5 ms·
As a former farmer (roughly 4000 acres of dryland farming in Canada) and an engineer who also did embedded control system development, I would like to add some
by nas 9y ago
As a former farmer (roughly 4000 acres of dryland farming in Canada) and an engineer who also did embedded control system development, I would like to add some of my concerns.
For new ag machinery, embedded control systems are absolutely essential for the machine to do its job. The ECU on the engine is generally reliable and have long life. The other stuff, I'm highly dubious of the long-term maintainability of it. On our farm, we ran a lot of older equipment and did a lot of repairs ourselves. For new equipment, that will be near impossible as the electronic control systems are black boxes. Even the cabling is complicated and is generally not documented. After the machine gets a decade or two old, good luck fixing it.
I suppose you could just drive the machine in the junk pile. However, when a new combine harvester is costing around 3/4 of a million USD, that seems a bit wasteful. I don't know what the solution is though. The farmers buying new equipment don't care so much, their resale value is not suffering too badly. The manufacturers are looking for ways to sell new equipment and adding more features via electronic controls is a relatively cheap way to enhance the product.
Most farmers say they don't want all these new electronics on their machines. When Deere announced their S700 series combines, they had a video bragging about all the new improvements:
https://youtu.be/l5xJOoNyLoU https://youtu.be/l5xJOoNyLoU
If you study it, you will notice that most of the new features are due to software changes or to electronic control systems. Little of what the machine actually does to harvest the grain has changed (metal parts, etc). This automation features are nice when they work but are a disaster when something goes wrong. The operator will have trouble to determine what the machine is doing (never mind trying to figure out how to fix it).
However, even though many farmers say they don't want it, the new machines are selling well. So, maybe you could argue the market is working. To me, it feels like there could be some externalization of costs going on. These new machines are very much less valuable as they get older vs the previous era of farm equipment. I guess the same thing has happened to automobiles. You can take a car from the 1940s and fix it up into perfect condition. If you take a 2017 car loaded with electronics, would you have any hope of fixing it to new condition in 50 years from now?
- mveety 9y agoMy family doesn't farm but we used to and we still own a business where we use these tractors. The older tractors are much better for us because they're simple and quickly debuggable. I can get our Oliver Rowcrop 77 back up and running in no time almost disregarding what's failed, but the machines with electrical systems period are harder to debug and fix. This has been getting progressively worse as these machines get more sophisticated. Especially now because of the the addition of closed software these tractors aren't going to be around in 10-15 years and it wouldn't surprise me if it gets to the point where the tractor OEMs will start telling farmers just to get a new machine, which is perfectly viable for the huge farms. They just don't seem to give a shit anymore about little farms/businesses or long term reliability.
- dsfyu404ed 9y agoIt took ~30yr for good, fairly cost effective aftermarket, fairly generalized ECUs and transmission controllers for automotive applications to come about. The same will probably happen to tractors and whatnot. Since the cost side of the equation is far different for business and the problem has already been solved in the automotive space so it may happen quicker once it starts happening.
- davidzweig 9y agoI do embedded work. Making an open-source, aftermarket electronics for tractors, with standard interfaces.. that sounds fun.
- sli 9y agoYou might like tinkering with something like the Macchina[1]. https://www.macchina.cc/ https://www.macchina.cc/
- sli 9y agoAnd it's not just things become unrepairable. Some vehicles, like my mom's previous vehicle, could be repaired by the owner. The problem was that any "serious" repair would require you to disassemble a surprisingly big chunk of the car. For example, every time my mom sent the car to the shop, the dashboard was completely removed. To fix her moonroof, yep, the dash had to be removed. As well as most of the roof. On top of all that, the manual outright lied about features. It stated that oil could be checked by holding down a button on the instrument cluster, but after trying it then trying all the other buttons, none of them actually did anything outside their normal use (e.g. swapping between total and trip odo). There was no way for the owner to check the oil in this car. Additionally, it is heavily implied that the owner can't even change the oil themselves, though that could be done (with relative difficulty -- the "correct" way was with one of those expensive oil vacuum systems that no one actually owns). The manual also described Bluetooth features that the car did not have, with no disclaimer like, "This feature may not be available in all models." It also had all the buttons for it and generally looked like it has Bluetooth, but none of the buttons actually did anything. It's really no wonder she traded her BMW for a Camry.