Up until a year ago I was regularly using a Massy Fergusson 135 [0] (Perkins Diesel version), made sometime in the 1970s. It was wonderful! So amazing to drive and use. Clunky and heavy, but you really really felt like you were using a machine. In low gears, if you put you foot down on the accelerator the engine would roar, and your speed would barely change!
And there was no fancy technology in it at all. If I was in the forest and had forgotten the key, I'd just reach behind the dashboard and hot-wire it. The air filter was basically a shisha-pipe that bubbled the incoming air through wire wool and engine oil.
Its fuel gauge didn't work either. You just had to take a look in the tank, or quickly react as soon as the revs started dropped. I ran it dry a few times and had to sit there with a spanner in one hand and YouTube into the other, while trying to bleed all the fuel lines. But they were all on the outside of the vehicle, which made it comparatively easy I imagine.
I've never actually driven a modern tractor, so don't know how it compares. I imagine the clutch is easier on the knees these days!
Anyway, this just felt like the place to share this.
I think this is a reaction to the incredibly locked down ecosystem that most of these mfgs are pushing.
However, the tech exists for a reason and is not inherently bad, the issue is the lock-in, the lack of choice and interoperability.
IMO, there is plenty of space for an OEM who can play nice with others, offer an open (and vibrant ecosystem), and keep users coming back by choice, not by lock-in.
> However, the tech exists for a reason and is not inherently bad, the issue is the lock-in, the lack of choice and interoperability.
These low-tech tractors could become a hot bed for open source experimentation. Nothing stopping someone from sticking a tablet on the dash. You could run GPS harvesting optimization software or some webthing locally. Could be cloud or clever DiY farmers could run their farm off a local instance on a small machine using a WiFi AP atop the barn or whatever.
This was my take as well. How many 3rd parties might be able to bring on upgrades/modifications to a "dumb" tractor to make it smart vs only being able to buy a "smart" tractor from one vendor and be forced into it's rules/restrictions/prices
There are already open source auto pilot and cruise control implementations for cars. (Not all cars are supported obviously!) so to have this in place for tractors off the road seems very doable.
OEM can change their mind at any moment and there is always going to be an MBA rubbing their hands together thinking about all the money that can be made.
This needs to be solved at government level with right to repair laws and requirement for open standards instead of believing in magic of "free market".
Ever-more-restrictive government regulations are what allows these OEMs to ‘leverage’ their market power this way. I am not sure that a new regulation can solve it, as these sorts of mandates don’t seem to have worked in any other market.
The argument isn't 'more' regulations or 'less' regulations, it is the right regulations. The problem is that big companies slowly allow regulations that don't hurt them but do block competition by aggressively fighting regulations that help the startup (their competition) or help the consumer in ways that make them less money. It isn't hard to be evil and create regulatory capture. You don't actually have to be active in crafting regulation, just be active in blocking the right regulation. General statements that are 'against regulation' play into big companies making things worse.
These big companies absolutely allow regulations that "hurt" them. Deere doesn't want to deal with farmers who are pissed off that emissions stuff results in a service call at a bad time and can't be overridden, or obnoxious safety stuff that make products less useful outside of their "textbook" application, or something that forces them to expensively certify their product is XYZ or something.
Buuuuut, the cost of implementing that stuff hurts the competition way more, so Deere and friends don't really fight it.
They're trading absolute market size for stronger control over market share. Less people are going to buy their products at the margin if the products are made worse. But those that do will buy it from them, so more profit.
Those are load-bearing quotation marks: you're saying the regulation doesn't hurt them, only "hurts" them. If the regulation hurt them, they wouldn't allow it.
Remember that those regulations are written by the OEMs they benefit and whom bribe legislators to pass those regulations.
Any argument made without acknowledging this is purely in bad faith. The problem is not regulation that benefits OEMs. The problem is that you can simply purchase regulations that benefit you.
There are many regulations, written by a variety of actors, often in strange alliances. Safety, environmental, and disclosure regulations are often the culprits behind industry consolidation and oligopolization.
Now is especially a good time for Canada to do it. Cory Doctorow had a fantastic CBC interview about this. Scrapping anti-tampering protections would harm anti-Canadian tech companies while also building rapport with American farmers who would be able to use Canadian software on their tractors.
Government regulations weren't necessary for Framework to make the most open laptop product line in history which includes a the 'Pro' 13" laptop chassis which is both backwards and forwards compatible with components that were sold 5 years ago on day 1.
There's no magic necessary. TFA highlights the exact mechanism by which markets can fill a gap or need via entrepreneurship when incumbents fail to deliver what customers want. It's not guaranteed to happen or work in every case, but there's money to be made by giving people what they actually want.
A lot of electronics is useful, it can reduce fuel use or help with more accurate driving.
Farmers are just pissed they lose the ability to repair the vehicle easily or get stuck with monthly subscription because tractor company has changed the terms and you are praying they don't change it further.
But the company in the article isn't filling the gap. Farm owners want the technology. They don't want to be held hostage over the technology when it needs maintenance, repair, or adaptation after the initial sale.
It would be nice if this could happen more smoothly and rapidly, without some random people having to become experts in tractors from the ground up, and that's what regulations could help with. Say, if it was legal to copy from the best.
I disagree. While those are great points, I don't think that's the primary reason -- and maybe we're actually saying the same thing.
This tractor will last 50 years (and maybe more). Your grandchildren will be able to still use it. That longevity is the primary reason farmers would be super interested in this.
Some jobs (like mucking a barn for example) don't require a high-tech tractor. Sometimes you just need a workhorse that you can trust will start, run and do the job. Every single time. I still see farmers running old minneapolis-moline tractors from 100 years ago!
My in-laws use a Farm-all H around the yard for a lot of tasks. I don’t know what year it was made, but it looks like they were made from 1939-1954. It just… runs. We basically just do oil changes on it.
This is probably not this companies vision but it does seem interesting if companies sell "dumb" machines and then consumers can BYO electronics. Like an agricultural version of comma.ai.
Not sure how much appetite there is for that but half price + 5 grand in off the shelf electronics seems like something margin sensitive farmers would do.
Reminds me of how I don’t ever want an infotainment system in my car. I want the peripherals: a touch screen and speakers. I’ll supply my own phone to do the rest.
Do you work in the agricultural industry? Farm equipment is expensive, farmers will maintain the equipment as long as possible, which is a long time. Manufactures such as John Deere have tried to make it not possible for farmers to do self repair.
That’s part of the issue. But packing a tractor (or car) with electronics and computers does make it inherently harder to work on—even if it’s not locked down.
You need electronics and computers for cost-effective compliance with emissions requirements. Emissions limits have been one of the most positive government policies in my lifetime, saving millions of QALYs.
There's lots of other electronics in most modern vehicles, but the public manufacturer rationales for electronic lockdowns almost always point back to emissions concerns because they're so defensible. How do you separate them?
How do you define "electronics" and "computers"? Is a general-purpose computer running Java in the same category as a microcontroller running a tight loop with lookup tables for fuel and spark?
The problem: Once you have a microcontroller running a tight loop with lookup tables for fuel and spark, it's very tempting to make it run a tight loop with lookup tables for fuel, spark, and time since license renewal - and there's no outward difference between the two microcontrollers until one of them stops working. This is where regulations can help: any manufacturer caught checking time since license renewal should be fined a million trillion dollars.
Perhaps this is naive, but I would imagine that farm equipment is a rounding error in terms of global emissions. Compare the number of tractors to the number of trucks...
I would have expected policy to be pragmatic here, with (relatively) relaxed emissions requirements, since an affordable and reliable food supply is in the national interest? Sounds like that's not the case
Emissions regimes are complicated, but US tractors fall into the much less restrictive off-road category. As a result, they're a disproportionately significant contributor to things like NOx. A long time ago the off-road category was >20%, and I'm sure that percentage has only grown as regulations have forced emissions reductions in onroad vehicles.
I'd imagine it depends what kind of emissions you're measuring? Are we talking air quality or climate change?
Two stroke engines are pretty terrible in terms of unburned hydrocarbons and are disgusting for local air quality, which is why I'm glad they're being phased out in many areas.
I'd expect these tractors with I6 diesel engines to run pretty efficiently. I'd bet that the CO2 emissions from tractors are tiny in comparison from the emissions from trucks, fertiliser, and transporting the food.
Mandate common interfaces and open hardware. I shouldn't have to buy a $10k dongle to sniff codes. I certainly shouldn't have to buy a different one for each manufacturer.
The legislation has to be robust. No dice if the dongle is generic and $20 like OBD2 in cars, but that on top of that there's a per-manufacturer set of codes that only licensed dealers have access to the software to read those special codes.
Exactly. Electronically controlled unit injectors are expensive--like 10x the price of mechanical ones. They're super cool, they can produce like 10 separate metered injection events per cycle. This is great for efficiency, noise, emissions, etc. But I can rebuild mechanical injectors with a bottle jack pop tester I made from $100 worth of parts and a bench vise. There's no wiring harness, no computer.. If the injector is getting fuel, has decent spray pattern, and is popping at the right pressure I know for certain the fuel system is good. With an electronic common rail system I need some expensive proprietary computer equipment to diagnose it, and there's no way I can build a test bench to rebuild those injectors.
Surely there’s room for a middle ground. There are plenty of 1990s-era engines that were excellent designs, had no meaningful connectivity to anything except their own ECUs, and could be produced new for not very much money. Some of them were quite modular, too — I know someone who took the drivetrain out of a salvaged Honda Civic and built an entire car (with no resemblance whatsoever to a Civc) around it.
If a tractor with a clean-burning, efficient $7500k engine could be purchased and were designed around the theory that, in 20 years or so, the owner could reasonably quickly replace the entire engine (with a first-party or aftermarket solution), would that be a good solution?
The common tech that has solved these problems nicely (IMO) is network transceivers: SFP and similar modules are built according to multi-source agreements. They contain all kinds of exotic tech, and they are not intended to be serviced at all, but (unless your switch or NIC has an utterly stupid lockout) you can pull it out and replace it with an equivalent part from a different vendor in seconds, and those parts can be unbelievably inexpensive considering what’s in them. (Single-mode bidirectional 1Gbps transceivers are $11 or less, retail, in qty 2. This is INSANE compared the the first time I lit up a 1Gbps SMF link. To be fair, this particular tech may require one to replace both ends if one fails, but if you can spare a second fiber, the fully IEEE-spec-compliant interoperable ones are even less expensive.)
Maybe not inherently bad, but clearly not inherently necessary or useful if they're already getting so many inquiries from farmers. Could just be that the tech doesn't offer enough meaningful value when the core mechanical functionality can be achieved at a lower price.
For the farmers I know the price tag is the first thing they were looking at. So much grumbling about how Deere is using software to egregiously pad the price tag. Looking at a tractor that is going to take 5 or 6 years to pay off instead of 15 is tempting. Sadly Trump is absolutely going to slap a 400% tariff on these if they are even allowed to be imported.
Ultimately the “lock in” boils down to “when this breaks someone has to pay to fix it”. Automation and tech makes the galaxy of things that can break much larger, and the pinpointing of “who should pay to fix this” much harder. “Lock in” feels like an attempt to simplify toward “only we can fix it”, with the downsides of cost and time.
What if an OEM did the IBM thing and published open specs and software, spawning a whole industry? It's a shame the incentives don't seem to be there for it.
I want this for cars but to keep the modern powertrain. So an EV without the tracking/touch screens, etc etc. Or an internal combustion engine car that is just simple and efficient (and again, no tracking). I'll take the low-tech but nice features like heated seats and power windows still thank you.
I'd love this. I really don't want my car to be an iPhone with "apps" and random background software on it. The car touchscreen was perhaps the worst design choice in the history of the automobile, and is likely the cause of countless crashes. It's insane when I see car UIs that have the 'cancel / go back' button located in DIFFERENT areas depending on the screen context.
it seems like Slate might be trying that but there's no real cars from them yet so they're just renders at this point. but yes, same concept but printers is my wish.
I honestly don't care about power windows (or seats), do you really? I guess one advantage is being able to easily open windows other than your own.
Heated seats and stearing wheel, yes please.
But yep what I want is a Saab 900 "cockpit" car -- everything can be focused on and manipulated (physically!) without my eyes leaving the road or my hand having to explore too much.
Cloudflare is increasingly a problem in terms of blocking huge geographic regions, often without the website operators even being aware this is happening. All in the name of "security."
Yeah, I also wanted to comment on this, though I think it’s technically against the rules.
I hit this first on my VPN, so I disconnected, then got asked again from my home wifi. I dunno why I look like a bot to Cloudflare. I hate these prompts and it’s too bad they’re all over the web.
My guess is that this is a direct response to all the claw stuff running on macs. I used to never get cf captchas from a mac + home IP (while getting plenty on my linux ws + work vpn). Now i've gotten 2 sites in the past week that not only show the captcha, but also loop once I click the human thing. Most likely mac + resIP is not a good signal anymore...
Worked for me just now on mobile safari. You get the cloudflare human test but I just clicked the box and was in. This was despite accessing the site while vpn’d from home and using multiple adblockers.
On HN, I often see comments like this, complaining about Cloudflare blocking access to pages. It makes me wonder if it’s due to a particular setup that triggers bot detection – like Tor or no-JS – that HN readers often use, or if Cloudflare has too many false positives.
This is the way if we can ensure manufacturing of the parts. It won’t catch on but it would be awesome to have “base” tractors that are mechanical and predictable. Then you slap on whatever software on top that helps (automation, etc). But they need to be decoupled imo.
This is what a "bobcat" has become for UGV startups. It's a low tech proven platform that you can basically modify with attachments to do a lot of UGV work.
i have a farmall hand cranked tractor, going on 90 years old, so far its been rubber parts, and clutch pads.
as far as auto mation goes, thats how implements used to work. it was a tracter/thresher/combine. then a bale counter is slapped on then maybe row sighting or guidance, etc.
if your really snazzy, the implement is actually mapping the soil for moisture, or rough composistion and holding data to use in reformulating or notating your current cultural plans, i.e. supplemental spot feeding and irrigation.
And how many acres are you farming on it? Today's world of agriculture is much higher tech-based (for many good reasons, primarily yield) than back in the horse and buggy days of farming.
I still got a farmall 230, super easy to fix and maintain and works perfect for my small bit of land. An electric starter addon is really nice for winter starts though instead of killing your arm.
While I’m not at all surprised that they’re still running, I am a little surprised at how many Farm-all owners are on HN. Farm-all H owner checking in :)
I was assuming the same. This might be fine for a small setup but I'd imagine all the digitization shenanigans was done so efficiency could increase. I imagine for large scale operations this would be like replacing your steam engine with a horse.
This is great, if there is some real competition, then we can see John Deere will have to figure out how to compete. Either with lower prices or less lock in.
That's what I always want -- all of my appliances should look like the ones we got in the 90s/2000s. Some Chinese companies should take this niche or maybe not-niche field, sell at a premium, which hopefully is still cheaper than smart ones.
Is part of the appeal due to the fact that being remanufactured engines they don't need modern emissions control, aka Diesel Exhaust Fluid (DEF)? Farmers hate DEF.
I bought my tractor from a particular Korean knockoff company that undertunes larger engines to below 25hp so you can still have a mechanical engine without DEF, DPF, an ECU or any of the stuff that makes it harder to repair and more expensive. At the lower horsepower the emissions requirements mostly fall off.
The same engine has a little screw on the side, with a metal cover, that you absolutely should not remove and turn. Because if you did that, it would restore the horsepower of the engine back up to 35hp, which would be illegal.
Anyone who actually has to use their equipment to get shit done dislikes DPF/regen. It's like Windows Update --- you might be in the middle of a serious task but screech "time for a scheduled update! we dgaf what kind of critical task you were just doing, you want updates!"
Modern diesel systems equipped with DPF tech (which consumes DEF, the fluid) require a regen cycle which is kinda like an oven cleaning itself - they get super hot and burn away particulate before they can be used again. Farmers are more frustrated by the system than the fluid. In fact, DEF is really just piss (urea) which is the same kind of product that they use for fertilizer. Although the prices for urea have skyrocketed recently so perhaps they truly do hate DEF too.
The awesome thing about these 'older' Cummins engines is yes they lack DEF systems and also have mechanical fuel injection. As is commonplace with diesel, there are no spark/glow plugs either. So ostensibly once you have the engine started, it requires zero electricity or computer systems to operate. The RPM of the engine dictates everything else mechanically through gearing. This is a big win for equipment that needs to "just work". Of course they still have sensors and all kinds of systems that are kinda layered on top... but they're not strictly required. This is also why the "runaway diesel" problem exists. You cannot stop an engine like this without starving it of air or fuel.
A friend is an organic farmer in Saskatchewan who has been buying specifically older mechanical only tractors; after a heart attack that will require him to sell off his farm, he’s finding lots of potential buyers.
"old" tractors from 10+ years ago and new tractors are really ... not different at all. mechanically and structurally they are all the same. you can get a 20 year old deere/kubota tractor that might even be better than a new one because of the decline in manufacturing, cost cutting across materials etc. if well maintained they last forever, and the older gear is easier to work on.
Wish they sold something in the compact utility segment. 40-60hpish. I'd love an affordable Canadian made tractor for property maintenance / smaller farms.
(Though these days I've love something electric. I don't need long run time, I'm not doing row crops. Just market gardening and property maintenance stuff. All the electric stuff I see out there is aiming up at the high end and for autonomy / "smart" tractor stuff which I don't care about.)
If you're mechanically inclined, the compacts of yesterdecade are still out there. Popular brands like Ford or Massey Ferguson have amazingly good supply chain for 50 year old models. I run my hobby farm with a 1975 MF135, and I just sold a 1947 Massey Harris Pony that ran like a top doing pasture/arena dragging duties. I've put a ton of hours on the 135 and only done basic maintenance like replacing a few hydraulic lines and changing fluids.
Can you share more about your hobby farm? I would love to learn more about how you got into that? My family had a small farm growing up and my parents are still actively working on the farm everyday and I would like to take that up at some point. So curious to hear what you farm and how much involved you are in the process.
The market for used tractors went through the roof years ago--20 to 40 year old tractors with tens of thousands of miles on them sell for not so far from new prices because farmers value being able to fix them without paying $$$
Good. The John Deere monopoly is wild, but if you talk to a farmer they say they can’t handle the repairs. Sure, John Deere gets to make more expensive and complex machines and convince their customers that it’s “the future”.
Those buying new don't care about repairs. They were never going to do the warrantee work themselves anyway. Those buying on the used market have more reason to care about repairs, but used buyers are beholden to what new buyers purchased in the past.
Yes because thy live in the John Deere future. This was not always the case, surely. You used to be able to take high school classes to learn how to fix a combustion engine, even a new one!
Keep in mind that tractors are also getting massive.
The economics of row-crop agriculture is "you gotta farm more land". That means spending as much time in the field as you can with as big a machine as you can.
So not only is time you spend fixing your tractor yourself time you're not spending on your primary job, it's also working on a machine that's just monstrously huge. Delegating that work to a specialist with specialized tools is a very reasonable way to live.
The issue is that the specialized employees is not someone you hire on payroll who has access to tools you purchase. They must be a John Deere employee who comes from out of state and costs you $$$$$$ to calibrate a sensor that could just be a simple menu button and a 20 second wait
I mean, sure, right to repair and all that, but to be clear, unless you have like 50+ tractors to maintain, it's not going to make economic sense to have a full time employee to repair them. You still want to call out, you just want the option of calling someone local with more competitive rates and a faster response time.
Exactly! The old image of a guy on a Deere 4020 pulling an eight row implement is just unsustainable in today's agricultural system. Whether that system is sustainable is a different question.
You're pretty confident for someone who fundamentally does not understand the issue. During harvest season even hours of delay can be disastrous for farms that are barely solvent in the first place. When your only option is to call the dealer and hope and pray they deign to visit your farm in a timely fashion it doesn't matter how good the warranty is or is not. Farmers need to be self sufficient because time is money and money is survival.
That's not true for commercial users the way it is for private cars.
Even if you have a service contract you're still gonna be pissed at the downtime cost of having a tech drag their ass out to wherever you are to initiate a forced regen or something.
What early demand are you seeing, exactly? The article does indicate that they plan to ramp up production in 2026, but no mention of actual sales. It is quite possible that they are increasing production thinking that they need to roll them out to dealer lots to gain any traction.
In fact, their TractorHouse profile shows that they are still struggling to sell last year's models. If there was demand, why hasn't that demand already gobbled up the stock? "I guess it would be cool to own one if it was given to me for free" isn't demand.
They need to swing the pendulum back, the current problem is that there is now a whole generation about to take over from the previous and the new gen has never had to use a non-John Deere a tractor. If they could evangelize their product as the “smarter farmer that doesn’t need all that tech” then they might have success.
Oh hey, do you happen to know if there's any tool incompatibility in the modern electronics?
The other thing about tractors is that the three point hitches, PTOs, etc etc, have been standardized forever, so there's very little lock in in terms of, swap out your JD for and IH and away you go, so I'm curious if eg modern seed drills have any fancy tech which locks you in.
The farmer who doesn't want or need tech already buys from the likes of Versatile, Kubota, or maybe even Massey Ferguson if more towards the middle of the road. "Low tech" is already a serviced market. That's not to say there isn't room for another competitor, but there isn't much indication that Ursa is becoming one. When you can't even sell the product you produced last year... The bit in the article about them not wanting to really scale up is telling.
It is not like John Deere actually has a monopoly. There is just as much CNH (CaseIH, New Holland) seen out in the fields, and even when you want all the bells and whistles, Fendt is rapidly becoming understood to be the true king of tech. What John Deere does have going for it is that they generally do better than everyone else at keeping parts in stock where the parts are needed; local to the farmer. Ironically, repairability is where John Deere finds the win at the end of the day.
This makes me think of the new toyotas, the rav4s, 4runner, and land cruiser. Through government regulations, they were forced to create smaller more fuel efficient engines. To get the same power, they overstrain them, and put huge turbos on the engines. The outcome is a strictly worse engine, that essentially uses the same fuel as older engines.
The demand for older vehicles in certain segments is actually increasing
The new models have engines that are smaller turbos, that part is true — but they get >30% better fuel economy, and they output more power.
The reliability might become an issue down the road especially in hybrid engines but the data so far don’t seem to support your assertions. The one exception is maybe the Tundra 3.4L but that seems to still be ambiguous as to the root cause, and may just be mfg process error.
I wonder if this notion comes from the 80s, when engines with turbos had lower compression ratios for reliability. Today's turbocharged motors have higher compression ratios than in the malaise era, and the turbos have a lot less lag. Turbos no longer mean you have to sacrifice fuel economy for performance (unless you have a lead foot).
I feel this. I've been looking at ADV bikes and everything on the market has a cellular modem for always on cloud connectivity, and multiple vendors, including Zero (the electric internet darling) are offering paid feature unlocks via apps.
On top of this, I looked at Zero's job postings and they're desperately trying to hire a firmware lead to get the team to use Claude Code (precisely what I want managing a 100hp motor under my ass).
Not only are we in a world where everything is locked down with software, the software is about to get way worse and there's nothing you can do about it.
I wish someone would do something similar for TVs. Just a really fantastic panel with only the tech needed to decode HDMI or whatever and show it on the screen. No other tech whatsover: no telemetry, no smart anything, nothing.
Good. There should be an option for a straightforward mechanical machine. This also has trickledown effect where hopefully regular town mechanics can fix things based on their historical knowledge of engines. Instead of not wanting to touch anything because of the all the electronics involved.
Also, I know this is a strange parallel, but it feels similar to what Dell and HP did to their servers. They made the BIO so complicated that it takes 5-10 minutes for their severs to boot up. Using an older Dell server with a straightforward BIOS that boots up in 30 seconds feels awesome.
What is it with American companies that eventually always try to sell crap and low moral products/services. As if the people are educated in luring people into traps to only benefit themselves.
And there was no fancy technology in it at all. If I was in the forest and had forgotten the key, I'd just reach behind the dashboard and hot-wire it. The air filter was basically a shisha-pipe that bubbled the incoming air through wire wool and engine oil.
Its fuel gauge didn't work either. You just had to take a look in the tank, or quickly react as soon as the revs started dropped. I ran it dry a few times and had to sit there with a spanner in one hand and YouTube into the other, while trying to bleed all the fuel lines. But they were all on the outside of the vehicle, which made it comparatively easy I imagine.
I've never actually driven a modern tractor, so don't know how it compares. I imagine the clutch is easier on the knees these days!
Anyway, this just felt like the place to share this.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massey_Ferguson_135
Do you still have the Massy?
However, the tech exists for a reason and is not inherently bad, the issue is the lock-in, the lack of choice and interoperability.
IMO, there is plenty of space for an OEM who can play nice with others, offer an open (and vibrant ecosystem), and keep users coming back by choice, not by lock-in.
These low-tech tractors could become a hot bed for open source experimentation. Nothing stopping someone from sticking a tablet on the dash. You could run GPS harvesting optimization software or some webthing locally. Could be cloud or clever DiY farmers could run their farm off a local instance on a small machine using a WiFi AP atop the barn or whatever.
Tech for improvement for customers vs tech for moats/enshittification, especially when imposed by one side on the other is a very different thing.
This needs to be solved at government level with right to repair laws and requirement for open standards instead of believing in magic of "free market".
Buuuuut, the cost of implementing that stuff hurts the competition way more, so Deere and friends don't really fight it.
They're trading absolute market size for stronger control over market share. Less people are going to buy their products at the margin if the products are made worse. But those that do will buy it from them, so more profit.
Any argument made without acknowledging this is purely in bad faith. The problem is not regulation that benefits OEMs. The problem is that you can simply purchase regulations that benefit you.
Farmers are just pissed they lose the ability to repair the vehicle easily or get stuck with monthly subscription because tractor company has changed the terms and you are praying they don't change it further.
This tractor will last 50 years (and maybe more). Your grandchildren will be able to still use it. That longevity is the primary reason farmers would be super interested in this.
Some jobs (like mucking a barn for example) don't require a high-tech tractor. Sometimes you just need a workhorse that you can trust will start, run and do the job. Every single time. I still see farmers running old minneapolis-moline tractors from 100 years ago!
Not sure how much appetite there is for that but half price + 5 grand in off the shelf electronics seems like something margin sensitive farmers would do.
Always better long term to bring and maintain your own smarts.
https://youtu.be/EPYy_g8NzmI
There's lots of other electronics in most modern vehicles, but the public manufacturer rationales for electronic lockdowns almost always point back to emissions concerns because they're so defensible. How do you separate them?
I would have expected policy to be pragmatic here, with (relatively) relaxed emissions requirements, since an affordable and reliable food supply is in the national interest? Sounds like that's not the case
Two stroke engines are pretty terrible in terms of unburned hydrocarbons and are disgusting for local air quality, which is why I'm glad they're being phased out in many areas.
I'd expect these tractors with I6 diesel engines to run pretty efficiently. I'd bet that the CO2 emissions from tractors are tiny in comparison from the emissions from trucks, fertiliser, and transporting the food.
Mandate common interfaces and open hardware. I shouldn't have to buy a $10k dongle to sniff codes. I certainly shouldn't have to buy a different one for each manufacturer.
If a tractor with a clean-burning, efficient $7500k engine could be purchased and were designed around the theory that, in 20 years or so, the owner could reasonably quickly replace the entire engine (with a first-party or aftermarket solution), would that be a good solution?
The common tech that has solved these problems nicely (IMO) is network transceivers: SFP and similar modules are built according to multi-source agreements. They contain all kinds of exotic tech, and they are not intended to be serviced at all, but (unless your switch or NIC has an utterly stupid lockout) you can pull it out and replace it with an equivalent part from a different vendor in seconds, and those parts can be unbelievably inexpensive considering what’s in them. (Single-mode bidirectional 1Gbps transceivers are $11 or less, retail, in qty 2. This is INSANE compared the the first time I lit up a 1Gbps SMF link. To be fair, this particular tech may require one to replace both ends if one fails, but if you can spare a second fiber, the fully IEEE-spec-compliant interoperable ones are even less expensive.)
Not sure they needed to go all the way to mechanical injection tho, this is just literally burning money away
Heated seats and stearing wheel, yes please.
But yep what I want is a Saab 900 "cockpit" car -- everything can be focused on and manipulated (physically!) without my eyes leaving the road or my hand having to explore too much.
But, yeah, electric.
I predict 6 months before John Deer gets the Alberta UCP on the line and gets a law passed that bans "unsafe tractors" (or the like)
https://www.thedrive.com/news/new-tractor-with-12-valve-cumm...
I hit this first on my VPN, so I disconnected, then got asked again from my home wifi. I dunno why I look like a bot to Cloudflare. I hate these prompts and it’s too bad they’re all over the web.
This article requires Age Verification. Please hold up your passport to the sensor on your device to continue.
... and only briefly pause to wonder if it's because of all the anti-cookie, anti-tracking stuff in Safari.
> A UGV (Unmanned Ground Vehicle) is a robotic vehicle that operates on the ground without a human driver onboard.
as far as auto mation goes, thats how implements used to work. it was a tracter/thresher/combine. then a bale counter is slapped on then maybe row sighting or guidance, etc.
if your really snazzy, the implement is actually mapping the soil for moisture, or rough composistion and holding data to use in reformulating or notating your current cultural plans, i.e. supplemental spot feeding and irrigation.
actual agricultural needs, not just fluff.
https://www.opensourceecology.org/
https://wiki.opensourceecology.org/wiki/Open_Source_Ecology
ursa-ag.com For (a little bit) more info
The same engine has a little screw on the side, with a metal cover, that you absolutely should not remove and turn. Because if you did that, it would restore the horsepower of the engine back up to 35hp, which would be illegal.
Modern diesel systems equipped with DPF tech (which consumes DEF, the fluid) require a regen cycle which is kinda like an oven cleaning itself - they get super hot and burn away particulate before they can be used again. Farmers are more frustrated by the system than the fluid. In fact, DEF is really just piss (urea) which is the same kind of product that they use for fertilizer. Although the prices for urea have skyrocketed recently so perhaps they truly do hate DEF too.
The awesome thing about these 'older' Cummins engines is yes they lack DEF systems and also have mechanical fuel injection. As is commonplace with diesel, there are no spark/glow plugs either. So ostensibly once you have the engine started, it requires zero electricity or computer systems to operate. The RPM of the engine dictates everything else mechanically through gearing. This is a big win for equipment that needs to "just work". Of course they still have sensors and all kinds of systems that are kinda layered on top... but they're not strictly required. This is also why the "runaway diesel" problem exists. You cannot stop an engine like this without starving it of air or fuel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glider_%28automobiles%29#Glide...
(Though these days I've love something electric. I don't need long run time, I'm not doing row crops. Just market gardening and property maintenance stuff. All the electric stuff I see out there is aiming up at the high end and for autonomy / "smart" tractor stuff which I don't care about.)
I wonder about a hybrid version of this though, maybe Edison motors should collab
We'll see what, if anything, actually becomes available.
Yes because thy live in the John Deere future. This was not always the case, surely. You used to be able to take high school classes to learn how to fix a combustion engine, even a new one!
The economics of row-crop agriculture is "you gotta farm more land". That means spending as much time in the field as you can with as big a machine as you can.
So not only is time you spend fixing your tractor yourself time you're not spending on your primary job, it's also working on a machine that's just monstrously huge. Delegating that work to a specialist with specialized tools is a very reasonable way to live.
One of these days I'm going to buy one to restore, the way other men but the cars of their youth.
huh, why not?
Even if you have a service contract you're still gonna be pissed at the downtime cost of having a tech drag their ass out to wherever you are to initiate a forced regen or something.
In fact, their TractorHouse profile shows that they are still struggling to sell last year's models. If there was demand, why hasn't that demand already gobbled up the stock? "I guess it would be cool to own one if it was given to me for free" isn't demand.
The other thing about tractors is that the three point hitches, PTOs, etc etc, have been standardized forever, so there's very little lock in in terms of, swap out your JD for and IH and away you go, so I'm curious if eg modern seed drills have any fancy tech which locks you in.
It is not like John Deere actually has a monopoly. There is just as much CNH (CaseIH, New Holland) seen out in the fields, and even when you want all the bells and whistles, Fendt is rapidly becoming understood to be the true king of tech. What John Deere does have going for it is that they generally do better than everyone else at keeping parts in stock where the parts are needed; local to the farmer. Ironically, repairability is where John Deere finds the win at the end of the day.
The demand for older vehicles in certain segments is actually increasing
The new models have engines that are smaller turbos, that part is true — but they get >30% better fuel economy, and they output more power.
The reliability might become an issue down the road especially in hybrid engines but the data so far don’t seem to support your assertions. The one exception is maybe the Tundra 3.4L but that seems to still be ambiguous as to the root cause, and may just be mfg process error.
On top of this, I looked at Zero's job postings and they're desperately trying to hire a firmware lead to get the team to use Claude Code (precisely what I want managing a 100hp motor under my ass).
Not only are we in a world where everything is locked down with software, the software is about to get way worse and there's nothing you can do about it.
Also, I know this is a strange parallel, but it feels similar to what Dell and HP did to their servers. They made the BIO so complicated that it takes 5-10 minutes for their severs to boot up. Using an older Dell server with a straightforward BIOS that boots up in 30 seconds feels awesome.