They litereally started as a tractor company, and as I understand it was annoyed at Enzo Ferrari and challeneged himself to making a supercar, and later the "Holy Shit" Countach was born (but the earlier Lambos are really beautiful)
Jeremy Clarkson from Top Gear fame has a 2-season show about his farm. In the first episode, he buys a Lambo tractor because "of course he does" type of logic.
> As a world financial crisis began to take hold, Ferruccio Lamborghini's companies began to run into financial difficulties. In 1971, Lamborghini's tractor company, which exported around half of its production, ran into difficulties. Cento, Trattori's South African importer, cancelled all its orders. After staging a successful coup d'état, the new military government of Bolivia cancelled a large order of tractors that was partially ready to ship from Genoa. Trattori's employees, like Automobili's, were unionised and could not be laid off. In 1972, Lamborghini sold his entire holding in Trattori to SAME, another tractor builder.
The name lives on in the ag market, but built by SAME, not Automobili.
Then you have to also agree that Lamborghini cars are Audis (/Volkswagens), and before that they were Chryslers.
> Patrick Mimran sold Lamborghini to the Chrysler Corporation in 1987 for US$25 million. [...] In 1998, Mycom Setdco and V'Power sold Lamborghini to the Volkswagen Group where it was placed under the control of the group's Audi division.
Google Translate: "FERRARI of Luzzara (RE) is one of the historic brands in the field of agricultural mechanization. Founded in 1954 as "Officine Meccanica Ferrari SpA", in the period of reconstruction and mechanization of the country, it was one of the most enterprising companies in the agricultural machinery sector."
Ferrari (the car brand) and CNH (Case IH, New Holland) were both under the same ownership a few years back, so in a way you could say they were Ferrari tractors. Seems there has been some changes in the meantime, though.
Farmers are truly geniuses. They have to be a combination of agriculturalist, meteorologist, engineer, mechanic, handyman, builder, vet, hydrologist, and now we're adding technologist to that. They also generally have an amazing work ethic (getting up before sunrise, working in the blazing heat all day, etc). Not to mention dealing with disasters like diseases, weather events, accidents (lots of sharp blades, tools, etc).
Massive respect for them. Even with this tractor, this guy likely does more work than the majority of people. They feed our entire society with a ton of work for very little reward. We don't give them the respect they're due.
I've recently picked up Farming Simulator on PS5, not so much because I'm into farming or anything but it's a great little game for shutting your brain off for a while. There's no point to the game, beyond just farming, which is great because you can pick it up and drop off whenever, you're not in the middle of some narrative.
Point being: they've put a lot of effort into modelling the different tractors and first time I used the in-vehicle perspective I was amazed at all the screens and knobs and dials and levers and what not. They don't really do anything in the game, it's just for show, but man they are complex beasts clearly.
Then again, I can definitely see the value of at least some of these features. Like you spend an inordinate amount of time just making sure you get maximum yield from a field, while keeping costs low, so having a screen tell you how much fuel you're consuming per turn or whatever is actually pretty useful.
Anyway, I absolutely agree – farmers are incredible! I have a whole new appreciation for farming equipment and farmers in general, just from playing this silly game.
I wonder how much it is like an aircraft - many many many dials and knobs, all with there purpose, but only a few needed in normal operation, or used once or twice a trip.
I assumed the purpose on an aircraft is a bit different: you don't want a "check engine" light to go on when you are 10 miles from the nearest landing strip. Probably a bit more detail is useful when a stalled engine means 50% odds of survival.
This is going to sound mean, but do you actually know any farmers?
At least in my area, they aren't exactly known to be geniuses. The ones that have built up their business by buying out other farms and have tons of acres and employees? Sure. The usual "inherited the family farm" type? Not so much.
They have two small periods during the year where they're up before sunrise and stop working after sundown, assuming they live in an area with one harvest. Overall they work a hell of a lot less than most of us, and have more money. I have a friend that owns a business where he sells side-by-sides, four wheelers, snowmobiles, etc. The amount that many spend by buying all the newest toys every year is incredible.
The downside, of course, is that you need to be born in to it. A tiny 100 acre farm's land is worth north of 1 million dollars, not to mention a ton of other startup costs. Land isn't for sale very often, as usually at least one child wants to take it up. I don't even know how you'd approach starting from scratch unless you were already rich.
Note: I'm referring to crop farmers. Animals are hard work and I don't understand why any small time farmer still does it.
Not so. By definition, both in common usage and legally, the farmer is the owner. The farmer may also work in the operation, but that is not a strict requirement.
Calling someone who owns land and hires people to work it a farmer is like calling someone who owns a factory a "factory worker". In some technical sense maybe it's correct, but that's not what people mean when they use the term.
Not at all. Again, farmer refers to the owner. This is echoed in the dictionary as well as what is written in law.
The word people use for what you describe is farmhand. It is the farmhand who works on a farm. The farmhand is the agricultural equivalent of a factory worker. Indeed, someone who owns a farm, but does not work on it, would not be considered a farmhand, but they most definitely would be a farmer.
It is technically possible for one to be both a farmer and a farmhand, but being a farmer does not imply that one is also a farmhand. They are distinct roles.
Hence "was CTO". The business in question was sold to the competitor in 2021. While the details of the transaction were undisclosed, said competitor received a funding round shortly before the deal was done for an amount far less than YC and friends invested in wholesalad's company. Needless to say it was almost certainly sold for pennies on the dollar. Hard to win over farmers when you don't understand them.
If you make some effort to expand your perspective, you'll find out that there is a whole world outside of the US, where people also practice farming and have been farming for a long time.
Wouldn't you find it arrogant – or at least weird – if people answered everything you write and say with the assumption that you're talking about British politics?
> Animals are hard work and I don't understand why any small time farmer still does it.
I guess it depends on the animal, and how many. I work sometimes on a hobby farm with around 30 pineywoods cattle and they're almost maintenance free. The hay is more work than those cattle and basically all we do for that is drive tractors around for a few days, a few times a year.
My impression is young farmers without land start with Animals because you can do it. Animals can live on land that cannot be farmed for row crops, and need much less land to make some money. so you buy some land - a few acres - then raise animals on that while working a day job someplace to pay the bills. As land becomes available you buy it, but sticking with animals as that is what you know. after 20 years of this you have enough trust with the banks to buy some row crop field that goes on sale. Another 10 years and you finally are earning enough from the farm to live without the other job and 10 more years and you can retire - letting your kids inherit a nice income from the mostly paid off farm (or sell the farm and retire to a nice life)
I grew up on a dairy farm in Wisconsin (and I knew plenty of crop farmers as well, of course), and frankly none of what you said is congruent with my own experience. As orenlindsey said, farmers are generally smart people who have to juggle many hats and work their asses off in order to scrape out a very modest living. "Genius" is probably stretching a bit, but they aren't stupid laggards who get by on the inheritance they got from their parents the way you imply.
> The downside, of course, is that you need to be born in to it. A tiny 100 acre farm's land is worth north of 1 million dollars, not to mention a ton of other startup costs. Land isn't for sale very often, as usually at least one child wants to take it up. I don't even know how you'd approach starting from scratch unless you were already rich.
This is just flat out false. My dad started our farm (90 acres) from scratch. He did it by working his ass off, often working two or three jobs, while living frugally and saving as much as he could for a down payment. Then he got a mortgage, just like most people do when they buy property. It's hard in the sense that saving money is always hard, but it's certainly not impossible and something where you can't pull it off without a helping hand from your parents.
My parents bought a 60 acre property on a truck driver and part time school bus driver's salary. There's no way my wife and I could afford the same property today, even with us both having degrees. Land is freaking expensive now, and I assume farm equipment is also more than it was back then.
Don't get me wrong; I'm sure there are ways to do it, but I've known plenty of farmers and apart from hobby type farms they all inherited their land.
> I don't even know how you'd approach starting from scratch unless you were already rich.
Well, you are not going to start any kind of business without some kind of working capital. To be rich, for some definition of rich, is always a necessity when starting a business. That is not exclusive to farming.
I'm not sure farming is any worse than any other business[1], though. I have started a number of businesses in my day and the farm was probably the easiest of them to get into. Like any startup without venture capital – you start as small as possible, prove the business model, and then slowly work towards growth.
> A tiny 100 acre farm's land is worth north of 1 million dollars
Ah, if only. Imagine how easy farming would be if 100 acres was only $1MM! We haven't seen farmland that cheap around here in 20 years.
[1] Maybe software has an edge if you can find success with nothing but a budget computer, but your time commitment is going to be many orders of magnitude larger, so I expect it still requires more working capital in the end.
I wasn't sure what current prices were, which is why I said north of. I know back 10 years ago I saw some for about $10,000 an acre, but for all I know it wasn't great land for one reason or another. I've also heard my region has some of the best soil in the world so I wasn't sure if my prices were generalized enough.
I disagree. Farming has been the default job in human society for thousands of years - and still is, even today. There's nothing special about farmers, they aren't geniuses, the work is not that difficult - it requires effort, care and perseverance.
And this shouldn't be surprising. Farming is a very human activity, and can be done by pretty much any human. You don't need to be exceptional to do it. In fact it would be ridiculous if you did - imagine if only 1 in 50 people was brilliant enough to become a farmer - human civilization would never have gotten started.
Praising something like this feels silly to me, much as when people talk about "being a mother is the hardest job" or similar. It's not. Being a mother is a common human experience, and most women go through it.
This isn't to say such things shouldn't be celebrated. The idea of celebrations around harvest or motherhood is appealing to me, but there's nothing exceptional here, and there shouldn't be. Simple things, regular things, things everyone can do or goes through are worth celebrating, not just the exceptions, the geniuses, the stand-outs.
Being a parent is definitely harder that being a software engineer if you want to do a good job. Same for being a farmer. It isn't the default job anymore for a reason.
You could argue more women nowadays don't want to be mothers because it's hard. Especially if that's the second job and unpaid, actually you have to pay lots of money to be a successful mother. So yeah, it's exceptional... that anyone wants to have children at all! Though that's quickly changing, too.
> Being a parent is definitely harder that being a software engineer if you want to do a good job. Same for being a farmer. It isn't the default job anymore for a reason.
There's a difference between hard = effort, and hard = difficulty. Most people struggle to understand software engineering concepts. If you do understand them, then the effort required to succeed at the job is less than parenting/farming/etc; but there's a reason software engineers are in the top 20% of the economic ladder and picking vegetables on a farm is on the bottom.
And at last check, subsistence farming was still the default job worldwide. Perhaps things have changed in the last decade or two, but I have my doubts.
(I'd also take issue on the idea of parenting being difficult, vs. good parenting, vs. newer cultural expectations on parents/education/helicoptering, vs. kids being free to roam etc etc., but that's a whole huge discussion on its own - and I think there's a pretty strong argument to be made that raising kids is not harder on either axis than having a job, but doing both at once is very difficult and forces an economic choice many women are making in favor of money.)
As both a farmer and a software engineer, farming is way harder – and I don't mean in terms of effort. To your economic point, farming pays better too.
Sure, neither is hard if you want to do it at subsistence level. Hell, I started programming at like 5 years old. Software development is the easiest endeavour a human can partake in – so easy, it is easily picked up by young children who can barely read. Anyone can build software.
But I think it is far to say that building robust, reliable, maintainable, performant, and scalable software that satisfies a market need is a different story. And same goes for farming. If you want to farm at a level beyond subsistence, that is when it becomes hard.
I was kinda with you up until you started talking out of your ass about parenting, it is probably the hardest job I've ever done in my life, and I have had various physically and/or mentally challenging jobs.
The key to why parenting is such a hard job: it literally doesn't end for about two or more decades and you absolutely cannot quit or slack off on this gig, no matter what!
Just because something "always has been" doesn't mean it's easy.
> The key to why parenting is such a hard job: it literally doesn't end for about two or more decades and you absolutely cannot quit or slack off on this gig, no matter what!
We might not like to admit it, but people can and do, all the time. There's an ideal as far as being a parent goes that we try to hold people to and enforce culturally - but that doesn't stop people from getting divorces or dumping their kids on their partner or parents while they go off and do their own thing. I know a number of people that more or less raised themselves - their parents provided necessities and that was about it.
There's also a larger discussion to be had on parenting and why it takes more time and effort than past generations; the difficulty of raising kids with two working parents; the move away from extended family groups and close neighbors that can help with kids; the increase in helicoptering/worrying and loss of independence; all of which contributes to making things more difficult.
> Just because something "always has been" doesn't mean it's easy.
I never said it was easy. What I said was it's not the hardest job, it's a common human experience, and it deserves celebrating even if it is an average, common thing.
> There's nothing special about farmers, they aren't geniuses, the work is not that difficult
This is absolutely laughable. The work is incredibly difficult. It literally destroys your body, every old farmer I've ever known has a heap of medical issues from having to do a lifetime of physical labor. It may not be intellectually difficult, but it's very difficult work.
A decade ago I worked on the first version of the (current generation of the) main touch screen in John Deere equipment. I haven't watched the full video, but you can see it in some of the clips. Neat to think that some code I wrote a decade ago is likely still running on these things.
No, but this is a 10-20 year old planter where all the useful parts have been replaced with something from a different manufactures. Buy a new planter and more than half of those independent screens/controls go away. Buy a new tractor and another can go away. Buy a tractor and planter from the same manufacture and you can get down to just 1 (but realistically you have enough data to monitor that you would have 2-3).
There is also the ISO11783 protocol which this tractor (which is at least 10 years old) has in the base model that could show everything, but the resolution available isn't really good and so while 3-5 controls could use that instead of a separate box, anything on a high resolution screen needs to stay. I don't know why the manufacture of those controls choose not to.
Is there anywhere I can anonymously upload an image to show off my own "spaceship tractor cab?" It's been awhile since I've tried, and it seems imgur no longer allows non-users to do this.
While at uni, I worked on a local fishing boat doing (amongst many things) hardware/software integration, and did some work on equipment communicating via NMEA. Very fun blast-to-the-past, didn't know the standard was used outside of marine environments.
They talk about GPS guided tractors for planting vs. using a marker wheel. I'm surprised GPS is accurate enough for that; are they using something like DGPS to get the needed accuracy?
GPS on its own especially with systems like WAAS is quite accurate these days, generally within a few meters. If you need more (which planting most crops does) there's also RTK [1], which permits centimeter-level accuracy from relatively inexpensive / simple setups. Here's an example of a local RTK base station with radio link in the industry [2], and additionally it's possible to get these corrections off cell network data connections [3]. Radio offers you more hyperlocal corrections which could improve accuracy a touch, but comes with all the downsides you'd expect of a local radio system so both are viable options.
Hmm, I always thought of RTK as including carrier-phase tracking, which would make it overkill for farming if the base-station is fixed (on the order of 2mm relative-position accuracy; absolute positional accuracy is not much better than DGPS without carrier phase-tracking). Wikipedia is ambiguous as to whether or not RTK necessarily includes carrier-phase tracking.
Tractors don't rely on _just_ GPS for planting, etc. They augment with some other technologies to get the necessary accuracy (a few cm of accuracy) for positioning.
I was thinking NOC myself. One monitor per major system being monitored.
Not a ton of space ship vibe (especially the Dragon, for example), just a lot of poorly integrated individual systems that each comes with their own monitor and control system. Which is maybe better than a tightly integrated system when it comes to farming implements.
I don't see how farmers can afford to not use this tech, but I also don't understand how they can afford them. We constantly told about the thin margins farmers work with, which seems like the math to afford the payments on these machines ever work out.
It also seems like this is one of those things that buying the base model is never enough. There were two different types of row cleaners in the front of the towed unit. There were devices at the back of each row that also seem like an add-on. The thing that presses the seeds down, and then the smart version that detected soil moisture and other info. Of course that's one of those 'for a small nominal fee' type of add-ons. John Deere seems to figure out how to keep his hand in the farmer's pocket eternally
I left my career as an agronomist 25 years ago. That was around 8 years into the precision ag revolution. It was great to view this video, we only dreamed of this sort of control while planting back then. Everything was manual and getting everything calibrated was a dusty job for the farmer, setting something climbing back into the tractor, going a couple of hundred feet and then getting out to make another change.
Once you got everything dialed in you rarely made many changes, The ability to change field by field or even in a field to adopt to different soil types is nothing short of amazing. Lots of times an individual row would stop planting and you wouldn't notice.
I worked a lot with satellite infrared photos and it wasn't uncommon to look at a field and see an entire row missing or planted at a half rate. I predict in time though a lot of these screens will become less important as your AI agent will be making all these sorts of adjustments for you.
It feels like we’re in a bit of a nadir, agriculturally, in terms of soil exhaustion and erosion, crop monocultures, and so on, largely because of technology letting you do the same thing to bigger areas more quickly and with fewer people, and we’re reaching the end of the epoch where the cost of this can be blithely externalised.
_However_, it seems like it could also be an inflection point, again because of technology. Imagine if tractors could tow behind them not a spraying trailer but a computer vision + laser system that could identify and zap individual weeds rather than napalming the whole ecosystem chemically, or that had arms that could pick only the correct, or ripe crop, or sub-varietal of crop, on a field planted with a variety of useful plants that balanced out the intensity with which they extracted nutrients from the soil. All of this at the cost/scale required to support the 8 billion (or so) people on the earth now with the agricultural land we have now, but perhaps too with the ability to open up more marginal bits of land to agriculture, and de-intensify the current wrung-to-death expanses of flat that we have to use now to accommodate the limitations of current farm machinery.
Modern farmers using the best practices are building back soil not exhausting it. The typical practice since about 1980-1990 was holding the line, but research has found to how build up soil and a few farmers are employing it.
While lasers are not used (yet?) you can now get sprayers that will spray chemical only on weeds and not the rest of the field. Or more likely you apply herbicide at a low dose across the whole field and then a high dose (possibly different chemical) where there is a weed.
> Imagine if tractors could tow behind them not a spraying trailer but a computer vision + laser system that could identify and zap individual weeds.
It exists. [1][2]. Robotic tractor, vision system, multiple 150W CO2 lasers. There is no such thing as overkill. It's really cool. "Certified Organic".
A more practical approach is See and Spray.[3] Cameras and deep learning are taught to recognize and target enemy weeds. The sprayer has a valve for each nozzle, and it only zaps the weeds. Uses far less pesticide. For some crops a zap of spray fertilizer is used. The weeds overdose and die.
That's now a John Deere product.
For those who are curious, here is the office view of my own "Spaceship tractor cab." https://imgur.com/a/ebUlEVy
Devices:
Tractor - 1979 Versatile 875. Indestructible. Used for planting with a 40' air seeder.
Trimble 500 - This is now a redundant GPS receiver which provides a special NEMA string to the device below it. Will stay in operation until I can figure out how to reliably duplicate said string via the primary GPS.
PF3000 - Old reliable. This computer allows rudimentary tracking of loads to allow for seed and fertilizer rate experiments. Data is saved to a CF card for later transfer to SMS Basic or QGIS.
CF-D1 Tablet - This handy bright touchscreen handles the signal from the primary GPS and RTK towers. It communicates with various sensors and a DC motor to steer the machine. Runs AgOpenGPS, a incredible godsend of a project which allows these kind of autosteer retrofits on old tractors for dirt cheap.
Various camera screens to monitor the operations of an Air Seeder. You know what's cheaper and more reliable than airflow and runout sensors? Cameras. :) Hopefully I'll be able to upgrade these to IP cameras this spring, but for now they're all various brands of cheap wired "backup cameras."
Agtron sensor monitor (canbus I think?) - This is supposed to monitor shaft RPMS and other various functions for the Air Seeder. It kinda works, but most functions are broken.
AtomJet Aux Hydraulic system - Allows older tractors to handle newer more intensive implements.
AgopenGPS control board (V2.. I think) - Takes Wheel Angle sensor data, GPS data, and Motion sensor Data, stews it all up on an Arduino nano and feeds that to the steeringwheel motor.
Ardusimple GPS RTK2B - Primary GPS receiver and NEMA string generator.
Not pictured - A streamdeck MK2 set up to control AgOpenGPS functions. Of dubious usefulness. :)
Other future upgrades - Replacing the main hydraulic manifold block with electronic solenoids. This should allow AgOpenGPS to raise and lower the implement automatically, as well as control various functions of the air seeder. One more step on the road to total automation!
I looove learning about technology that I don't usually come into contact with.
My dad was a doctor, and subscribed to the New England Journal of Medicine. The articles were opaque ("Defective Regulation of Inflammatory Mediators in Hodgkin's Disease — Supernormal Levels of Chemotactic-Factor Inactivator"??), but the ads were marvelous. Ultracentrifuges! Gel electrophoresis! Confocal microscopes! Electrosurgial units! Blood gas analyzers! Catnip for this budding engineer.
77 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 143 ms ] threadEDIT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Lamborghini
They litereally started as a tractor company, and as I understand it was annoyed at Enzo Ferrari and challeneged himself to making a supercar, and later the "Holy Shit" Countach was born (but the earlier Lambos are really beautiful)
Jeremy Clarkson from Top Gear fame has a 2-season show about his farm. In the first episode, he buys a Lambo tractor because "of course he does" type of logic.
The name lives on in the ag market, but built by SAME, not Automobili.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamborghini_Trattori
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAME_(tractors)
> Patrick Mimran sold Lamborghini to the Chrysler Corporation in 1987 for US$25 million. [...] In 1998, Mycom Setdco and V'Power sold Lamborghini to the Volkswagen Group where it was placed under the control of the group's Audi division.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Lamborghini
There is also a tractor company called FERRARI, but they have nothing to do with Enzo Ferrari as far as I know.
"Ferrari Tractors are designed and built in Italy by the BCS Group." (https://www.ferraritractor.com/faq)
English Wikipedia gives up at that point, but itwiki has https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferrari_(azienda)
Google Translate: "FERRARI of Luzzara (RE) is one of the historic brands in the field of agricultural mechanization. Founded in 1954 as "Officine Meccanica Ferrari SpA", in the period of reconstruction and mechanization of the country, it was one of the most enterprising companies in the agricultural machinery sector."
Meanwhile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferrari says it was founded in 1939 and doesn't mention tractors at all.
Massive respect for them. Even with this tractor, this guy likely does more work than the majority of people. They feed our entire society with a ton of work for very little reward. We don't give them the respect they're due.
Point being: they've put a lot of effort into modelling the different tractors and first time I used the in-vehicle perspective I was amazed at all the screens and knobs and dials and levers and what not. They don't really do anything in the game, it's just for show, but man they are complex beasts clearly.
Then again, I can definitely see the value of at least some of these features. Like you spend an inordinate amount of time just making sure you get maximum yield from a field, while keeping costs low, so having a screen tell you how much fuel you're consuming per turn or whatever is actually pretty useful.
Anyway, I absolutely agree – farmers are incredible! I have a whole new appreciation for farming equipment and farmers in general, just from playing this silly game.
Hydraulics and attachments open up almost an endless possibilities.
At least in my area, they aren't exactly known to be geniuses. The ones that have built up their business by buying out other farms and have tons of acres and employees? Sure. The usual "inherited the family farm" type? Not so much.
They have two small periods during the year where they're up before sunrise and stop working after sundown, assuming they live in an area with one harvest. Overall they work a hell of a lot less than most of us, and have more money. I have a friend that owns a business where he sells side-by-sides, four wheelers, snowmobiles, etc. The amount that many spend by buying all the newest toys every year is incredible.
The downside, of course, is that you need to be born in to it. A tiny 100 acre farm's land is worth north of 1 million dollars, not to mention a ton of other startup costs. Land isn't for sale very often, as usually at least one child wants to take it up. I don't even know how you'd approach starting from scratch unless you were already rich.
Note: I'm referring to crop farmers. Animals are hard work and I don't understand why any small time farmer still does it.
The word people use for what you describe is farmhand. It is the farmhand who works on a farm. The farmhand is the agricultural equivalent of a factory worker. Indeed, someone who owns a farm, but does not work on it, would not be considered a farmhand, but they most definitely would be a farmer.
It is technically possible for one to be both a farmer and a farmhand, but being a farmer does not imply that one is also a farmhand. They are distinct roles.
Wouldn't you find it arrogant – or at least weird – if people answered everything you write and say with the assumption that you're talking about British politics?
I guess it depends on the animal, and how many. I work sometimes on a hobby farm with around 30 pineywoods cattle and they're almost maintenance free. The hay is more work than those cattle and basically all we do for that is drive tractors around for a few days, a few times a year.
Farmers aren't all geniuses, but they also aren't mostly lazy idiots like you depict them to be.
> The downside, of course, is that you need to be born in to it. A tiny 100 acre farm's land is worth north of 1 million dollars, not to mention a ton of other startup costs. Land isn't for sale very often, as usually at least one child wants to take it up. I don't even know how you'd approach starting from scratch unless you were already rich.
This is just flat out false. My dad started our farm (90 acres) from scratch. He did it by working his ass off, often working two or three jobs, while living frugally and saving as much as he could for a down payment. Then he got a mortgage, just like most people do when they buy property. It's hard in the sense that saving money is always hard, but it's certainly not impossible and something where you can't pull it off without a helping hand from your parents.
My parents bought a 60 acre property on a truck driver and part time school bus driver's salary. There's no way my wife and I could afford the same property today, even with us both having degrees. Land is freaking expensive now, and I assume farm equipment is also more than it was back then.
Don't get me wrong; I'm sure there are ways to do it, but I've known plenty of farmers and apart from hobby type farms they all inherited their land.
Well, you are not going to start any kind of business without some kind of working capital. To be rich, for some definition of rich, is always a necessity when starting a business. That is not exclusive to farming.
I'm not sure farming is any worse than any other business[1], though. I have started a number of businesses in my day and the farm was probably the easiest of them to get into. Like any startup without venture capital – you start as small as possible, prove the business model, and then slowly work towards growth.
> A tiny 100 acre farm's land is worth north of 1 million dollars
Ah, if only. Imagine how easy farming would be if 100 acres was only $1MM! We haven't seen farmland that cheap around here in 20 years.
[1] Maybe software has an edge if you can find success with nothing but a budget computer, but your time commitment is going to be many orders of magnitude larger, so I expect it still requires more working capital in the end.
And this shouldn't be surprising. Farming is a very human activity, and can be done by pretty much any human. You don't need to be exceptional to do it. In fact it would be ridiculous if you did - imagine if only 1 in 50 people was brilliant enough to become a farmer - human civilization would never have gotten started.
Praising something like this feels silly to me, much as when people talk about "being a mother is the hardest job" or similar. It's not. Being a mother is a common human experience, and most women go through it.
This isn't to say such things shouldn't be celebrated. The idea of celebrations around harvest or motherhood is appealing to me, but there's nothing exceptional here, and there shouldn't be. Simple things, regular things, things everyone can do or goes through are worth celebrating, not just the exceptions, the geniuses, the stand-outs.
You could argue more women nowadays don't want to be mothers because it's hard. Especially if that's the second job and unpaid, actually you have to pay lots of money to be a successful mother. So yeah, it's exceptional... that anyone wants to have children at all! Though that's quickly changing, too.
There's a difference between hard = effort, and hard = difficulty. Most people struggle to understand software engineering concepts. If you do understand them, then the effort required to succeed at the job is less than parenting/farming/etc; but there's a reason software engineers are in the top 20% of the economic ladder and picking vegetables on a farm is on the bottom.
And at last check, subsistence farming was still the default job worldwide. Perhaps things have changed in the last decade or two, but I have my doubts.
(I'd also take issue on the idea of parenting being difficult, vs. good parenting, vs. newer cultural expectations on parents/education/helicoptering, vs. kids being free to roam etc etc., but that's a whole huge discussion on its own - and I think there's a pretty strong argument to be made that raising kids is not harder on either axis than having a job, but doing both at once is very difficult and forces an economic choice many women are making in favor of money.)
Sure, neither is hard if you want to do it at subsistence level. Hell, I started programming at like 5 years old. Software development is the easiest endeavour a human can partake in – so easy, it is easily picked up by young children who can barely read. Anyone can build software.
But I think it is far to say that building robust, reliable, maintainable, performant, and scalable software that satisfies a market need is a different story. And same goes for farming. If you want to farm at a level beyond subsistence, that is when it becomes hard.
The key to why parenting is such a hard job: it literally doesn't end for about two or more decades and you absolutely cannot quit or slack off on this gig, no matter what!
Just because something "always has been" doesn't mean it's easy.
We might not like to admit it, but people can and do, all the time. There's an ideal as far as being a parent goes that we try to hold people to and enforce culturally - but that doesn't stop people from getting divorces or dumping their kids on their partner or parents while they go off and do their own thing. I know a number of people that more or less raised themselves - their parents provided necessities and that was about it.
There's also a larger discussion to be had on parenting and why it takes more time and effort than past generations; the difficulty of raising kids with two working parents; the move away from extended family groups and close neighbors that can help with kids; the increase in helicoptering/worrying and loss of independence; all of which contributes to making things more difficult.
> Just because something "always has been" doesn't mean it's easy.
I never said it was easy. What I said was it's not the hardest job, it's a common human experience, and it deserves celebrating even if it is an average, common thing.
This is absolutely laughable. The work is incredibly difficult. It literally destroys your body, every old farmer I've ever known has a heap of medical issues from having to do a lifetime of physical labor. It may not be intellectually difficult, but it's very difficult work.
Farming is hard work, as you noted. But most physically able people are capable of it.
Designing a rocket to put a man on the moon is difficult and a much smaller percentage is capable of that.
Looks like slapping a bunch of hardware to circumvent poor interoperability.
And F35 cockpit has large single MFD, MFD setup of any 4+ generation fighter is 2-3 screens for what I imagine to be more complicated missions.
There is also the ISO11783 protocol which this tractor (which is at least 10 years old) has in the base model that could show everything, but the resolution available isn't really good and so while 3-5 controls could use that instead of a separate box, anything on a high resolution screen needs to stay. I don't know why the manufacture of those controls choose not to.
If not your style, https://imgbb.com is also an option. More ads, though
But please do upload a picture. That would be interesting.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39195506
While at uni, I worked on a local fishing boat doing (amongst many things) hardware/software integration, and did some work on equipment communicating via NMEA. Very fun blast-to-the-past, didn't know the standard was used outside of marine environments.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_kinematic_positionin... [2] https://www.deere.com/en/technology-products/precision-ag-te... [3] https://www.deere.com/en/technology-products/precision-ag-te...
Not a ton of space ship vibe (especially the Dragon, for example), just a lot of poorly integrated individual systems that each comes with their own monitor and control system. Which is maybe better than a tightly integrated system when it comes to farming implements.
He mentions swapping out components from last season a couple of times, so lack of integration is probably a feature.
It also seems like this is one of those things that buying the base model is never enough. There were two different types of row cleaners in the front of the towed unit. There were devices at the back of each row that also seem like an add-on. The thing that presses the seeds down, and then the smart version that detected soil moisture and other info. Of course that's one of those 'for a small nominal fee' type of add-ons. John Deere seems to figure out how to keep his hand in the farmer's pocket eternally
Once you got everything dialed in you rarely made many changes, The ability to change field by field or even in a field to adopt to different soil types is nothing short of amazing. Lots of times an individual row would stop planting and you wouldn't notice.
I worked a lot with satellite infrared photos and it wasn't uncommon to look at a field and see an entire row missing or planted at a half rate. I predict in time though a lot of these screens will become less important as your AI agent will be making all these sorts of adjustments for you.
_However_, it seems like it could also be an inflection point, again because of technology. Imagine if tractors could tow behind them not a spraying trailer but a computer vision + laser system that could identify and zap individual weeds rather than napalming the whole ecosystem chemically, or that had arms that could pick only the correct, or ripe crop, or sub-varietal of crop, on a field planted with a variety of useful plants that balanced out the intensity with which they extracted nutrients from the soil. All of this at the cost/scale required to support the 8 billion (or so) people on the earth now with the agricultural land we have now, but perhaps too with the ability to open up more marginal bits of land to agriculture, and de-intensify the current wrung-to-death expanses of flat that we have to use now to accommodate the limitations of current farm machinery.
> arms that could pick only the correct, or ripe crop, or sub-varietal of crop, on a field planted with a variety of useful plants
I've seen demos for both of these in the last year or two.
While lasers are not used (yet?) you can now get sprayers that will spray chemical only on weeds and not the rest of the field. Or more likely you apply herbicide at a low dose across the whole field and then a high dose (possibly different chemical) where there is a weed.
It exists. [1][2]. Robotic tractor, vision system, multiple 150W CO2 lasers. There is no such thing as overkill. It's really cool. "Certified Organic".
A more practical approach is See and Spray.[3] Cameras and deep learning are taught to recognize and target enemy weeds. The sprayer has a valve for each nozzle, and it only zaps the weeds. Uses far less pesticide. For some crops a zap of spray fertilizer is used. The weeds overdose and die. That's now a John Deere product.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53Mma8IOEzc [2] https://carbonrobotics.com/
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH-EFtTa6IU&
Devices:
Tractor - 1979 Versatile 875. Indestructible. Used for planting with a 40' air seeder.
Trimble 500 - This is now a redundant GPS receiver which provides a special NEMA string to the device below it. Will stay in operation until I can figure out how to reliably duplicate said string via the primary GPS.
PF3000 - Old reliable. This computer allows rudimentary tracking of loads to allow for seed and fertilizer rate experiments. Data is saved to a CF card for later transfer to SMS Basic or QGIS.
CF-D1 Tablet - This handy bright touchscreen handles the signal from the primary GPS and RTK towers. It communicates with various sensors and a DC motor to steer the machine. Runs AgOpenGPS, a incredible godsend of a project which allows these kind of autosteer retrofits on old tractors for dirt cheap.
Various camera screens to monitor the operations of an Air Seeder. You know what's cheaper and more reliable than airflow and runout sensors? Cameras. :) Hopefully I'll be able to upgrade these to IP cameras this spring, but for now they're all various brands of cheap wired "backup cameras."
Agtron sensor monitor (canbus I think?) - This is supposed to monitor shaft RPMS and other various functions for the Air Seeder. It kinda works, but most functions are broken.
AtomJet Aux Hydraulic system - Allows older tractors to handle newer more intensive implements.
AgopenGPS control board (V2.. I think) - Takes Wheel Angle sensor data, GPS data, and Motion sensor Data, stews it all up on an Arduino nano and feeds that to the steeringwheel motor.
Ardusimple GPS RTK2B - Primary GPS receiver and NEMA string generator.
Not pictured - A streamdeck MK2 set up to control AgOpenGPS functions. Of dubious usefulness. :)
Other future upgrades - Replacing the main hydraulic manifold block with electronic solenoids. This should allow AgOpenGPS to raise and lower the implement automatically, as well as control various functions of the air seeder. One more step on the road to total automation!
My dad was a doctor, and subscribed to the New England Journal of Medicine. The articles were opaque ("Defective Regulation of Inflammatory Mediators in Hodgkin's Disease — Supernormal Levels of Chemotactic-Factor Inactivator"??), but the ads were marvelous. Ultracentrifuges! Gel electrophoresis! Confocal microscopes! Electrosurgial units! Blood gas analyzers! Catnip for this budding engineer.