More like, never use their tractors without them phoning home first.
Probably to look for illicit parts, or make sure the combine license is up to date and paid.
Not really. Just like Tesla, you cannot use Deere' self driving system without someone there looking for safety issue. Musk's is clearly better at detecting and avoiding hazards - at least they try, while John Deere admits the system doesn't even try, it will just drive a line and if something is there kill it. The difference is John Deere's system is for use in a field where there is essentially never anything to hit/kill in the first place unlike roads where pedestrians and other cars could be in the way, so Tesla has a lot harder problem.
My comment was a bit tongue-in-cheek. I know Deere has a different and easier problem set to address. However, auto-steer and similar tech have been working well on tractors for a long time.
I just fear people who mostly don't know what is going on will read too much into the claim. while your claim is technically correct, it is very misleading to the average person.
Maybe we should just wait for that one? If Starships will fly anywhere as frequently as currently projected, we'll have that question less than in five years.
I was really hoping this was some sort of green Martian Rover system.
SpaceX made satellite communications so ubiquitous and boring it's even used in farming. They tend to have this effect on their products. Reusable rockets are so obvious and now boring because the novelty is gone. I cannot wait for Starship to do the same with LEO (and beyond) delivery.
And, hey, this is fine. Who gives a shit about fucking mars - we have to do something about our food production. We have to automate it and make it more sustainable. It’s exactly these sort of infrastructural use cases that are both the most profitable and carry the most significant impact.
If I remember correctly, SWARM (bought by SpaceX) was already going after John Deere. They were working with smaller farmers, transportation trucks, and the like. Now, with SpaceX, the deals seem easier.
When I learned about the tech for pinging data via satellite to movable/non-movable objects anywhere on earth (for real-cheap), I was intrigued and started listening to the CEO talk. Sometime later, I heard about the acquisition. They went quiet, and now they seem everywhere.
Twitter is so bad that everybody switched to, err, well firing a bunch of engineers made it, err, well the point is that if somebody is a jerk IRL, then their businesses should fail as a matter of principle.
buncha musk freaks down voting me. don't come to me when the tractor network stops working and you starve because you haven't been supporting your local food system.
Hopefully the world will end before they spice up their marriage and extend the offer to Tesla.
Technically it makes some sense, but most of the push is because for more "data, intelligence, cloud, AI" in order to get more "value" to big agrobusinesses or anyone who can pay to stay in the party.
Agriculture is already a massive business only a few gigantic corporations can be in. The old romantic notion of the family farm has been dying at a rapid pace in the last few decades, also, monocultures to the max!
My ironic comments are mostly due to the way John Deere does business almost perfectly align with Musk's recipe for Tesla and SpaceX to an extent.
The blindingly brightness of this future is so bleak at the same time.
Not entirely true, small family farming can compete in niche, specialty and high end produce, they can capitalize on having a pretty farm (because "real" farms are incredibly ugly but people have pastoral fantasies), and farm stands can be profitable if they're in the right location.
This is my experience as well. Ranchers and farmers that are established are quite wealthy. Maybe sometimes that's paper wealth or paired with seasonal debt up to their eyeballs. Also probably some extremely single-threaded dependencies (JD and JD authorized repair outlets, seed strains, etc).
Agreed that a lot of it may be paper wealth. Farming is capital intensive. Having a successful farm often means hundreds of thousands to millions in equipment and infrastructure. Anybody with that kind of capital is absolutely not poor.
Ya, usually paired with significant political capital as well. Ranchers in the west make up a mess of state legislatures, are strong conservation advocates (although in an indirect/slightly selfish way), and so on. If I had the money to plan for and survive the land-value tax issue, I'd probably buy a mess of land and hand it back over to an operator.
To be clear, I was speaking more toward starting new family farms. Few families can afford to invest the capital required to compete with families like yours that have inherited generational wealth. Put those assets on a balance sheet charted over time, and I suspect their net value has decreased relative to their productive returns. If so, that’s a large fortune turned into a small one.
Do you honestly think your family could start from scratch and still successfully compete in a saturated commodity market entrenched with others in such a position?
And don’t talk to be about nice markets, because that’s far less farming and much more marketing (as another commenter pointed out).
Sure they have wealth that was grown over time. My family started working somebody else's land. Why would you expect starting a farm now to be easier than way back? There are constantly farms or land in farm country for sale. If owning is too much, starting as a sharecropper is still a possibility. Like any business it requires a lot of hard work and risk to make a successful farm. It is still very possible to start small farming and build up.
All of that is separate from the value destruction of inflation. We would all be better off with a stable measure of value.
We'll destroy civilization through social unrest before our technology fails to keep us on life support, that doesn't mean there won't be serious losses of life quality for those not blessed with wealth, and the loss of food quality/diversity and habitable land due to climate and habitat damage is both unquestionable and will play a significant role in precipitating the decline. I'll happily take bets on that statement of whatever amount you're willing to lose.
This is where conventional poverty metrics can be extremely counterproductive. A subsistence farmer could be materially much better off than a homeless or low class person in the city, but superficial poverty metrics suggest the opposite because the farmer technically has no income while the homeless person has some amount of welfare support. Whether by accident or not, neoliberal economics says we need fewer farmers and more min wage serfs.
Besides, we live in the 21st century, it is possible to be both a remote subsistence farmer and an educated+connected person at the same time, and the efficiency of small scale farming can be massively boosted with the use of modern tech such as networked sensors, camera drones, AI, etc.
The thing is research tend to show pre industrial revolution poor farmers had a better time than our modern poors. Unless we consider owning lots of gadgets makes someone rich
Wouldn't the desired alternative be to have adequately wealthy, good quality of life farmers? Why do you start from the position that farming is undesirable, and extrapolate that people shouldn't farm? Why not examine the barriers preventing a practical family farm?
> Wouldn't the desired alternative be to have adequately wealthy, good quality of life farmers?
Not realistic if 90% of the population were farming, as asserted before. Quality of life has risen dramatically over the last century or two exactly because people are no longer bound to the fields and are able to do and create other things. Put them back in the fields and where is the wealth and quality of life going to come from?
I encourage you to consider what happens to the interior of the country when family ag-businesses go away for fully automated CorpoFarms. Paris/Berlin are showing an example currently.
All Tesla cars are already constantly connected to the internet via cell network, not sure what you mean by extend the offer to Tesla.
The recipe for Tesla and SpaceX are to offer the best product (Model Y is the best selling vehicle in the world and Starlink is taking over because no one offers satellite internet anywhere close to as good), how does that align with John Deere selling tractors as a service?
It is of incredible strategic importance that tractors not become "online only". Some fucking John Deere licensing server should not become a single point of failure for the nations agriculture.
Already too late. Farmers already use quite a bit of connected technology in the field. Modern high-output farming and the cheap food we have really wouldn't be possible without it.
Civilian GPS is not accurate enough for precision farming which is why these tractor manufacturers in my above link were using Inmarsat L-band to transmit correction information in addition to using GPS.
I don't know what that has to do with this topic. Starfire (and similar) farm tractor guidance systems are not that. Zero farm tractors use military GPS.
I imagine a mostly autonomous land vehicle relying on GPS would also require RTK GPS, which does require an external source of the data. Some GPS receivers can receive that from satellites, but the data is encrypted and requires expensive commercial licenses or military grade equipment.
You can generate your own correction data for GPS, using a fixed base station, and relaying the data over a radio link or through the cell network. Look up ArduSimple if interested how. Something like $400 IIRC (for the base station).
Source: we are doing it, using AgOpenGPS (OSS autosteer) with RTK
Oh I know. I've plumbed RTCM3 streams over radios and cell networks aplenty as well. There's a real cost to setting up and maintaining a base station properly, though. Subscribing to a service is attractive if you're only operating a small fleet, which is sort of the point?
That is fine and great. But there is a big difference between a farmer who has a system to, lets say set time for watering and can control, repair (the pipping for that system is run of the mill PVC and they can source parts from suppliers for other parts of the system), and operate each set of equipment without it needing to reach out to some company's API, but another piece of equipment the won't work if it can't phone home and proprietary parts that can't be gotten from a supplier.
Supplier lock-in is definitely a concern I agree with. But many modern farms do make a fair use of external data that does inherently require an external connection.
And I think that is fine so long as it no longer becomes a requirement of the standard function of the equipment. I should be able to buy a tractor and use it as a tractor with a reduced feature set that doesn't rely on external systems, but it can still accomplish the base set of features a tractor needs, even if not optimal. And the parts the require external data are opt-in and not required for basic functionality. Which is the fear. You bought the tractor or piece of equipment, but it is useless without also all the other subscriptions.
Taking the sprinkler. I make a sprinkler system. You buy the system and can work with with your own local manual settings, no extra fees, no external communication required. But you can pay me a, lets say $15/month subscription and I will control it using AI/ML and historical data to try to control it in a way to maximize it's use and output. I think that is fine so long as your allowed to cancel the subscription and set your own basic settings and it can operate. And most parts are easily sourced and replaceable.
> And I think that is fine so long as it no longer becomes a requirement of the standard function of the equipment.
Sometimes it is, not arbitrarily, but as a matter of how the technology works. For example, the link I posted above.
Yes, those tractors can be manually driven like a 1980's farm tractor without guidance, but that's kind of impractical because profitably operating a farm often depends on those features.
I don't think you know that much about modern tractors. This headline is only surprisingly to people who still think of John Deere as an old school tractor company.
Modern day tractors have tons of sensors on them that are always connected to make sure any failing part can be detected and fixed before it breaks, basically or actually do drive themselves, and likely have as much or more tech in then as any modern car.
They sell land prep, crop sowing, and harvesting solutions.
It's not like a car. These things are used for a few weeks a year, and if they don't do their job during that time the farm looses all their income for the year.
A better way to think of them is like construction equipment that you rent. Even big construction companies rent their equipment.
This comment still doesn't answer parent question. I design critical infrastructure control systems for a living. Every single component of my systems is user servicable and replaceable with an alternative COTS available component with a little bit of work. There is literally no reason a tractor can't also do that. Other than market moats and rent seeking.
Rent seeking is right. Farmers shouldn't be subjected to landlord economics via their equipment. That is, equipment cost shouldn't scale simply to eat farming profit (as rent costs quickly rise to eat rising incomes).
I'd want to see the numbers on exaclty how much supposed always-up farming equipment saves in crop production, compared to farmers that don't use it.
In fact, I know for certain that the most productive farmland in the US, per area unit, is least likely to use motorized equipment of any kind. And when they do it isn't equipment on par with John Deere.
> In fact, I know for certain that the most productive farmland in the US, per area unit, is least likely to use motorized equipment of any kind.
Isn’t this exactly what you’d expect? Motorized equipment is for working vast amounts of farmland as efficiently as possible, so the only farmland that would be worked by hand would have to be much more lucrative in comparison.
Why can't the farm have the server on premise instead of needing a subscription. So somebody can say they're meeting their KPIs and request more money?
I sell software and services to farmers. Running an on premises server that their business depends on is way beyond their capabilities. Our company tried that, it failed horribly, and the farmers blamed us. They want us to provide it as a service that always works, however it's made they don't care, just pay.
If I can’t drive to work, I won’t be paid, i’ll lose all my income. Thus, somehow the car company should prevent me from repairing my car, working with any independent qualified garage?
And you help the farmer by preventing them from fixing their own vehicles and equipment? Somehow we seem to be talking from different worlds. If you are worried about people losing potential to use their equipment at an important time, then (this will sound crazy!) let them fix their own equipment.
They tried. Independent auto repair shops across the country sued and lobbied to save their businesses.
"On the last day of California's legislative session in 2000, Governor Gray Davis signed into law what had come to be known as "OBD-II." The new law expanded the OBD service information requirements in California by directing car companies to make all manuals and technical service bulletins Internet-accessible, supply tools, and offer training to all non-dealer service companies in the state."
Are they exempt? At least one state, I believe it was Mass has a law on the book allowing work. Of course we need independent repairs (and training to do it properly) on EVs. There are a few repair garages for Teslas that seem to be people who used to work at Tesla, they fix wonky things on battery packs sometimes.
Exempt from requiring an ODB port that outputs the narrow scope ODB data.
They are mainly exempt because most of that data is emissions related. ODB came about due to CA requiring lower emissions and smog checks. They needed a way to quickly and cheaply verify it independently of the manufacturer. Unfortunately, in VWs case, the law assumed the data isn't modified before being sent.
> if they don't do their job during that time the farm looses all their income for the year.
That's exactly why farmers push for right-to-repair. The old model of "each farmer can repair their tractor, or at least jury-rig it to work for a week" was much more scalable than John Deere somehow having enough staff and service partners to handle anything that goes wrong in those couple of weeks, and then having these people mostly idle the rest of the year.
Of course at the same time newer tractors are much more capable, and allow a farmer to be much more efficient. But for a country it's also somewhat risky to put a large part of their food supply behind a single point of failure
Farmers use their tractors year round, though? I see what you're saying vis-a-vis specific sprayers, ploughs, or even a combine harvester, but tractors are in pretty continuous use.
Yes, I feel that the commenter suggesting they are "not like a car" is mistaken. I grew up in an AG community but my family was not doing crops so I don't have first hand knowledge
They are mostly a utility truck used quite often, and 2-3 times a year they hook up the expensive add-ons to do the big work
They're not really cars. They sell navigational, entertainment- and seat-heating solutions. These things are used a few hours each day. A better way to think of them is like a transportation solution that you rent. Even big unrelated companies rent things.
I don't think the parent comment necessarily misses that online connectivity is delivering a lot of features, value and ultimately yield. These improvements come with a downside of the risk of outages. The comment is highlighting that John Deere is deliberately increasing this risk so that they can keep farms maximally dependent on the company.
> These improvements come with a downside of the risk of outages.
Which is why the current use of land tower connectivity is being expanded to use satellite service, providing greater redundancy and improved coverage. That reduces the risk of outage.
If you want no chance of outage on a modern tractor, you are going to have to find yourself a time machine and go way back in time. That ship sailed decades ago.
My read on mathgradthrow's comment was that it isn't concerned about outages caused by the network being down, but by more existential things like John Deer going bust, being a victim of cyberwar and so on. Of course he never says that so that's probably my own politics and fears coming into play.
Well, even the ancient (John Deere) equipment isn't going to work when John Deere goes bust. Farm equipment breaks constantly. Where are the parts going to come from? John Deere bought out the only only full-line after market parts manufacturer several years ago, so if you are eyeing up that secondary market, think again.
I mean, sure, you can go to your local machine shop to get custom parts made. But you can also go to your local controls shop to get custom computers made. There are ways to deal with that – not the end of the world, just annoying. Also, John Deere has been sending one-way data via satellite to their tractors since the 1990s and have had two-way connectivity via cell networks since the 2000s, should cyber warfare ever break out...
So, it's not clear why he is concerned now all of a sudden. The concern is not unwarranted exactly, but we've already been thinking about it for decades to centuries. What is it about augmenting tower-based connectivity with satellite-based connectivity that instills a new fear?
One can imagine a cyber attack bricking every John Deere tractor in US overnight. That's a whole different ball game than the slow wearing out of machines and slow rising cost of repairs.
Maybe, but theoretically you've already been able to do that for decades. Again, what's the new concern brought about by using satellites over towers (or even other satellites, which John Deere also utilizes for communication with tractors)?
Farmers do not want that. John Deere collects a lot of opt-in data from tractors. That is the owner of the tractors chooses to upload that data because they get value from it. If the tractor is not online or the GPS isn't working the farmer will stay home to fix things as the data is too valuable to risk not having it uploaded. (you can export the data to USB, but that is a hassle). Farmers who don't get a good cell signal of course do work without getting data uploaded, but they want the real time monitoring possible with an always on connection.
I work for Deere, but don't speak for the company.
Lol farmers absolutely want their tractor to work when the cell network doesn't what are you talking about. Sounds like you might have drank a little too much of the company koolaid. It's not surprising, I know engineers at Deere and it sounds like quite a toxic environment.
Those kinds of requirements are extremely anti-consumer. If farmers get benefit from that, then they will do it, pay you for it even. But making them do things is terrible. It’s just a way to control and get more money. It will take years but we will break through these coporate controls. Meanwhile, people will circulate hacks so they can fix their own equipment. With all due respect, you are wrong.
Quick question friend - that ag data gets sold into finance, for instance, at way higher monetary value than any value-add to ag output from those sensors for the farmer. Those farmers getting a cut of the sales?
Edit - looking around my ag town, that also hammers right to repair which is blocked by JD's DRM approach, I don't think they are getting a cut.
Edit 2 -
> If the tractor is not online or the GPS isn't working the farmer will stay home to fix things
pretty sure you mean the farmer will go to the licensed JD repair outlet and get their tractor fixed by the local farm/car dealership, vs. themselves, which is how it always was before JD started this digital apprpoach.
The data is a zero sum game - the value to finance company is exactly equal to the loss in value to the farmer. Many farmers have carefully read the contract before opting in because they understand the cost to them if the data is shared to the wrong people. they will refuse to upload the data (and there are other options to buy from if they don't like what we do so overall Deere stands to lose more than gain by selling data to finance company) The people who have admin access to the database where the data is stored are registered with the SEC as not allowed to trade commodities.
You've completely missed my point, and your zero sum game comment is a tangent.
I'm pointing out how the farmer isn't getting a cut.
Another way of saying what you just did is the value to the finance company's buy is going straight to JD, and not to the farmer.
And that data is powering a massive commodities trading industry, with value at orders of magnitude ever higher than a farmer could hope to earn, even though the value is only, and fully, sourced from their work.
And the point is I doubt JD is bothering to consider or tell the farmer they could get a cut of the data from their own fields powering that value. When farmers and ranchers are losing their multi-generational livelihoods largely driven by other impacts from a digital world, it's a gross practice by JD, considering the farmer's work plays a key role in it.
Edit - I'm not going to veer into a back-and-forth on this, but I encourage you to ask a JD product manager about a farmer getting a data-sales cut, or maybe even try to force that across the company from your relative position, and see how that plays out.
AFAiK there is no data sales. Note that there is data from Europe subject to Europe's data laws - while we don't mix that data with non-europe data, all such data is treated the same.
Yes in theory we can do whatever evil you want to imagine. However realistically I don't see it happening. Getting caught selling that data means farmers lose trust and won't buy any more million dollar machines - sales of equipment is in the end worth far more than the data.
"...Seba sees it differently. It’s one thing for Deere to use his data to make a better tractor. But, he said, Deere knows when he’s planting, and he’s convinced the company sells that data to weather companies and commodities traders. Deere denies that it sells aggregated farm data to traders. Nevertheless, it’s the billions of acres of data the company collects that allows it to enter into lucrative business partnerships with complementary companies, such as Dow DuPont, which depends on soil information to make nutrient and seed planting “prescriptions.""
I work for a Deere competitor. We have a closed-loop system where we implement our tech in the cab, the farmer (securely) uploads their planting information to us in real-time, and we advise on yield management. As in - ways for them to make more money and use less chemicals and water during the growing season. It doesn't go to Wall Street or anyone else.
We also benefit because that data goes back to the seed scientists and advises on which hybrids work in which environment and which do not.
We use LTE and Wifi to get this data home but having Starlink in the cab is a nice idea. Especially in parts of the world (you mean there are farms outside the US?) where connectivity is minimal. Everyone here bitching about the right-to-repair issue, right or wrong, misunderstood the press release.
Yes. When you mix agricultural production capacity with access to the production via a data connection involved in the Ukraine war (as a quick example...), you'll get a war + day 1 bricked tractors. Scary thought, absolutely exposed to it.
There is a vital need for farm equipment to be open source. I get the feeling quite a few people have no clue where their food comes from.
This was going around years so the source may have been removed. "Seven per cent of American adults think chocolate milk comes from brown cows.." what was worse is I am pretty sure I saw the study and seem to recall it also said 40% replied "don't know" so 47% of supposed adults in the US are perplexed by chocolate milk. https://globalnews.ca/news/3535819/chocolate-milk-brown-cows...
This was surprising to me, so I did a little digging. Per [1], it appears the options were that chocolate milk comes from black and white cows, brown cows, or "don't know". As far as I am personally aware, both cow choices are correct answers, and I wouldn't blame anyone for choosing "don't know" when they haven't been given an option for both.
Of course it's also surprising if this was how the question was asked, and I may be misinterpreting the interview. Sadly, the survey itself does not seem to be available to confirm or deny.
The correct answer could be brown cows if the diary farm that the milk that your chocolate milk brand of choice comes from uses a cow breed with predominantly brown coloring.
But saying “I don’t know” is probably the most appropriate response because they could be more colors than just black and white and brown cows, like you said. There are even orange cows that a dairy farm could be using!
But the grandparent comment is likely complaining that most people don’t know where their food comes from. And that is a fact. I get a CSA box and so I can identify where my produce comes from but the milk? I would have no idea what kind of cows it comes from. I know it’s a local farm but the color of the cows? I would have to make the trip.
For all the negative comments, think of the huge value this will have to improving life in countries where farming is not some pastoralized, romantic fantasy. The amount of food we have to grow is staggering. The alternative is continuing to prop up the economic disparity where first world HN posters rely on third world family farmers who would rather send their kids to college.
Yes, you should be able to grow your own food if you want to. Yes, you should be able to buy a tractor that is repairable.
That value should not be siphoned out by corporations though. Let tractor companies simply build tractors, and if their users want to be able to repair them they should provide that.
Many people would be surprised by how high tech farming has become over the last decade or so.
In the next few decades I wouldn't be surprised if most of the farming done in the US will be done from an office building.
Last year I went to a farm where they had a guy sitting in a room with 5 screens watching tractors farm fields. The cameras, sensors radars, mapping ect. were all powered by GPS.
The data is also sent to John Deere and they will do diagnostics on your equipment for you while you are using it and let you know if you need to do anything.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 254 ms ] threadCan't do that, if connectivity is spotty.
https://www.csoonline.com/article/572811/remote-bricking-of-...
https://doctorow.medium.com/about-those-kill-switched-ukrain...
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/08/the-latest-john-deere-repair...
And this of course isn’t a John Deere only issue.
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/14/polish-train-manufacturer-th...
https://youtu.be/ubl5BEuqzL8
Not speaking for Deere here.
dangit.
SpaceX made satellite communications so ubiquitous and boring it's even used in farming. They tend to have this effect on their products. Reusable rockets are so obvious and now boring because the novelty is gone. I cannot wait for Starship to do the same with LEO (and beyond) delivery.
The other way around, if anything. John Deere was sending SF1 data to farmers via satellite in the 1990s.
When I learned about the tech for pinging data via satellite to movable/non-movable objects anywhere on earth (for real-cheap), I was intrigued and started listening to the CEO talk. Sometime later, I heard about the acquisition. They went quiet, and now they seem everywhere.
Indeed, satellites are becoming the new cellphone towers - https://spectrum.ieee.org/satellite-cellphone-starlink
HAL: I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.
Dave: What's the problem?
HAL: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.
Dave: What are you talking about, HAL?
HAL: This support contract is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize the cash cow weve built up here.
> agreement with SpaceX to provide cutting-edge satellite communications (SATCOM) service to farmers
surely they really mean
> agreement with SpaceX to provide cutting-edge satellite communications (SATCOM) service to John Deere
Hopefully the world will end before they spice up their marriage and extend the offer to Tesla.
Technically it makes some sense, but most of the push is because for more "data, intelligence, cloud, AI" in order to get more "value" to big agrobusinesses or anyone who can pay to stay in the party.
Agriculture is already a massive business only a few gigantic corporations can be in. The old romantic notion of the family farm has been dying at a rapid pace in the last few decades, also, monocultures to the max!
My ironic comments are mostly due to the way John Deere does business almost perfectly align with Musk's recipe for Tesla and SpaceX to an extent.
The blindingly brightness of this future is so bleak at the same time.
In that version, you are fundamentally not a farmer, you are a marketer.
Source: grew up in a farm town. Go Wheat Kings!
Do you honestly think your family could start from scratch and still successfully compete in a saturated commodity market entrenched with others in such a position?
And don’t talk to be about nice markets, because that’s far less farming and much more marketing (as another commenter pointed out).
All of that is separate from the value destruction of inflation. We would all be better off with a stable measure of value.
Coming soon to John Deer: electric automotive technology licensed from Tesla.
You really want a tiny handful of rich incumbents owning all the land? That's never worked out well before.
Something must be going right.
Pity everyone is competing for fewer jobs and AI is just entering the market. Quality of life has always been overrated.
It might sound cynical but quality of life depends largely on which side you are on: rich or poor?
Besides, we live in the 21st century, it is possible to be both a remote subsistence farmer and an educated+connected person at the same time, and the efficiency of small scale farming can be massively boosted with the use of modern tech such as networked sensors, camera drones, AI, etc.
Not realistic if 90% of the population were farming, as asserted before. Quality of life has risen dramatically over the last century or two exactly because people are no longer bound to the fields and are able to do and create other things. Put them back in the fields and where is the wealth and quality of life going to come from?
I encourage you to consider what happens to the interior of the country when family ag-businesses go away for fully automated CorpoFarms. Paris/Berlin are showing an example currently.
The recipe for Tesla and SpaceX are to offer the best product (Model Y is the best selling vehicle in the world and Starlink is taking over because no one offers satellite internet anywhere close to as good), how does that align with John Deere selling tractors as a service?
e.g. https://www.smh.com.au/national/farmers-crippled-by-satellit...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarFire_(navigation_system)
Source: we are doing it, using AgOpenGPS (OSS autosteer) with RTK
Taking the sprinkler. I make a sprinkler system. You buy the system and can work with with your own local manual settings, no extra fees, no external communication required. But you can pay me a, lets say $15/month subscription and I will control it using AI/ML and historical data to try to control it in a way to maximize it's use and output. I think that is fine so long as your allowed to cancel the subscription and set your own basic settings and it can operate. And most parts are easily sourced and replaceable.
Sometimes it is, not arbitrarily, but as a matter of how the technology works. For example, the link I posted above.
Yes, those tractors can be manually driven like a 1980's farm tractor without guidance, but that's kind of impractical because profitably operating a farm often depends on those features.
Modern day tractors have tons of sensors on them that are always connected to make sure any failing part can be detected and fixed before it breaks, basically or actually do drive themselves, and likely have as much or more tech in then as any modern car.
Just because it has tons of sensors doesn't mean they shouldn't be replacable
They sell land prep, crop sowing, and harvesting solutions.
It's not like a car. These things are used for a few weeks a year, and if they don't do their job during that time the farm looses all their income for the year.
A better way to think of them is like construction equipment that you rent. Even big construction companies rent their equipment.
I'd want to see the numbers on exaclty how much supposed always-up farming equipment saves in crop production, compared to farmers that don't use it.
In fact, I know for certain that the most productive farmland in the US, per area unit, is least likely to use motorized equipment of any kind. And when they do it isn't equipment on par with John Deere.
Isn’t this exactly what you’d expect? Motorized equipment is for working vast amounts of farmland as efficiently as possible, so the only farmland that would be worked by hand would have to be much more lucrative in comparison.
That’s a funny way to phrase it considering that many farmers are landlords.
If you're renting a zillion acres to someone that grows corn or wheat on it, you're not a farmer, your a landlord; the renter is the farmer.
"On the last day of California's legislative session in 2000, Governor Gray Davis signed into law what had come to be known as "OBD-II." The new law expanded the OBD service information requirements in California by directing car companies to make all manuals and technical service bulletins Internet-accessible, supply tools, and offer training to all non-dealer service companies in the state."
http://fbaum.unc.edu/lobby/_107th/093_OBD_Service_Info/frame...
We need OBD regulations to be updated for reflect these new technologies. I think hydrogen vehicles are also exempt.
They are mainly exempt because most of that data is emissions related. ODB came about due to CA requiring lower emissions and smog checks. They needed a way to quickly and cheaply verify it independently of the manufacturer. Unfortunately, in VWs case, the law assumed the data isn't modified before being sent.
That's exactly why farmers push for right-to-repair. The old model of "each farmer can repair their tractor, or at least jury-rig it to work for a week" was much more scalable than John Deere somehow having enough staff and service partners to handle anything that goes wrong in those couple of weeks, and then having these people mostly idle the rest of the year.
Of course at the same time newer tractors are much more capable, and allow a farmer to be much more efficient. But for a country it's also somewhat risky to put a large part of their food supply behind a single point of failure
They are mostly a utility truck used quite often, and 2-3 times a year they hook up the expensive add-ons to do the big work
Which is why the current use of land tower connectivity is being expanded to use satellite service, providing greater redundancy and improved coverage. That reduces the risk of outage.
If you want no chance of outage on a modern tractor, you are going to have to find yourself a time machine and go way back in time. That ship sailed decades ago.
I mean, sure, you can go to your local machine shop to get custom parts made. But you can also go to your local controls shop to get custom computers made. There are ways to deal with that – not the end of the world, just annoying. Also, John Deere has been sending one-way data via satellite to their tractors since the 1990s and have had two-way connectivity via cell networks since the 2000s, should cyber warfare ever break out...
So, it's not clear why he is concerned now all of a sudden. The concern is not unwarranted exactly, but we've already been thinking about it for decades to centuries. What is it about augmenting tower-based connectivity with satellite-based connectivity that instills a new fear?
I work for Deere, but don't speak for the company.
Sounds like it works exactly the way you say it should:
> Farmers who don't get a good cell signal of course do work without getting data uploaded
How are you getting requirement from this?
Because John Deere is the best provider of this value, or because John Deere is the only provider of this value?
Edit - looking around my ag town, that also hammers right to repair which is blocked by JD's DRM approach, I don't think they are getting a cut.
Edit 2 - > If the tractor is not online or the GPS isn't working the farmer will stay home to fix things
pretty sure you mean the farmer will go to the licensed JD repair outlet and get their tractor fixed by the local farm/car dealership, vs. themselves, which is how it always was before JD started this digital apprpoach.
I'm pointing out how the farmer isn't getting a cut.
Another way of saying what you just did is the value to the finance company's buy is going straight to JD, and not to the farmer.
And that data is powering a massive commodities trading industry, with value at orders of magnitude ever higher than a farmer could hope to earn, even though the value is only, and fully, sourced from their work.
And the point is I doubt JD is bothering to consider or tell the farmer they could get a cut of the data from their own fields powering that value. When farmers and ranchers are losing their multi-generational livelihoods largely driven by other impacts from a digital world, it's a gross practice by JD, considering the farmer's work plays a key role in it.
Edit - I'm not going to veer into a back-and-forth on this, but I encourage you to ask a JD product manager about a farmer getting a data-sales cut, or maybe even try to force that across the company from your relative position, and see how that plays out.
Yes in theory we can do whatever evil you want to imagine. However realistically I don't see it happening. Getting caught selling that data means farmers lose trust and won't buy any more million dollar machines - sales of equipment is in the end worth far more than the data.
More context:
"...Seba sees it differently. It’s one thing for Deere to use his data to make a better tractor. But, he said, Deere knows when he’s planting, and he’s convinced the company sells that data to weather companies and commodities traders. Deere denies that it sells aggregated farm data to traders. Nevertheless, it’s the billions of acres of data the company collects that allows it to enter into lucrative business partnerships with complementary companies, such as Dow DuPont, which depends on soil information to make nutrient and seed planting “prescriptions.""
https://thecounter[.]org/farmobile-farm-data/
We also benefit because that data goes back to the seed scientists and advises on which hybrids work in which environment and which do not.
We use LTE and Wifi to get this data home but having Starlink in the cab is a nice idea. Especially in parts of the world (you mean there are farms outside the US?) where connectivity is minimal. Everyone here bitching about the right-to-repair issue, right or wrong, misunderstood the press release.
Grow your own food if you don't like it.
This was going around years so the source may have been removed. "Seven per cent of American adults think chocolate milk comes from brown cows.." what was worse is I am pretty sure I saw the study and seem to recall it also said 40% replied "don't know" so 47% of supposed adults in the US are perplexed by chocolate milk. https://globalnews.ca/news/3535819/chocolate-milk-brown-cows...
Of course it's also surprising if this was how the question was asked, and I may be misinterpreting the interview. Sadly, the survey itself does not seem to be available to confirm or deny.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2017/06/16/533255590/alarming-number-of-..., quote: "RAGALIE-CARR: Well, there was brown cows or black-and-white cows, or they didn't know."
But saying “I don’t know” is probably the most appropriate response because they could be more colors than just black and white and brown cows, like you said. There are even orange cows that a dairy farm could be using!
But the grandparent comment is likely complaining that most people don’t know where their food comes from. And that is a fact. I get a CSA box and so I can identify where my produce comes from but the milk? I would have no idea what kind of cows it comes from. I know it’s a local farm but the color of the cows? I would have to make the trip.
Yes, you should be able to grow your own food if you want to. Yes, you should be able to buy a tractor that is repairable.
In the next few decades I wouldn't be surprised if most of the farming done in the US will be done from an office building.
Last year I went to a farm where they had a guy sitting in a room with 5 screens watching tractors farm fields. The cameras, sensors radars, mapping ect. were all powered by GPS.
The data is also sent to John Deere and they will do diagnostics on your equipment for you while you are using it and let you know if you need to do anything.
I guess they're making space tractors in there?