40 ms·
Wild bidding wars erupt at used-tractor auctions across the U.S.
- gremloni 5y agoMahindra tractors from India are used all over the Midwest. I can see why- they’re solid but can still be fixed by a farmer.
- tomc1985 5y agoInteresting... I remember encountering Mahindra vehicles in South America and wondered why I they didn't seem to be in the 'States at all
- HeyLaughingBoy 5y agoI've never seen one in the flesh but they advertise on RFDTV (https://www.rfdtv.com/ https://www.rfdtv.com/) all the time.
- SQL2219 5y agoCoupled with right to repair issues, farmers are really in a bad spot.
- toomuchtodo 5y agoFarmers need a coop that designs and builds farm equipment to avoid legacy manufacturer rent seeking. Edit: open source hardware design and fabrication should be a part of 4-H programs, lots of overlap with maker/hacker spaces imho
- daniel-cussen 5y agoBuy tractors from Belarus. They are nearly completely analog. What few plastic parts there are haven't been minimized. And if it's anything like it used to be in the Soviet Union, you get instructions on how to make the replacement parts yourself in the manual.
- wwweston 5y agoWhere can I learn more about the soviet culture around industrial equipment that you’re describing?
- daniel-cussen 5y agoI talked to people who emigrated to Cuba for around a decade. And it's not comfortable equipment, like it's lacking all kinds of "features" that American equipment has, and that are actually nice, but that never got incorporated into the design. So I'm reading up about it but remote controls were never a big thing, it was not like in America where they were an obvious part of the television, in the Bloc you had to manipulate the knobs mounted on the device, and that meant getting up every time. It was all about the basic bottom line functionality. So I hear that in Cuba the Soviet air conditioning is basic and brutal, for better and for worse. Apparently most Soviet electronics sacrifice efficiency (energy efficiency, and light weight, and economizing materials) for effectiveness. There is a reason for this: under Socialism, capital goods were always short, but they had to be available. Demanding an air conditioning was basically done as a political favor, and the economics weren't good. Therefore what the factory wanted, really really wanted, was for the customer to take his air conditioning or tractor and never come back. No planned obsolescence, repeat customers were the bane of their existence. So they made them last.
- kevin_thibedeau 5y agoRemote controls were a niche novelty until the 80's. Everyone got up to change the channel unless you had an expensive set using chimes or a wired control box.
- pessimizer 5y agoI'm pretty sure 4-H relies on corporate sponsors.
- myself248 5y agoI got tapped by 4H to judge a computers/electronics design event a few years ago. My background is in hackerspaces and OSHW, and the overlap with what the kids were building was staggering. It's been a while and I'm curious what they're up to lately.
- tomc1985 5y agoWould it be possible to source designs from expired patents?
- toomuchtodo 5y agoCan’t see why not. I’d also imagine patenting new technology and allowing open access would also be possible.
- ren_engineer 5y agoproblem is that many of the corporate farms are owned by hedge funds who are also invested in BigAg companies, so they don't really care about right to repair. Hedge funds are also jacking up land prices because they have access to near zero interest loans for land
- shmageggy 5y agoGot any links where we can read about this? Shit like this is the root of all evil
- noefingway 5y agohttps://thecounter.org/who-really-owns-american-farmland https://thecounter.org/who-really-owns-american-farmland https://www.motherjones.com/food/2021/05/bill-melinda-gates-farmland-wealth-cascade-young-farmers-priced-out/ https://www.motherjones.com/food/2021/05/bill-melinda-gates-... where I farm our (60 miles from DC and Baltimore) not very productive red clay is going for top dollar and not to farmers. Not necessarily hedge funds, but high income earners buying up property for investment.
- etempleton 5y agoI am familiar with this area and soil type and I am always shocked farming is viable at all. Most grass doesn’t even seem to grow well unless you put a heavy layer of topsoil down.
- loonster 5y agoSounds very similar to McDonald's Ice Cream machines.
- h2odragon 5y agoOld iron is better built, less "electronic", and far easier to understand the designs and fabricate parts yourself. As well as cheaper to purchase. Folks I worked with in the 80s were using Michigan dirt moving equipment from the 60s [1], and a quick look shows there's still similar machines being traded [2]. The market for tractors is far bigger than specialized construction equipment, but all the same factors apply. The bigger units, say 75HP and up, counted as "construction equipment" for us, certainly. Today's farms are bigger and today's farmers have little need for smaller machines. [1] https://www.constructionequipment.com/michigan-elevating-scraper https://www.constructionequipment.com/michigan-elevating-scr... [2] https://www.machinerytrader.com/listings/for-sale/michigan/scrapers/1054 https://www.machinerytrader.com/listings/for-sale/michigan/s...
- universa1 5y agoHmm, early 90s "we" already had about 180hp... Nowadays more like 300 to 400 for a tractor, and more for caterpillar like stuff... With the electronics obviously being a double edged sword... You kinda need them to efficiently use those big machines... The smaller stuff is still around, but from my experience mostly for "hobby" farmers in Germany :-)
- jasode 5y ago>Old iron is better built, less "electronic", and far easier to understand the designs and fabricate parts yourself. As well as cheaper to purchase. I thought that big farms take advantage of newer tech on tractors using GPS RTK for sub-inch accuracy and increased productivity? Therefore, depending on the workload, the decades-old "cheaper" tractor can turn out to be more costly because the farm's yield isn't keeping up with competitors. It seems like a tradeoff between old & new.
- julianlam 5y agoI believe the argument is that these new tractors are not repairable by yourself, leading to expensive repair and / or replacement cost
- 5y ago
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mrfusion 5y agoWe need an open source tractor. Who’s with me! It doesn’t even have to be great. Just minimum viable product and let iterations improve it. Maybe a billionaire would fund kicking this off?
- rascul 5y agoThere was one on HN about a month ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28827785 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28827785
- carbocation 5y agoCheck out https://opensourceecology.dozuki.com/c/LifeTrac https://opensourceecology.dozuki.com/c/LifeTrac
- JohnJamesRambo 5y agoThe old ones are about as open source as you can get haha. I can see everything on my Mom and Dad’s old Massey Ferguson tractors and every single part is available online from a plethora of vendors since there really aren’t that many parts.
- markdown 5y agoExcept they don't make those any more, do they? Maybe some of the low-end Mahindra models will do. No fancy electronics, ease to maintain, etc.
- rzzzt 5y agoWould three wheels be enough?
- webmaven 5y ago> Would three wheels be enough? Potentially, but there are a number of issues to overcome, such as: More weight on each wheel compresses the soil more. This is possibly alleviated by the 3rd wheel not being in line with the other two, or that might make the problem worse, I'm not sure. Steering, handling, tipping. With a triangular wheel base, the tractor will seem more top heavy for any given size. This is less of a problem than it would be for eg. an SUV, but it is still a problem. Widening the footprint overcomes this but introduces transportation and parking problems, not to mention having to reconsider spacing of row crops etc. Overcoming that is possible by making the whole thing an articulated tripod that can adjust the wheelbase at need (and incidentally maneuver in any direction), but the flexibility gained comes at the cost of quite a bit more complexity that is unlikely to be worth it for farming equipment (construction equipment might be a different matter, but I wouldn't bet on it).
- bunabhucan 5y agohttps://archive.ph/8ZKDl https://archive.ph/8ZKDl
- michaelcampbell 5y agoIf I'm reading the graph right, this is about the same prices as 2008-2013? So although the prices have been lower between then and now, it's suddenly a crisis when prices are what they were 7-12 years ago?
- randomdata 5y agoThey were writing the same story in 2008-2013. Commodity prices are back to 2008-2013 levels, so people are spending their money like they did back then. That's farming.
- ilamont 5y agoIf right-to-repair and ease of maintenance are such huge issues for farmers, why doesn't some up-and-coming manufacturer fill this niche?
- Osiris 5y ago1. Capital requirements 2. Patents
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dehrmann 5y agoIf people are buying up used tractors, I'd be surprised they'd be that disappointed with 20-year-old (i.e., all patents have expired) tractor tech.
- structural 5y agoThey do! They make parts for old tractors (really, old tractor chassis once everything else has been replaced a few times). As far as why doesn't a new tractor manufacturer start up, they have to compete with a few things: first, the market for old tractors and parts (if they are repairable basically forever and the amount of land used by agriculture isn't changing, this is not a growth market). Worse, it's much more difficult to design a small engine for sale that is both reliable and will pass current environmental regulations. This is a major barrier to entry that didn't exist decades ago. So if you're a startup in the ag space, it makes eminently more sense to make small parts for someone else's platform, which is why you see companies doing things like deploying GPS, cameras, lidar, datalogging systems. There, the market opportunity is "all tractors could benefit from this", the competition is initially "other small companies", the exit strategy is "get purchased by a large manufacturer who would rather buy than develop the tech themselves", and the regulatory environment is much more friendly.
- R0b0t1 5y agoDoes farm equipment need to pass environmental regulations? I didn't think it did. If it does I doubt there will ever be a startup in this area.
- dzdt 5y agoThere are two kinds of optimum strategies for farmers, and there has been a long term shift from one to the other. The older strategy is for a farm to be no bigger than a single family can handle, and to be as self-sufficient as possible. Here equipment is run as close to breaking down as it can be without actually being broken down. A tractor would be used <30 days a year (planting, fertilizing, weeding, harvest) and sit idle otherwise. It doesn't make sense to pay for a super-expensive machine to sit idle. The optimum is lowest cost to purchase, lowest cost to repair, cheapest option that can get the job done. A farmer builds a collection of nearly-broken down machines over years to have backup options if one isn't working when needed. The other optimum is to have the largest, most effective, most efficient machines and use them enough to justify it. This makes sense at the industrial farming scale or as a contracting business where the equipment is owned by someone who does contract jobs for many smaller farmers. For this case the tractor needs to be running and making money as many days a year as it can; any down time is money lost. The shift over years has been that the second strategy produces more crops with lower expenses than the first, and is taking over to the extent it is almost impossible to run a small farm without going bankrupt.
- structural 5y agoThis is absolutely true. A related trend is that many family-owned farms are no longer operated by the family: they own the land and lease the farming rights to an industrial-scale operation. The difference in efficiency means that the large operator can pay almost as much for the lease as the individual farming family would realize in profit if they worked the land themselves and still have a viable business.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- h2odragon 5y agoWell observed. My experiences include a lot of farms that operated with big yards of scrap iron; were always repairing / rebuilding something, and did contract construction work to keep the machines running when they weren't using them for their own concerns. There's very few operations running that way anymore, the "odd construction contract" market for them dried up before and faster than the farming side of those operations. USDA Soil Conservation flood control projects used to be a large source of work there.
- giantg2 5y agoThere will be a lot of demand for less electronic cars too. Once the mandatory intoxication and automatic braking takes effect in 2026, demand for older cars will go up.
- errcorrectcode 5y agoBelarus has problems right now, but US farmers on the side of R2R have been buying old John Deere tractors as in the article and modern ones from more repairable vendors like Minsk Tractor Works.
- SQL2219 5y agoLamborghini still makes tractors https://www.lamborghini-tractors.com/it-it/ https://www.lamborghini-tractors.com/it-it/
- monksy 5y agoThey won't fit in your bar like a massy will.
- SyzygistSix 5y agoWay cooler to drive to school on tractor day though.
- throwawaymanbot 5y agoIf ever there was a rebuttal of a business model… share holders should pay attention.
- markdown 5y agoAnyone fascinated by this should subscribe to the "Just a few acres farm" channel on youtube. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkOTo20XS1LL95g2p6CcE3A?view_as=subscriber https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkOTo20XS1LL95g2p6CcE3A?vie...
- anonu 5y agoReminds me of NPR Planet Money's recent 2016 rerun on the subject: https://www.npr.org/2021/11/12/1055421103/auction-fever-classic https://www.npr.org/2021/11/12/1055421103/auction-fever-clas...