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What many people may not realize is just how long-lived a lot of farm equipment is. There will be tractors out there still working that are 75 years old and jus

• toomanybeersies 7y ago
  I've seen and used farm equipment and machine tools (lathes, mills, etc.) from the 40's and 50's that are still in good serviceable condition. I think it's been a long time since farmers cultivated their own seed though, even before roundup-resistant and GM crops were commonplace. It's a very different science and skill to growing crops.
  • tapvt 7y ago
    I still run a 1949 Ford 8N tractor. No heroic measures needed to keep it going. Just routine maintenance.
    • olivermarks 7y ago
      Designed to last forever if maintained properly..
      • OldManAndTheCpp 7y ago
        A cool thing I learned from watching AvE's channel is that bearing surfaces are meant to last forever if properly lubricated. The oil in them is meant to take all the load, and the metal surfaces should never touch. If you don't replace the oil regularly, or let it get so hot it flows out of the journal, the bearing will wear and need replacing. The design is meant to last a really long time if properly serviced and not overloaded though. (I'd love to hear from a MechE if I misunderstood, I'm just a dumb programmer who watches YouTube).
        • anfilt 7y ago
          Thats pretty much right. Excluding how some types of bushings work, and other similar bearing surfaces. Side note. There also air bearings which are also pretty awesome but require tight machining tolerances. They are used in the semiconductor industry for some things. Mainly because you dont want lubricant to dirty the enviroment, but the tighter tolerances also help ensure a spindle/shaft dont wobble as much.
          • tempestn 7y ago
            I assume this means it's airtight and instead of a cushion of oil, it uses a cushion of (presumably compressed) air?
            • anfilt 7y ago
              Yea pretty much. This video starts off with a nice demo of the concept. https://youtu.be/sFrVdoOhu1Q https://youtu.be/sFrVdoOhu1Q
              • tempestn 7y ago
                Great, thank you. As an aside, I love listening to people with accents explain things, so the video was doubly enjoyable! Edit some time later: And then perhaps I'll go down an hours-long rabbit hole watching all his videos and learning a ton about machining...
                • pathseeker 7y ago
                  >I love listening to people with accents explain things Are there people without accents that explain things? Because that would be a video I want to see.
                  • wongarsu 7y ago
                    I suppose by "without accent" you mean "with General American accent"? German or French can be spoken without accent, but English doesn't have one universally agreed "standard accent". What's without accent to the American is just an American accent to everyone else.
    • bregma 7y ago
      You can still buy 9Ns from the 1930s around where I live. Also, you can still buy new parts from after-market suppliers. They might not handle 16-bottom plows or even a round baler but they're still damn good machines for basic work and they're simple enough to maintain that even I could do it.
    • AngryData 7y ago
      I got a '56 Farmall 230. Not a big tractor, but it can do anything I need for myself, primarily used to feed my two cows which I grow for meat, but also for hauling wood out of the woods for heating my house. Very little maintenance really needed. Just two months ago I even got fancy and installed an electric starter! A fine addition when you need to plow the driveway in the winter and don't feel like doing a full body workout just to get the thing started.
  • mattgrice 7y ago
    Farmers definitely still cultivate their own seed, even in the West, for cereal crops like wheat, oats, rye, and rice where hybrid and GMO variants do not exist or are not competitive. For these crops, it's not a very different skill. You just have to clean the seed and ideally test germination rates, though many farmers do not even do that.
  • dsfyu404ed 7y ago
    Serviceable does not imply profitable (though profitable implies serviceable). As much as I love lugging around rotary tables and indexing heads a machine shop that makes triple digit part quantities would be stupid to run old machines (too many man hours per part) and a repair machine shop would be stupid to finance a new 5-axis. Equipment in most industries moves from low margin, high duty cycle operators to operators with either higher margins and/or lower duty cycles.
    • AngryData 7y ago
      Yeah but it is great equipment to have in a garage ready to go all around the country. So much shit is thrown away because you need some new little piece machined or repaired that you can't buy. It's not worth it to a machining business, but to some individual at home with a waiting machine and time on their hands? They could make a good deal making simple replacements pieces or parts for things.
  • AngryData 7y ago
    It is not always because farmers couldn't produce their own seed, but it is also because growing for viable seeds has a bit different finishing procedure as growing food stuff. You might end up with a loss of seed viability because your primary effort is based on selling food for the highest profit and not storing viable seed in the most pristine way. So naturally a local farm community can evolve into a large number of food producers who don't store their own seeds, and a smaller variety of seed farmers to supply the other farmers with crop seed every year.
• closetohome 7y ago
  The search for an ongoing revenue stream is one of the most destructive forces in the tech industry. It leads to some very customer-hostile experiences.
  • Semiapies 7y ago
    The problem is that not having a revenue stream is one of the most destructive forces to tech (or other) companies, and people like to keep their jobs.
    • cletus 7y ago
      You make a thing. You sell your thing. You sell it for more than it cost to make it. That's your revenue stream. But that's not enough (apparently) hence locking down repairs and other anti-end user behaviour.
      • OldManAndTheCpp 7y ago
        Now you've shipped your thing that lasts forever. If it's a mechanical object, maybe you can get continuing revenue from spare parts, but those will bring in less than the original purchase. Worst case, someone brings up a factory copying your part design (without doing any engineering work on them, just copies them exactly), and undercuts you. If you sell software, do you let the old stuff atrophy and become insecure? If not, you are spending salaries on maintenance without any associated revenue. As time goes on, the maintenance costs increase without bringing in another cent.
        • cletus 7y ago
          On the software front, this is why I, personally, am a fan of the subscription model... if done right. And almost no one does it right. The shining example for actually doing it right is Jetbrains. There is a schedule for new releases they keep to. You get loyalty discounts for long term subscriptions and ending a subscription entitles you to a version that is ~1 year old in perpetuity. Plus the prices are (IMHO) entirely reasonable. Almost no one else does this. Other companies will, say, take the MSRP of the software package, divide it by 12 and give you that as the monthly price with a minimum contract period of 12 months. They'll also restrict you to choose platform when you purchase and may limit the number of installs rather than concurrent users.
• SquareWheel 7y ago
  Your comment on GM crops is technically correct but also misleading. Most crops are already grown from hybrid seeds. For reasons of genetics, hybrid seeds cannot be reused in the next season. It's also quite a time-consuming process to reuse seeds, which makes the whole process less cost effective anyway. GM crops have not had a significant effect on this issue.
  • h0l0cube 7y ago
    > For reasons of genetics, hybrid seeds cannot be reused in the next season. Can you provide supporting evidence/materials to back this claim?
    • metiscus 7y ago
      Depending on the plant, you'll get either of the two species used to make the hybrid instead of the hybrid itself.
      • h0l0cube 7y ago
        Thank you, and excuse my naivete here. So what makes the hybrid route the optimal way to produce these GM plants, rather than cross-breeding in a way that survives reproduction? Do we know GM crops to always be hybrids of this nature?
        • LennyWhiteJr 7y ago
          Hybrid vigor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterosis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterosis It lets you create a sort of super crop... but it only works for a single generation. ‾\_(ツ)_/‾
        • galangalalgol 7y ago
          Also, as someone said above, this predates GM, its unrelated.
          • deleted 7y ago
• dejv 7y ago
  Yeah, I do own 30 years old tractor and it work just fine as is very simple machine and there are very few things that could break. This is why machines of this grade just keep their price: after initial drop the price just stays the same and demand is strong. I can see tractors from 70s changing hands on regular basis
• touristtam 7y ago
  Regarding the reuse of previous harvest's seed, the lobbying of Monsanto and Co have also managed to make it illegal until recently.
• Melting_Harps 7y ago
  > What many people may not realize is just how long-lived a lot of farm equipment is. There will be tractors out there still working that are 75 years old and just keep getting repaired. I'm going to not try and not infer anything from your handle, but how exactly do you know this? I personally worked on and with hose 50-25 year old tractors (Renault, Ferrari, Fiat, Massey-Fergueson, Case, Ford) in my apprenticeship in Europe and I can tell you that finding parts for a lot of those were half the problem. So unless you had an in with the few shops that kept them running like they do in Cuba with GM and the like, you were SOL. Anecdote: In England we had to drop a transmission in the middle of harvest on a 30/40 year old Case and all the spares available after several hours of calls and online searches would have to come in from former yugoslavia nations (Macedonia and Montenegro from what I recall) that had trans from tractors that 'ran when last parked' (before the break up in the 90s?) and couldn't come in by rail/air shipment in 2014 as it was the rainiest year in recorded History and brought everything to halt. So we gathered the village and did the harvest by hand, our yield wasn't great but it wasn't a total loss as it could have been had we waited for that trans to come in. But the following season they rented and hired a crew with a massive New Holland and John Deere fleet to help them out instead of buying. What I guess I'm alluding to is that in the case with farming, especially at the small farm (sub 50 hectare) owning anything but a small tractor for daily tasks is unnecessary, as the cost and maintenance is way out of reach for most people's budget or even needs. Flash-forward to 2013 in Colorado where the first legal hemp harvest took place, and you'd see a large number of farmers with more requests than they can handle to rent out their combines (with crazy combinations) and haulers out in the fields. There will always be a 'steady stream' of purchases for tractors/combines etc... its just that they got used to the crony-capitalist profits from rebuilding Iraq, Afghanistan after the invasion etc... and forgot their projected profits should be calculated withing the confines of the production of mainly domestic demand. As a former farmer, Biodynamic no less, I want Ag to go as automated as it can, but I can't shed a single tear for those manufactures who refuse to see why having proprietary blocks on their products will drive farmers away. Hopefully this spurs on a lot of the talent in FAANG to do something actually productive and necessary in Society and help an opensource hardware movement in Ag.
• dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  >There will be tractors out there still working that are 75 years old and just keep getting repaired. This is a massive over-generalization. Those tractors are not being used to farm low margin commodities (which are the people most new tractors are sold to). You can't operate a soy/corn/whatever farm without equipment that has a $/results number similar to everyone else in your market (who are also trying to reduce costs). There's a reason you don't see a lot of combines from the 70s still in operation whereas skidders basically never get replaced until they're broken in half. I know it's handwavy but basically every aspect of running a farm converts to money at the end of the day and depending the specifics of what you farm and where you farm it determine whether you have to keep up with the joneses or can run older equipment.
• kls 7y ago
  I grew up on a citrus farm and I can tell you CAT equipment makes Apple look like an open hardware platform. Parts where unavailable to non dealers they used patents to stop aftermarket and where hostile to hardware hackers that fixed flaws in their design. This was all while they where mechanical. I cannot imagine what it is like owning a CAT machine now that they are computerized. I know my grandfather tended to stick to Massey Ferguson and Minneapolis Molean's for that reason. We only bought CAT and Deere equipment if it was a specialty piece that could not be duplicated with an all purpose tractor like a MF or MM. Which is really CAT's bread and butter. They like the machinery that no one else produces and locking you in to support. They caught onto this long before the automotive and electronics world ever did. On seed stock it get's even worse, if you are next to a GM farm and get cross pollinated then your stock is tainted and you have to reseed again with clean seeds that will just get tainted in the next spawn. We did not have this problem with citrus because it is not grown from a seed, all citrus is root-stocked and then hybrid to make sweet citrus. I know it is an issue for corn and grain farmers who do not want to grow GMO crops.
  • magduf 7y ago
    >On seed stock it get's even worse, if you are next to a GM farm and get cross pollinated then your stock is tainted and you have to reseed again with clean seeds that will just get tainted in the next spawn. I see a simple solution here when some farmer gets stung by this: some company needs to make some really cheap GM seeds which exist only for the purpose of "accidentally" tainting the GM field next door, so that the owner of that field can get a dose of their own medicine.
    • dec0dedab0de 7y ago
      The GM Field wouldn't be collecting the seeds anyway.
  • MikeTheGreat 7y ago
    > On seed stock it get's even worse, if you are next to a GM > farm and get cross pollinated then your stock is tainted and > you have to reseed again with clean seeds that > will just get tainted in the next spawn. Genuine question: If your neighbor's seeds spread into your farm why do you have to reseed? Are you trying to avoid the cross pollination or are you required to do this by something/someone else?
• commandersaki 7y ago
  A "right to repair" is insufficient but a good start. As you say computers in vehicle are nothing more than holding consumers captive for a guaranteed revenue stream for the lifetime of a product. The first incident that got me thinking about this is Tivoization. The problem is getting much worse and regular consumers are unaware it is happening. As I said "right to repair" is a good right to fight for. We need a "right to own". I recognise and acknowledge there is significant overlap. This is why I would never buy a Tesla.