341–350 of 511 posts
My grandfather, rest his soul, was a 3rd generation rancher and farmer. He bought 2 John Deere tractors in the '80s and used them for 35 years. They are still being used to this day on the ranch. Growing up, I visited the ranch regularly. Farming and ranching is very hard on equipment so the tractors often needed repair. My father and grandfather could seemingly fix anything on the tractor without even needing to go…
My grandfather, rest his soul, was a 3rd generation rancher and farmer. He bought 2 John Deere tractors in the '80s and used them for 35 years. They are still being used to this day on the ranch. Growing up, I visited the ranch regularly. Farming and ranching is very hard on equipment so the tractors often needed repair. My father and grandfather could seemingly fix anything on the tractor without even needing to go…
Doesn't sound like progress to me
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Do you think end-users products from corporation style farms are cheaper than family farm (for equivalent quality) ?
Cheaper, yes, but currently corporate agriculture is less sustainable as they make little to no efforts in maintaining or building the top soil depth, and instead reap the soil for marginal yield gains and then buy out the small 75+ year well tended farm and do it all over again. Eventually having decent farm land is going to cost a premium and food price will rise because of it. Short term gains for long term costs.
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Tractor as a service will only bite them back. Look at how popular 40-year old tractors are :) It's never been a better time to create a good old repairable machine.
They all want to get to the point of being Tesla. Hiding features only in software, pushing out updates, and trying to bake in a living (recurring revenue) model. It's a problem for a lot of reasons. First off it's the complete death of ownership. I can't fix things. At some point they will probably just lock stuff back down if I want to sell, assuming I can even sell without them getting a cut. Second, repairability…
It definitely feels like "big business" is working against us in this regard. Everything new is locked down because the the rent-seeking those software locks enable. It's a drag on our economy and we've got to stop letting them do this to us.
My grandfather, rest his soul, was a 3rd generation rancher and farmer. He bought 2 John Deere tractors in the '80s and used them for 35 years. They are still being used to this day on the ranch. Growing up, I visited the ranch regularly. Farming and ranching is very hard on equipment so the tractors often needed repair. My father and grandfather could seemingly fix anything on the tractor without even needing to go…
Tractor as a service will only bite them back. Look at how popular 40-year old tractors are :) It's never been a better time to create a good old repairable machine.
* You have to make your machine good the first time. The customer buys it completely, no chance to update and fix things.
* Your machine is marketed as reliable. This means it has to be reliable, so you put a lot of effort / material / money into your machine, when your competition puts in much less.
* If your machine is indeed reliable, your customers won't show up for another in a few decades(!). They also won't need many spare parts. This will make your machine much more expensive up front. On a market where an average machine is priced in hundreds of thousands USD, this may be a deal breaker.
* Since you are a newcomer, there's little implicit trust to you, right when you are selling very expensive hardware much higher than competition.
It looks like everything is stacked against you.
I think a startup making cheap reliable tractors could make bank.
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Yes, lets keep hoping the Market will solve everything, and that somehow, the trend of consolidation will magically reverse itself on its own, despite how ever fewer companies control each market. Wouldn't want to realize people have more power than just what they buy.
The power to walk away and not buy is an almost ultimate power; and companies/everyone does respond aggressively to it. It is extreme hubris to think you can use some other power to get consumers a product that they magically want more than the one they're going to choose to spend their own money on. People value their money; they'll try and get the best value they can for it.
All of those things, people could have simply chosen not to buy, or not buy from companies employing those practices, yet it took laws (i.e. collective action and organization), to affect them. Telling people to limit themselves to "simply not buying", is telling them to only use forms of protest that have been repeatedly proven not to work.
Don't like companies hiring paramilitary squads to kill union members [1]? Just don't buy Coca-Cola! Spend hours or weeks of research for every minor purchase or risk funding something abhorrent - just God forbid you pass any laws!
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2003/jul/24/marketingandpr...
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Tractor as a service will only bite them back. Look at how popular 40-year old tractors are :) It's never been a better time to create a good old repairable machine.
I disagree. It's never been harder to compete by producing a long-term, very reliable machine. * You have to make your machine good the first time. The customer buys it completely, no chance to update and fix things. * Your machine is marketed as reliable. This means it has to be reliable, so you put a lot of effort / material / money into your machine, when your competition puts in much less. * If your machine is in…
And I'm speaking from growing up in a village with the highest agricultural % of population in Belgium. Which my family is also pretty involved with ( my dad is a veterinarian for farm animals, my uncle has ~40 tractors)
Also: a cousin with a garage, some friends who work at a big manufacturer and another cousin who with worked there.
My background influenced my opinion, not a unfunded comment like yours. I am curious what your background is, it's far from reality up here.
Mechanical parts are becoming a selling point. Just no manufacturer realizes it yet, because of "subscription access", lol.
I'd actually buy a mechanical environmental-friendly car. Not some electrical car that needs an overpriced official garage to work on. I want the guy I know, to work on my car. Because it's simple to fix and it didn't need a official licensed laptop to be serviced.
And I'm not alone:
https://tractorhacking.github.io/
https://www.vice.com/amp/en_us/article/xykkkd/why-american-f...
https://www.vice.com/amp/en_us/article/kzp7ny/tractor-hackin...
On a personal note, it means I'm abandoning Mercedes-Benz for my next car or have a lease from work.
Ps. All newcomers try full-electric cars. Which have a lot of breaking parts.
These farmers are not a bunch of ignorant backwater hicks- the ones that we worked with are shrewd, generally educated, and not at all afraid of technology. In fact, the reason I founded a company in the first place was that there's clearly a lot of demand for better technology among farmers. The problem is that the licensing terms and lock-in from their vendors have squeezed Farmers into a corner. None of their equipment is interoperable, they are bound by expensive recurring fees for software, locked into support contracts, can't repair their own equipment; the same situation those of us in tech have been shouting about for decades.
Maybe if we paid more attention to the farmers we could find some good allies in some of our movements.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tractor as a service will only bite them back. Look at how popular 40-year old tractors are :) It's never been a better time to create a good old repairable machine.
I disagree. It's never been harder to compete by producing a long-term, very reliable machine. * You have to make your machine good the first time. The customer buys it completely, no chance to update and fix things. * Your machine is marketed as reliable. This means it has to be reliable, so you put a lot of effort / material / money into your machine, when your competition puts in much less. * If your machine is in…
> Your machine is marketed as reliable. This means it has to be reliable, so you put a lot of effort / material / money into your machine, when your competition puts in much less.
The good news on this front is that every single patent covering a 40 year-old machine is expired. That means a lot less upfront cost of designing a reliable one. You'll want to redesign the body panels to avoid copyright; you'll want to consult with the community to patch some known defects; but there's no need to reinvent the whole danged thing. And that can go a long way towards establishing trust in your brand.