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The "breakthrough tech" I'm NOT seeing: There's all the excitement over electric cars and electrical trucks, and I, for one, can't wait to get an electrically

The "breakthrough tech" I'm NOT seeing: There's all the excitement over electric cars and electrical trucks, and I, for one, can't wait to get an electrically powered car I don't have to drive. But the thing I'm not seeing is electrically powered farm machinery. I think people underestimate just how hard that problem is. These machines, when they're working at peak times of the year (planting time, harvest) are required to work 24 hours a day for weeks on end. There's no time to stop for a recharge, and something like a harvester or large tractor pulling ploughs or a planter uses a /hell/ of a lot of power. Even assuming some sort of swap-out battery system, I'd guess that each machine would need something on the order of three to five battery packs in order to keep up with the work demand. And at the busy times of year even a moderately sized farm will have at least three to five machines working at the same time. Is anyone aware of companies developing real (not prototype/PoC) large-scale farm machinery?

semi-extrinsic 8y ago
My forecast is that heavy diesel engines (excavators, farm equipment, ships, maybe trains) will be replaced by hydrogen power. Either fuel cells in the 100-800 kW class, or gas turbines for the megawatt to tens of megawatt applications. For the latter, you might need to blend hydrogen with e.g. ammonia to slow down combustion, but we'll get there.
- maxerickson 8y ago
  Everything is easier with methane and even compressed natural gas has better storage density than liquid hydrogen (liquefied natural gas destroys hydrogen in energy per unit volume).
- bewo001 8y ago
  I've read somewhere that bio fuels make a lot of sense for powering agricultural machinery, while they'd be disastrous if we tried to power all cars with them.
cjrp 8y ago
This may be a stupid idea, but is there any reason that this kind of heavy machinery needs a battery and couldn't just be connected to a power source via a (admittedly, very long) cable?
- rusk 8y ago
  The very long cable sounds like a good enough reason to me ... Agricultural land is typically in remote areas, and equipment needs to be driven for miles often to get to where it's being used. Even if, lets say you do take the hit of the upfront costs introduce a heavy-duty power-grid to service all your land (thousands of hectares on many of the large-scale cases) - then you're still going to have to run the cable from some kind of power point, and without some aerial apparatus you're going to be running it across and through your crops. Yeah I guess you could take the time to arrange the cable, and have somebody follow it around all day but that's a lot of extra work. Probably a lot more work than just the harvesting. It's probably pretty dangerous too - trailing this multiphase high-power cable around where you've all this heavy equipment often doing chopping and grinding.
  - usrusr 8y ago
    Someone needs to run the numbers for a modular chain of wire-carrying drones: if you get rid of the batteries, what length of cable could a drone carry? How much power would that cable be able to transmit, how much of that power would be consumed by the cable-carrying drones? Just how light could we make the power electronics to feed the drones from the (obviously, for weight reasons) high voltage power lines they would be lifting? If this is possible at all, it could be an important base technology for a very wide range of new application fields.
    - rusk 8y ago
      That sounds crazy. The kind of heavy duty cabling you're talking about would be very very heavy. Now, you're not only talking about powering your combine harvester or whatever but also an army of heavy duty drones? LOL
    - 8y ago
pjc50 8y ago
Agricultural machinery is likely to keep using liquid hydrocarbon fuel even when it's being banned entirely from cities. It's just too much of a technological challenge, as you say.
typeliftr 8y ago
Asking out of genuine curiosity, does it actually matter if harvesting takes 5 or 10 days? If electricity is cheaper, it might make sense for the job to take a bit longer but be cheaper? Human labour is not involved (with automated vehicles) so price should only be dependent on actual power consumption.
- pjc50 8y ago
  > does it actually matter if harvesting takes 5 or 10 days? Crops are perishable, and there's always the risk of weather conditions damaging them while they're in the field. How much it matters will depend on the crop, but it's definitely important.
- mikro2nd 8y ago
  Yes it most certainly does matter! A crop that's harvested even a few days too late is likely to suffer severe nutrient and quality losses. eta: Of course this varies per crop, so let me back down just a little, but for most food crops there really is a optimal window outside of which the farmers' rather meagre profits evaporate quite fast.
- AngryData 8y ago
  Yes, something like letting your crops get rained on just before harvest can ruin them and make them rot in storage. Although purposefully planting crops with slightly different yield times could alleviate the problem. Currently though crop harvests are a huge rush to get all of it collected as soon as possible because it all tends to ripen around the same time, if a few plants ripened or finished it usually causes surrounding plants of the same species to ripen too.
  - tomp 8y ago
    I've been wondering recently if there's some way we could "hijack" this sort of signaling mechanisms that plants seem to have... E.g. artificiall encourage the crops to ripen sooner (i.e. when we want them to). The next step would be, to figure out how to grow just the parts of the plants that we need. I'm guessing internally, plants use some kind of hormone-like signalling mechanism that lets different parts of the plant know what to do. Why do we need a full tree (in particular, bark) when we could just grow apples directly along with a few leaves to "power" them?
techbio 8y ago
“Large-scale” is not necessarily large! Instead of tilling/planting/harvesting 24 rows at a time, how about a fleet of mule-sized drones running one row each, deployed from a semi with a power source, swapping as needed?
wffurr 8y ago
Transport uses a lot more fuel than farm equipment. Biodiesel from sawgrass on marginal land or waste product like corn husks etc would work out a lot simpler for powering the equipment, and can be made on site.
- sitkack 8y ago
  Hydrocarbons are so useful, eventually we will generate them using electricity.
audunw 8y ago
Is this really that important though? I haven't numbers that indicate that farming machinery is such a big share of the oil consumption. My thoughts on these things is, if we can cut 90% of gasoline/diesel use with BEVs and PHEVs, then the last 10% could feasibly be fueld by renewable hydrocarbons. The development after that is up to the markets.. probably pure BEV will be preferred over time as batteries get better and we develop new solutions. Why would you need three to five packs? A pack can generally charge as fast as it can discharge.. you should only need two if you have a fast charging system. The problem is if the machines is only used part of the year. For the cost of a battery pack to make sense, it should be used as much as possible. If it's idle for large parts of the year and it can't be used for anything else, it'll be hard to justify the cost. Maybe they can double as grid storage?
- techbio 8y ago
  Farm machinery is not a huge part of agricultural energy use, and agriculture is not a huge contributor overall consumption, but energy's share in food production costs are high. Petroleum use by industry sector: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/index.php?page=us_energy_industry https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/index.php?page=us_energy... How energy is used in agriculture (Sweden): http://www.serina-ahlgren.com/p/research_26.html http://www.serina-ahlgren.com/p/research_26.html How agriculture energy use contributes to the atmosphere: https://www.globalagriculture.org/report-topics/climate-and-energy.html https://www.globalagriculture.org/report-topics/climate-and-... (I am not an expert in this field.) Edit: an adjective form
- regularfry 8y ago
  You also need a third in case one of the first two goes pop, and because batteries don't like being left on the shelf fully charged (or discharged), it needs to be actively cycled through. That's N+1 redundancy; N+2 means four in total assuming you can charge as fast as you can discharge.
saalweachter 8y ago
I'm occasionally boggling that there's no electric farm equipment, since it at least suffers from one fewer problem than electric cars: you're mostly driving around in a finite area. You might need to plumb a dozen or so charging stations at various fields, and have the equivalent ability to essentially carry a five gallon jug of electricity to a tractor in a field when you run out accidentally, but you're not driving 200 miles to an Ikea on the spur of the moment. Besides the lack of consumer demand (farmers have other things to worry about), I think the other thing that makes the farm market slow to adopt electric is that the market is, erm, slow. People are constantly buying new cars. Some people drive a new car every year, some people drive a car for 10 or 20 years, but I'd guess that most people get a new car every 3-7 years. That means, firstly, that a lot of people have bought a new car since they first started getting good; that also means that an electric car only has to last 3-7 years to meet most people's expectations, and your car will only be 3-7 years out of date when you get a new one. I would guess the average farm tractor in the fields today in the US is 20-30 years old. You've got some really new ones with GPS, autopilot and satellite TV, sure, but you've also got some 50-75 year old tractors which are still doing just fine. I used to rake hay with a little Farm-All my great grandfather bought back in his prime, which is still going strong today, and I bought a used Cletrac from '45 to use around my woodlot. This creates three problems for the prospective electric tractor manufactures: not a lot of tractors are sold each year, so you're fighting for a chunk of a very slow-moving market; prospective buyers are going to be asking themselves "will this tractor outlive me?" so you need to have a compelling story on how those battery packs and motor bearings are going to last 50 years, or be easily replaceable; the technology is still rapidly developing, so you also need to explain to the prospective buyer why it's is worth buying an electric tractor now, instead of waiting 10 years to buy a more mature electric tractor.
- jcranmer 8y ago
  > I would guess the average farm tractor in the fields today in the US is 20-30 years old. It's actually surprisingly hard to find hard numbers on this topic, but the numbers I've seen have generally suggested that the average age is more like 10-20 years old. The hard numbers I've seen do say that about 10-20% of tractors are less than 5 years old. Realistically, the difficult part of electric tractors isn't the mileage but rather the fact that you're consuming far more power per mile. You're looking at measuring fuel consumption of around 10 gallons an hour, instead of about 1.5 gallons an hour for a car. Also, you're going to want to work the tractor for as much sunlight as you can muster, and you want to charge back up only overnight. So you'd want an equivalent not of a 200 mile range car but more like a 2500 mile range car, that can fully charge overnight.

semi-extrinsic 8y ago

My forecast is that heavy diesel engines (excavators, farm equipment, ships, maybe trains) will be replaced by hydrogen power. Either fuel cells in the 100-800 kW class, or gas turbines for the megawatt to tens of megawatt applications. For the latter, you might need to blend hydrogen with e.g. ammonia to slow down combustion, but we'll get there.

maxerickson 8y ago
Everything is easier with methane and even compressed natural gas has better storage density than liquid hydrogen (liquefied natural gas destroys hydrogen in energy per unit volume).
bewo001 8y ago
I've read somewhere that bio fuels make a lot of sense for powering agricultural machinery, while they'd be disastrous if we tried to power all cars with them.

cjrp 8y ago

This may be a stupid idea, but is there any reason that this kind of heavy machinery needs a battery and couldn't just be connected to a power source via a (admittedly, very long) cable?

rusk 8y ago
The very long cable sounds like a good enough reason to me ... Agricultural land is typically in remote areas, and equipment needs to be driven for miles often to get to where it's being used. Even if, lets say you do take the hit of the upfront costs introduce a heavy-duty power-grid to service all your land (thousands of hectares on many of the large-scale cases) - then you're still going to have to run the cable from some kind of power point, and without some aerial apparatus you're going to be running it across and through your crops. Yeah I guess you could take the time to arrange the cable, and have somebody follow it around all day but that's a lot of extra work. Probably a lot more work than just the harvesting. It's probably pretty dangerous too - trailing this multiphase high-power cable around where you've all this heavy equipment often doing chopping and grinding.
- usrusr 8y ago
  Someone needs to run the numbers for a modular chain of wire-carrying drones: if you get rid of the batteries, what length of cable could a drone carry? How much power would that cable be able to transmit, how much of that power would be consumed by the cable-carrying drones? Just how light could we make the power electronics to feed the drones from the (obviously, for weight reasons) high voltage power lines they would be lifting? If this is possible at all, it could be an important base technology for a very wide range of new application fields.
  - rusk 8y ago
    That sounds crazy. The kind of heavy duty cabling you're talking about would be very very heavy. Now, you're not only talking about powering your combine harvester or whatever but also an army of heavy duty drones? LOL
  - 8y ago

pjc50 8y ago

Agricultural machinery is likely to keep using liquid hydrocarbon fuel even when it's being banned entirely from cities. It's just too much of a technological challenge, as you say.

typeliftr 8y ago

Asking out of genuine curiosity, does it actually matter if harvesting takes 5 or 10 days? If electricity is cheaper, it might make sense for the job to take a bit longer but be cheaper? Human labour is not involved (with automated vehicles) so price should only be dependent on actual power consumption.

pjc50 8y ago
> does it actually matter if harvesting takes 5 or 10 days? Crops are perishable, and there's always the risk of weather conditions damaging them while they're in the field. How much it matters will depend on the crop, but it's definitely important.
mikro2nd 8y ago
Yes it most certainly does matter! A crop that's harvested even a few days too late is likely to suffer severe nutrient and quality losses. eta: Of course this varies per crop, so let me back down just a little, but for most food crops there really is a optimal window outside of which the farmers' rather meagre profits evaporate quite fast.
AngryData 8y ago
Yes, something like letting your crops get rained on just before harvest can ruin them and make them rot in storage. Although purposefully planting crops with slightly different yield times could alleviate the problem. Currently though crop harvests are a huge rush to get all of it collected as soon as possible because it all tends to ripen around the same time, if a few plants ripened or finished it usually causes surrounding plants of the same species to ripen too.
- tomp 8y ago
  I've been wondering recently if there's some way we could "hijack" this sort of signaling mechanisms that plants seem to have... E.g. artificiall encourage the crops to ripen sooner (i.e. when we want them to). The next step would be, to figure out how to grow just the parts of the plants that we need. I'm guessing internally, plants use some kind of hormone-like signalling mechanism that lets different parts of the plant know what to do. Why do we need a full tree (in particular, bark) when we could just grow apples directly along with a few leaves to "power" them?

techbio 8y ago

“Large-scale” is not necessarily large! Instead of tilling/planting/harvesting 24 rows at a time, how about a fleet of mule-sized drones running one row each, deployed from a semi with a power source, swapping as needed?

wffurr 8y ago

Transport uses a lot more fuel than farm equipment. Biodiesel from sawgrass on marginal land or waste product like corn husks etc would work out a lot simpler for powering the equipment, and can be made on site.

sitkack 8y ago
Hydrocarbons are so useful, eventually we will generate them using electricity.

audunw 8y ago

Is this really that important though? I haven't numbers that indicate that farming machinery is such a big share of the oil consumption. My thoughts on these things is, if we can cut 90% of gasoline/diesel use with BEVs and PHEVs, then the last 10% could feasibly be fueld by renewable hydrocarbons. The development after that is up to the markets.. probably pure BEV will be preferred over time as batteries get better and we develop new solutions. Why would you need three to five packs? A pack can generally charge as fast as it can discharge.. you should only need two if you have a fast charging system. The problem is if the machines is only used part of the year. For the cost of a battery pack to make sense, it should be used as much as possible. If it's idle for large parts of the year and it can't be used for anything else, it'll be hard to justify the cost. Maybe they can double as grid storage?

techbio 8y ago
Farm machinery is not a huge part of agricultural energy use, and agriculture is not a huge contributor overall consumption, but energy's share in food production costs are high. Petroleum use by industry sector: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/index.php?page=us_energy_industry https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/index.php?page=us_energy... How energy is used in agriculture (Sweden): http://www.serina-ahlgren.com/p/research_26.html http://www.serina-ahlgren.com/p/research_26.html How agriculture energy use contributes to the atmosphere: https://www.globalagriculture.org/report-topics/climate-and-energy.html https://www.globalagriculture.org/report-topics/climate-and-... (I am not an expert in this field.) Edit: an adjective form
regularfry 8y ago
You also need a third in case one of the first two goes pop, and because batteries don't like being left on the shelf fully charged (or discharged), it needs to be actively cycled through. That's N+1 redundancy; N+2 means four in total assuming you can charge as fast as you can discharge.

saalweachter 8y ago

I'm occasionally boggling that there's no electric farm equipment, since it at least suffers from one fewer problem than electric cars: you're mostly driving around in a finite area. You might need to plumb a dozen or so charging stations at various fields, and have the equivalent ability to essentially carry a five gallon jug of electricity to a tractor in a field when you run out accidentally, but you're not driving 200 miles to an Ikea on the spur of the moment. Besides the lack of consumer demand (farmers have other things to worry about), I think the other thing that makes the farm market slow to adopt electric is that the market is, erm, slow. People are constantly buying new cars. Some people drive a new car every year, some people drive a car for 10 or 20 years, but I'd guess that most people get a new car every 3-7 years. That means, firstly, that a lot of people have bought a new car since they first started getting good; that also means that an electric car only has to last 3-7 years to meet most people's expectations, and your car will only be 3-7 years out of date when you get a new one. I would guess the average farm tractor in the fields today in the US is 20-30 years old. You've got some really new ones with GPS, autopilot and satellite TV, sure, but you've also got some 50-75 year old tractors which are still doing just fine. I used to rake hay with a little Farm-All my great grandfather bought back in his prime, which is still going strong today, and I bought a used Cletrac from '45 to use around my woodlot. This creates three problems for the prospective electric tractor manufactures: not a lot of tractors are sold each year, so you're fighting for a chunk of a very slow-moving market; prospective buyers are going to be asking themselves "will this tractor outlive me?" so you need to have a compelling story on how those battery packs and motor bearings are going to last 50 years, or be easily replaceable; the technology is still rapidly developing, so you also need to explain to the prospective buyer why it's is worth buying an electric tractor now, instead of waiting 10 years to buy a more mature electric tractor.

jcranmer 8y ago
> I would guess the average farm tractor in the fields today in the US is 20-30 years old. It's actually surprisingly hard to find hard numbers on this topic, but the numbers I've seen have generally suggested that the average age is more like 10-20 years old. The hard numbers I've seen do say that about 10-20% of tractors are less than 5 years old. Realistically, the difficult part of electric tractors isn't the mileage but rather the fact that you're consuming far more power per mile. You're looking at measuring fuel consumption of around 10 gallons an hour, instead of about 1.5 gallons an hour for a car. Also, you're going to want to work the tractor for as much sunlight as you can muster, and you want to charge back up only overnight. So you'd want an equivalent not of a 200 mile range car but more like a 2500 mile range car, that can fully charge overnight.