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As someone with a foot in both worlds, I have been in tech for 30+ years and we also own a small cattle farm (can't even call it a ranch), there is a staggering

As someone with a foot in both worlds, I have been in tech for 30+ years and we also own a small cattle farm (can't even call it a ranch), there is a staggering amount of distrust in technology of any kind in the ag world. Every new piece of tech comes saddled with some license, or dealer only issue, or the old tractor/equipment could break down and I could fix it in the field on my own in a few hours, vs my new equipment broke down and now I have to wait for some service tech (there are never enough when you need them) to come out and reset some computer or replace a piece of software/tech at a ridiculous cost. And I can't work on it on my own. Add to that, many farmers have been farming the same piece of ground for generations and they know everything they need to know about their land to at least break even most years and no piece of tech or software will improve those numbers enough for them to justify the cost/risk or the developers to justify the minimal profit growth.

prottog 4y ago
I hear the same about new tech-enabled equipment. I've always been curious, is there a market for continuing production of old-school, simple tractors and the like? Or is it one of those things that people complain about a lot but won't actually spend their own money to buy dumb equipment that may be less convenient or productive?
- mitthrowaway2 4y ago
  I'm more curious about why there isn't a market to offer what farmers want. Why not make modern, serviceable equipment with open code and published APIs and schematics? This just screams "market failure" to me.
  - SteveGerencser 4y ago
    My primary tractor is 4 years old and it has been in the shop more often than my 35 year old tractor. Most of us, especially the smaller guys, run equipment until it is quite literally gone. The biggest issue that bringing new equipment to market is incredibly expensive and you are competing with all of the green, red and blue (and now orange) guys that have been building equipment for generations. The new issue is looking for a revenue stream for the manufacturers. My Case while not on a service contract, has very few owner servicable parts to it. My '94 Kubota still does the job but Kubota makes about $200/ year on me at most since I can fix everything on it myself. It is by no means a market failure, the market is working exactly as it's supposed to. It's just that people think that the market is there for the farmers when it's really there for the equipment and inputs manufacturers.
    - ecshafer 4y ago
      I am not in manufacturing or anything. But I really think there could be a market out there for No-Frills appliances and equipment. Tractors that are just a tractor that work well and easily serviceable, long tail money made on replacement parts. Expand this to Refrigerators, Washers / Dryers, etc. So many products are made worse but cheaper, and have unused extra features that most people do not actually want. A big part of this I think is using electronic components and no chips / pcb, so you don't need to have specialized skills to repair and service.
      - diordiderot 4y ago
        Seems like something the Soviets would have done. E.g The Lada, Combine, T42, and Mig 17 all being designed knowing they would have to use of the shelf "Soviet standard spring #2"
  - __d 4y ago
    Caveat: this is totally pub talk level speculation, read at your own risk. There's a bunch of stories about how pissed the users of farm equipment are with everything being controlled by computers that are totally locked down to the manufacturer. They're the kind of "easy agreement" story that flourishes. I don't doubt that they're true. What I suspect is that this segment of the market is too small and too conservative to support a new manufacturer. The end result being not enough sales. If you're buying a product that lasts 30+ years, and there's relatively little follow-on revenue after the initial purchase, then the market needs to be pretty big to support a manufacturer. And if you're new to the game, who's going to trust you for a 30+ year product life, when you've got no track record? I'd love to see someone try though: you could try to promote the openness of the system as a counter to the "untrusted manufacturer", I suppose. Meanwhile, "big Ag" is perfectly fine with an equipment-as-a-service model, since it gets capital costs off their balance sheets, and manufacturers are happy to play along, because they can get a much simpler and more consistent revenue model?
LAC-Tech 4y ago
Question - how well known is US Cattle Trace? (Industry lead cattle identification scheme, for traceability). I followed it with interest - they had leap-frogged the state mandated scheme in AU and NZ by pushing UHF RFIDs instead of the LF ones we're stuck with down under - but it's hard to tell if most US cattle farmers have even heard of it.
- SteveGerencser 4y ago
  Cattle Trace is great for people with 10s of thousands of acres to manage. But that's not all that many cattle operations in the grand scheme of things. Most of us are small operations that don't interact with major processing plants and so on. We all know when someone has a sick cow and we all talk to each other. I was part of a pilot program using drones and RFIDs in Brazil some 10 or 15 years ago. It was cool, but the ranchers still ended up having to go out and put eyes on cows when some went missing or died so it didn't really solve a problem, just narrowed down the area a bit. I have a small drone here that I use so I can sit on the deck and still check water tanks and cows, or look for babies so I don't have to go out in the mud. But I don't know anyone else in 20 miles of me that does that.
  - malandrew 4y ago
    I assume FAA Part 107, the basic license you need as a drone operator, wouldn't fully allow you to do what you're doing in the US at least. You're using the drone to go check on things you can't see from home. If you're lucky you'll be able to maintain visual contact with the drone, but you'd still need to go through the trouble to get a license. This is a shame really because it really sounds like a pretty good use case that would be easy to adopt if you could just go down to some farm supply company and pickup a drone and be flying it over your farm the same day. Instead you end up having to figure out licensing requirements and worrying about the restrictions when you don't really want to deal with interpreting and understanding FAA regulations and you shouldn't really have to if you're using the tech over your own land in a rural setting. Would be cool if one day you could buy a Matterport or Leica Disto equipped LIDAR photo scanner (like Fixar or Wingtra) to survey the entire property based on GIS tax parcel data and then in the software you could select things to photograph on a regular schedule and all you'd have to do is look through the photos each day. Eventually machine learning could be used on the photos and you'd be able to have something like pagerduty for agtech as someone mentioned elsewhere to tell you where to focus your time. Not sure how well this would work with some livestock since I can't imagine they would like drones buzzing about. That said, I've got no ag experience so not really sure how much labor this really saves. Just cool to think about.
hinkley 4y ago
I’ve seen the tech distrust with landscapers (who were also permaculture enthusiasts, but I’m not sure what that does to the Venn Diagram). And protest all you want, but this is a group that is exquisitely sensitive to UX concerns and we are barely adequate at managing UX for moderately tech savvy people, let alone technophobes. The Hands in Soil community needs an Apple serving their needs, but as you say they can’t afford premium products, so they will continue to be underserved until there’s a glut of empathy, and… well, don’t hold your breath. It seems like the likely route is a combination of adaptation of Open Source and some amount of more humane freemium model than currently exists. What’s the Open Source Equipment community been up to lately? That seemed like a promising direction but I haven’t heard a peep in a long time.

prottog 4y ago

I hear the same about new tech-enabled equipment. I've always been curious, is there a market for continuing production of old-school, simple tractors and the like? Or is it one of those things that people complain about a lot but won't actually spend their own money to buy dumb equipment that may be less convenient or productive?

mitthrowaway2 4y ago
I'm more curious about why there isn't a market to offer what farmers want. Why not make modern, serviceable equipment with open code and published APIs and schematics? This just screams "market failure" to me.
- SteveGerencser 4y ago
  My primary tractor is 4 years old and it has been in the shop more often than my 35 year old tractor. Most of us, especially the smaller guys, run equipment until it is quite literally gone. The biggest issue that bringing new equipment to market is incredibly expensive and you are competing with all of the green, red and blue (and now orange) guys that have been building equipment for generations. The new issue is looking for a revenue stream for the manufacturers. My Case while not on a service contract, has very few owner servicable parts to it. My '94 Kubota still does the job but Kubota makes about $200/ year on me at most since I can fix everything on it myself. It is by no means a market failure, the market is working exactly as it's supposed to. It's just that people think that the market is there for the farmers when it's really there for the equipment and inputs manufacturers.
  - ecshafer 4y ago
    I am not in manufacturing or anything. But I really think there could be a market out there for No-Frills appliances and equipment. Tractors that are just a tractor that work well and easily serviceable, long tail money made on replacement parts. Expand this to Refrigerators, Washers / Dryers, etc. So many products are made worse but cheaper, and have unused extra features that most people do not actually want. A big part of this I think is using electronic components and no chips / pcb, so you don't need to have specialized skills to repair and service.
    - diordiderot 4y ago
      Seems like something the Soviets would have done. E.g The Lada, Combine, T42, and Mig 17 all being designed knowing they would have to use of the shelf "Soviet standard spring #2"
- __d 4y ago
  Caveat: this is totally pub talk level speculation, read at your own risk. There's a bunch of stories about how pissed the users of farm equipment are with everything being controlled by computers that are totally locked down to the manufacturer. They're the kind of "easy agreement" story that flourishes. I don't doubt that they're true. What I suspect is that this segment of the market is too small and too conservative to support a new manufacturer. The end result being not enough sales. If you're buying a product that lasts 30+ years, and there's relatively little follow-on revenue after the initial purchase, then the market needs to be pretty big to support a manufacturer. And if you're new to the game, who's going to trust you for a 30+ year product life, when you've got no track record? I'd love to see someone try though: you could try to promote the openness of the system as a counter to the "untrusted manufacturer", I suppose. Meanwhile, "big Ag" is perfectly fine with an equipment-as-a-service model, since it gets capital costs off their balance sheets, and manufacturers are happy to play along, because they can get a much simpler and more consistent revenue model?

LAC-Tech 4y ago

Question - how well known is US Cattle Trace? (Industry lead cattle identification scheme, for traceability). I followed it with interest - they had leap-frogged the state mandated scheme in AU and NZ by pushing UHF RFIDs instead of the LF ones we're stuck with down under - but it's hard to tell if most US cattle farmers have even heard of it.

SteveGerencser 4y ago
Cattle Trace is great for people with 10s of thousands of acres to manage. But that's not all that many cattle operations in the grand scheme of things. Most of us are small operations that don't interact with major processing plants and so on. We all know when someone has a sick cow and we all talk to each other. I was part of a pilot program using drones and RFIDs in Brazil some 10 or 15 years ago. It was cool, but the ranchers still ended up having to go out and put eyes on cows when some went missing or died so it didn't really solve a problem, just narrowed down the area a bit. I have a small drone here that I use so I can sit on the deck and still check water tanks and cows, or look for babies so I don't have to go out in the mud. But I don't know anyone else in 20 miles of me that does that.
- malandrew 4y ago
  I assume FAA Part 107, the basic license you need as a drone operator, wouldn't fully allow you to do what you're doing in the US at least. You're using the drone to go check on things you can't see from home. If you're lucky you'll be able to maintain visual contact with the drone, but you'd still need to go through the trouble to get a license. This is a shame really because it really sounds like a pretty good use case that would be easy to adopt if you could just go down to some farm supply company and pickup a drone and be flying it over your farm the same day. Instead you end up having to figure out licensing requirements and worrying about the restrictions when you don't really want to deal with interpreting and understanding FAA regulations and you shouldn't really have to if you're using the tech over your own land in a rural setting. Would be cool if one day you could buy a Matterport or Leica Disto equipped LIDAR photo scanner (like Fixar or Wingtra) to survey the entire property based on GIS tax parcel data and then in the software you could select things to photograph on a regular schedule and all you'd have to do is look through the photos each day. Eventually machine learning could be used on the photos and you'd be able to have something like pagerduty for agtech as someone mentioned elsewhere to tell you where to focus your time. Not sure how well this would work with some livestock since I can't imagine they would like drones buzzing about. That said, I've got no ag experience so not really sure how much labor this really saves. Just cool to think about.

hinkley 4y ago

I’ve seen the tech distrust with landscapers (who were also permaculture enthusiasts, but I’m not sure what that does to the Venn Diagram). And protest all you want, but this is a group that is exquisitely sensitive to UX concerns and we are barely adequate at managing UX for moderately tech savvy people, let alone technophobes. The Hands in Soil community needs an Apple serving their needs, but as you say they can’t afford premium products, so they will continue to be underserved until there’s a glut of empathy, and… well, don’t hold your breath. It seems like the likely route is a combination of adaptation of Open Source and some amount of more humane freemium model than currently exists. What’s the Open Source Equipment community been up to lately? That seemed like a promising direction but I haven’t heard a peep in a long time.