10 ms·

It really does beg the question, if JD is so bad why do people keep buying them? Perhaps RTR just isn't as important to people as the tech crowd thinks.

devwastaken 4y ago
Patents. Intellectual property. You cannot make a tractor without JD's blessing. We do not live in a free market where you can just "make your own" and sell it.
- osigurdson 4y ago
  Seriously? The patent on a basic / home-made tractor must have expired by now. I suspect finding a buyer (not to mention making it) would be more challenging that the legal issues.
ronsor 4y ago
Speaking generally and not just about RTR, people often recognize something is "wrong" and that they're negatively affected, but they also don't really understand what's going on, so they can't do much other than complain when they get screwed over.
inetknght 4y ago
> if JD is so bad why do people keep buying them Why do people keep buying Samsung or Apple when there are better products? They certainly don't respect the right to repair either. Likewise, people buy JD because it's a well-known brand. If you asked people what they wanted 100 years ago, they would say they wanted a faster horse. It's hard to advocate for something that people don't realize they don't have.
- tick_tock_tick 4y ago
  > Why do people keep buying Samsung or Apple when there are better products? Because most people don't care about the right to repair or are completely uniformed. Neither of which should apply to a professional farmer.
- WheatMillington 4y ago
  Farmers are pretty knowledgeable about the equipment they're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on. The idea they're just picking JD because of name recognition is insulting.
  - chasil 4y ago
    I understand that, when they work, the products are amazing, even up to the point that Deere can obtain satellite imagery of a farm and work it autonomously, without the owner of the equipment present. Many times, the products do not work, and repair is locked to approved equipment that is confirmed and authorized remotely - no authorization, no repair, no operational equipment. The last Defcon conference shattered the control that the corporation is able to exercise over this equipment, because of bad security design. There is a major effort to rethink (and improve) this control, but everything on the market now is irretrievably broken from the perspective of the embedded electronics preventing unauthorized repairs. There are other problems, one involving a fatality at a recent union strike, the GPL violations above, right to repair, and the (lack of) staff to correctly address said adversity. It will be interesting to see what transpires.
  - wander_homer 4y ago
    Maybe I'm just in my small bubble and/or the situation in Germany is quite different, but when I look at the farms in the area I grew up in, including my father's farm, then most of them are absolutely loyal to whatever brand their family has been using for centuries. My father didn't even test or look at others brands when he bought his tractors.
    - jocaal 4y ago
      Yeah, look at the toyota vs ford debates for trucks, these people are extremely brand loyal
- gonehome 4y ago
  > Why do people keep buying Samsung or Apple when there are better products? Because there aren’t better products? Knowing nothing, I’d suspect the same of JD.
- MikusR 4y ago
  There is a better phone with stylus than the one Samsung makes?
hajile 4y ago
Few alternatives (when looking for equipment beyond a basic tractor) and most are just as bad.
npteljes 4y ago
Buying something is a not a simple issue, there are multiple factors that go into the decision, and for many, buying something is not really a decision either, because the odds are stacked against them. Also, it might be that JD is not horrible to each buyer equally: some might not perceive these issues at all. And some might just treat it as a business, and write off the grievances as business expenses. They are okay as there are also other things to take care of. Amazon is also a company with many criticisms, and yet, they are very popular. And I'm sure the list goes on. So from an economic pov: it's a market failure. From an individual's pov: because purchase is complex. Regarding your last point: "Perhaps RTR just isn't as important to people as the tech crowd thinks." I agree, and still think RTR is very important. For a comparison, take any public health issue. Are, for example, unhealthy foods popular? Very much so. Is it still worth it for the people to regulate it? Absolutely. Issues such as this are not well served by treating it as a popularity contest, because if it would be up to the children, all of the meals would be candy. Experts, who have much deeper insights into the workings of their area can give much better advice.
- Groxx 4y ago
  It's pretty easy to end up in: 1) I have a farm. 2) I will lose millions a year if I don't have X. 3) X broke. 4) Only JD has anything that would prevent #2 (without collapsing the whole farm). Buying JD is... pretty reasonable in that scenario. It's one of the reasons captured markets are so bad, it lets companies get away with a lot of things they couldn't if the market were actually fair and competitive.
  - qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
    Sounds like a classic monopoly shake-down.
    - alexvoda 4y ago
      Of course, and it is long overdue in almost all domains. Corporations have used their power to influence the state and get away.
freedomben 4y ago
JD is still one of the best of the (horrible) options, and in some areas is the only option. Also, most of the people I have talked to about it had no idea how bad it was. They've been buying JD all their lives and some of those purchases stick around for decades, so many of them have other JD equipment that is older and much more friendly. They assume things are still the same.
mistrial9 4y ago
individual decision makers on farms are systematically replaced by corporate farming over decades; restricting sales to authorized dealers, and assigning those dealers exclusive territory, was done systematically for the last seventy years. If JD dismantles effective competition in the 1970s, who exactly is there to provide competitive alternatives? It is a "captured market" in the USA. "view from the City"
spenczar5 4y ago
Just as nobody was ever fired for buying IBM, nobody was ever fired for buying a Deere.
user3939382 4y ago
This translates to an absurd argument that anything large companies do is right because if they didn’t do right they wouldn’t be large. For example: Why do people keep buying BP gas after they were responsible for one of the biggest environmental disasters in history? Maybe people don’t care about the environment? The answer in all cases is that being a wealthy company with a lot of market penetration doesn’t mean your actions are ethically or morally right, or that your customers agree with them.
- sacrosancty 4y ago
  [dead]
CogitoCogito 4y ago
> if JD is so bad why do people keep buying them? I guess the logical conclusion is that a company can be "bad" and yet still have people buy from them. Edit: To be clear, I guess I'd just say your question is sort of illogical. I see no reason one should assume a company needs to be "good" for people to buy from it.
lyubalesya 4y ago
If JD is so great, why do people complain about them and lobby for laws against the worst of their behavior? If the Farm Bureau is so bad, why doesn't JD simply leave the US market, instead of corrupting that bureau to their own ends? If you're playing a game, and you think the only moves available are "buy" or "don't buy", while your opponent uses a plethora of other moves, you will lose, and lose bad.
kerkeslager 4y ago
Ah yes, as usual, HN provides the most sociopathic take possible within the first few comments.
- mardifoufs 4y ago
  On the other hand, calling people sociopathic (over a pretty open question) is totally normal and shows a very mentally stable outlook at life. Sociopathy is when an outside to the farming world wonders what value john deer actually provided to farmer if they seemingly overlook the massive caveats that we regularly hear about. Obviously.
  - kerkeslager 4y ago
    1. You'll note I didn't call him a sociopath. One does not have to be a sociopath to believe a sociopathic take. In this case, merely being deceived by anarcho-capitalist rhetoric explains why the person I'm responding to believes this. 2. The question was rhetorical. Nobody "wonders" anything in this conversation. 3. The extremist capitalist ideology espoused by many of HN's members is among the most harmful ideologies alive in our society today, and the mentally stable thing to do is treat it as the harmful ideology that it is. Consistently prioritizing corporate profits over basic human rights and decency is not healthy, and it's not healthy to treat it as if it were okay.
    - mardifoufs 4y ago
      I don't disagree about your last point, and I even agree that HN has some truly awful takes that can be almost 100% guaranteed to pop up whenever certain topics are discussed. It's just that I find myself to also ask the exact same question GP asked. I don't know anything about farming, or JD or even if JD has a market dominant position. And it's interesting to wonder what we, as mostly-tech-focused people here in HN, are missing. In the sense that, yes open source is great and being able to repair stuff is amazing. But farmers are probably really aware of the upsides of easy to repair hardware... so what are we missing? I just fundamentally tend to assume that people in other fields know a lot more about their stuff than I do, so it's important to ask what's the other side that we can't see here. So I didn't necessarily took the GP as being some sort of gotcha question in this context (even though I'm usually pretty good at picking that up)
tcmart14 4y ago
My understanding, most farmers are backed into a corner where there is not a viable option to go with someone else. JD has extensively made access to repair facilities convenient and sometimes for many farmers, it is the only repair center remotely. If they go with a tractor from a different brand and it does need to be taken to a repair facility, you may have to ship it or drive it a long way or wait for a tech travel to your farm. This might mean your tractor is out of service for weeks. But JD has repair centers all over and JD can turn your tractor around in 3 days or less. In highschool, I worked a couple seasons picking tobacco. Farmers love to be able to repair their tractors. Repair and maintenance work is something that can also give them something to do over the winter when they are not working the fields much if they limp along until then. Most farmers purchase them because as mentioned, there isn't really a reasonable alternative in the event it is something that actually does need to "go into the shop." I also would not be surprised if most of JD's sales were from corporate farms and smalls farmers are still using their grand daddy's tractor. The farm I worked on, the farmer was still using a 50 year old international harvester. Doing all of his own maintenance and repair work.
- jamesfinlayson 4y ago
  Yep - I know a pineapple farmer (who has a variety of new and old tractors of different brands) and in the extended stretches between planting and picking he repairs the older tractors (some are around 40 years old).
freeopinion 4y ago
As I write this you've been moderated into the grey zone. I think that means that a lot of people think that RTR is super important and you are wrong. But you can't be wrong because you didn't make a statement. You asked a question. And it is an important question. People assume your position on the question just because you asked it. This is a serious mistake. RTR fans cannot solve the problem until they can unravel the answers to this question. One obvious answer to the question is that there are very few alternatives to JD. How do we solve that? Well, lots and lots of money. How do we come up with lots of money? Um.. sell an alternative to JD? Ok, not practical on day one. Sell an alternative to Kubota? Hmmm... difficult. But that's probably where it needs to start. So, raise a lot of money to build an alternative to Kubota? Hmm.. if only there was some place where somebody could go where they gave away many millions of money to risky startups. I don't have millions of money, but I have approached a few efforts I hoped could go somewhere. No luck so far. The opportunity is there for the right somebody to run with. Perhaps starting with riding mowers could lead to something. It might take longer, but sooner started sooner done.
- wizzwizz4 4y ago
  > Hmm.. if only there was some place where somebody could go where they gave away many millions of money to risky startups. John Deere isn't evil because the people in charge decided, one day, to start twirling their moustaches. We can assume the issue is systematic. Would a startup be insulated from the same pressures and incentives that created – or permitted – John Deere? https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2014-01-23 https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2014-01-23
  - freeopinion 4y ago
    That is also an excellent and important question. Questions like that led to the GPL. They have led to other innovations as well. Yes, some people are always trying to figure a way around GPL and around every other well-intentioned thing. But still, BSD, MIT, MPL, and lots of other efforts have allowed the world to have and preserve some amazing things. And we need to keep asking those questions and keep coming up with spectacular answers. Every great answer allows us to iterate better and better on what this world can be. Every great answer starts with a great question.
Aunche 4y ago
Despite being downvoted, you're largely correct. John Deere's primary customer base are mega-farms who don't really mind treating tractors as a service. This does screw over smaller farmers though who are already struggling to compete.

devwastaken 4y ago

Patents. Intellectual property. You cannot make a tractor without JD's blessing. We do not live in a free market where you can just "make your own" and sell it.

osigurdson 4y ago
Seriously? The patent on a basic / home-made tractor must have expired by now. I suspect finding a buyer (not to mention making it) would be more challenging that the legal issues.

ronsor 4y ago

Speaking generally and not just about RTR, people often recognize something is "wrong" and that they're negatively affected, but they also don't really understand what's going on, so they can't do much other than complain when they get screwed over.

inetknght 4y ago

> if JD is so bad why do people keep buying them Why do people keep buying Samsung or Apple when there are better products? They certainly don't respect the right to repair either. Likewise, people buy JD because it's a well-known brand. If you asked people what they wanted 100 years ago, they would say they wanted a faster horse. It's hard to advocate for something that people don't realize they don't have.

tick_tock_tick 4y ago
> Why do people keep buying Samsung or Apple when there are better products? Because most people don't care about the right to repair or are completely uniformed. Neither of which should apply to a professional farmer.
WheatMillington 4y ago
Farmers are pretty knowledgeable about the equipment they're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on. The idea they're just picking JD because of name recognition is insulting.
- chasil 4y ago
  I understand that, when they work, the products are amazing, even up to the point that Deere can obtain satellite imagery of a farm and work it autonomously, without the owner of the equipment present. Many times, the products do not work, and repair is locked to approved equipment that is confirmed and authorized remotely - no authorization, no repair, no operational equipment. The last Defcon conference shattered the control that the corporation is able to exercise over this equipment, because of bad security design. There is a major effort to rethink (and improve) this control, but everything on the market now is irretrievably broken from the perspective of the embedded electronics preventing unauthorized repairs. There are other problems, one involving a fatality at a recent union strike, the GPL violations above, right to repair, and the (lack of) staff to correctly address said adversity. It will be interesting to see what transpires.
- wander_homer 4y ago
  Maybe I'm just in my small bubble and/or the situation in Germany is quite different, but when I look at the farms in the area I grew up in, including my father's farm, then most of them are absolutely loyal to whatever brand their family has been using for centuries. My father didn't even test or look at others brands when he bought his tractors.
  - jocaal 4y ago
    Yeah, look at the toyota vs ford debates for trucks, these people are extremely brand loyal
gonehome 4y ago
> Why do people keep buying Samsung or Apple when there are better products? Because there aren’t better products? Knowing nothing, I’d suspect the same of JD.
MikusR 4y ago
There is a better phone with stylus than the one Samsung makes?

hajile 4y ago

Few alternatives (when looking for equipment beyond a basic tractor) and most are just as bad.

npteljes 4y ago

Buying something is a not a simple issue, there are multiple factors that go into the decision, and for many, buying something is not really a decision either, because the odds are stacked against them. Also, it might be that JD is not horrible to each buyer equally: some might not perceive these issues at all. And some might just treat it as a business, and write off the grievances as business expenses. They are okay as there are also other things to take care of. Amazon is also a company with many criticisms, and yet, they are very popular. And I'm sure the list goes on. So from an economic pov: it's a market failure. From an individual's pov: because purchase is complex. Regarding your last point: "Perhaps RTR just isn't as important to people as the tech crowd thinks." I agree, and still think RTR is very important. For a comparison, take any public health issue. Are, for example, unhealthy foods popular? Very much so. Is it still worth it for the people to regulate it? Absolutely. Issues such as this are not well served by treating it as a popularity contest, because if it would be up to the children, all of the meals would be candy. Experts, who have much deeper insights into the workings of their area can give much better advice.

Groxx 4y ago
It's pretty easy to end up in: 1) I have a farm. 2) I will lose millions a year if I don't have X. 3) X broke. 4) Only JD has anything that would prevent #2 (without collapsing the whole farm). Buying JD is... pretty reasonable in that scenario. It's one of the reasons captured markets are so bad, it lets companies get away with a lot of things they couldn't if the market were actually fair and competitive.
- qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
  Sounds like a classic monopoly shake-down.
  - alexvoda 4y ago
    Of course, and it is long overdue in almost all domains. Corporations have used their power to influence the state and get away.

freedomben 4y ago

JD is still one of the best of the (horrible) options, and in some areas is the only option. Also, most of the people I have talked to about it had no idea how bad it was. They've been buying JD all their lives and some of those purchases stick around for decades, so many of them have other JD equipment that is older and much more friendly. They assume things are still the same.

mistrial9 4y ago

individual decision makers on farms are systematically replaced by corporate farming over decades; restricting sales to authorized dealers, and assigning those dealers exclusive territory, was done systematically for the last seventy years. If JD dismantles effective competition in the 1970s, who exactly is there to provide competitive alternatives? It is a "captured market" in the USA. "view from the City"

spenczar5 4y ago

Just as nobody was ever fired for buying IBM, nobody was ever fired for buying a Deere.

user3939382 4y ago

This translates to an absurd argument that anything large companies do is right because if they didn’t do right they wouldn’t be large. For example: Why do people keep buying BP gas after they were responsible for one of the biggest environmental disasters in history? Maybe people don’t care about the environment? The answer in all cases is that being a wealthy company with a lot of market penetration doesn’t mean your actions are ethically or morally right, or that your customers agree with them.

sacrosancty 4y ago
[dead]

CogitoCogito 4y ago

> if JD is so bad why do people keep buying them? I guess the logical conclusion is that a company can be "bad" and yet still have people buy from them. Edit: To be clear, I guess I'd just say your question is sort of illogical. I see no reason one should assume a company needs to be "good" for people to buy from it.

lyubalesya 4y ago

If JD is so great, why do people complain about them and lobby for laws against the worst of their behavior? If the Farm Bureau is so bad, why doesn't JD simply leave the US market, instead of corrupting that bureau to their own ends? If you're playing a game, and you think the only moves available are "buy" or "don't buy", while your opponent uses a plethora of other moves, you will lose, and lose bad.

kerkeslager 4y ago

Ah yes, as usual, HN provides the most sociopathic take possible within the first few comments.

mardifoufs 4y ago
On the other hand, calling people sociopathic (over a pretty open question) is totally normal and shows a very mentally stable outlook at life. Sociopathy is when an outside to the farming world wonders what value john deer actually provided to farmer if they seemingly overlook the massive caveats that we regularly hear about. Obviously.
- kerkeslager 4y ago
  1. You'll note I didn't call him a sociopath. One does not have to be a sociopath to believe a sociopathic take. In this case, merely being deceived by anarcho-capitalist rhetoric explains why the person I'm responding to believes this. 2. The question was rhetorical. Nobody "wonders" anything in this conversation. 3. The extremist capitalist ideology espoused by many of HN's members is among the most harmful ideologies alive in our society today, and the mentally stable thing to do is treat it as the harmful ideology that it is. Consistently prioritizing corporate profits over basic human rights and decency is not healthy, and it's not healthy to treat it as if it were okay.
  - mardifoufs 4y ago
    I don't disagree about your last point, and I even agree that HN has some truly awful takes that can be almost 100% guaranteed to pop up whenever certain topics are discussed. It's just that I find myself to also ask the exact same question GP asked. I don't know anything about farming, or JD or even if JD has a market dominant position. And it's interesting to wonder what we, as mostly-tech-focused people here in HN, are missing. In the sense that, yes open source is great and being able to repair stuff is amazing. But farmers are probably really aware of the upsides of easy to repair hardware... so what are we missing? I just fundamentally tend to assume that people in other fields know a lot more about their stuff than I do, so it's important to ask what's the other side that we can't see here. So I didn't necessarily took the GP as being some sort of gotcha question in this context (even though I'm usually pretty good at picking that up)

tcmart14 4y ago

My understanding, most farmers are backed into a corner where there is not a viable option to go with someone else. JD has extensively made access to repair facilities convenient and sometimes for many farmers, it is the only repair center remotely. If they go with a tractor from a different brand and it does need to be taken to a repair facility, you may have to ship it or drive it a long way or wait for a tech travel to your farm. This might mean your tractor is out of service for weeks. But JD has repair centers all over and JD can turn your tractor around in 3 days or less. In highschool, I worked a couple seasons picking tobacco. Farmers love to be able to repair their tractors. Repair and maintenance work is something that can also give them something to do over the winter when they are not working the fields much if they limp along until then. Most farmers purchase them because as mentioned, there isn't really a reasonable alternative in the event it is something that actually does need to "go into the shop." I also would not be surprised if most of JD's sales were from corporate farms and smalls farmers are still using their grand daddy's tractor. The farm I worked on, the farmer was still using a 50 year old international harvester. Doing all of his own maintenance and repair work.

jamesfinlayson 4y ago
Yep - I know a pineapple farmer (who has a variety of new and old tractors of different brands) and in the extended stretches between planting and picking he repairs the older tractors (some are around 40 years old).

freeopinion 4y ago

As I write this you've been moderated into the grey zone. I think that means that a lot of people think that RTR is super important and you are wrong. But you can't be wrong because you didn't make a statement. You asked a question. And it is an important question. People assume your position on the question just because you asked it. This is a serious mistake. RTR fans cannot solve the problem until they can unravel the answers to this question. One obvious answer to the question is that there are very few alternatives to JD. How do we solve that? Well, lots and lots of money. How do we come up with lots of money? Um.. sell an alternative to JD? Ok, not practical on day one. Sell an alternative to Kubota? Hmmm... difficult. But that's probably where it needs to start. So, raise a lot of money to build an alternative to Kubota? Hmm.. if only there was some place where somebody could go where they gave away many millions of money to risky startups. I don't have millions of money, but I have approached a few efforts I hoped could go somewhere. No luck so far. The opportunity is there for the right somebody to run with. Perhaps starting with riding mowers could lead to something. It might take longer, but sooner started sooner done.

wizzwizz4 4y ago
> Hmm.. if only there was some place where somebody could go where they gave away many millions of money to risky startups. John Deere isn't evil because the people in charge decided, one day, to start twirling their moustaches. We can assume the issue is systematic. Would a startup be insulated from the same pressures and incentives that created – or permitted – John Deere? https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2014-01-23 https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2014-01-23
- freeopinion 4y ago
  That is also an excellent and important question. Questions like that led to the GPL. They have led to other innovations as well. Yes, some people are always trying to figure a way around GPL and around every other well-intentioned thing. But still, BSD, MIT, MPL, and lots of other efforts have allowed the world to have and preserve some amazing things. And we need to keep asking those questions and keep coming up with spectacular answers. Every great answer allows us to iterate better and better on what this world can be. Every great answer starts with a great question.

Aunche 4y ago

Despite being downvoted, you're largely correct. John Deere's primary customer base are mega-farms who don't really mind treating tractors as a service. This does screw over smaller farmers though who are already struggling to compete.