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Farmers want California to change its autonomous tractor ban [video]
- andsoitis 1y agowhat are the goals of the policy of banning autonomous tractors? I imagine it is at least twofold: a) provide jobs for manual laborers b) more of an equal playing field between large-scale industrial agriculture companies and "sole proprietor" farmers EDIT: turns out to be a case of safety regulation written before more recent advances in tractor automation. So my guesses were wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driverless_tractor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driverless_tractor
- codingdave 1y agoSafety is a far more likely concern.
- Loughla 1y agoI'm not sure about that. A field is sort of a best case scenario for autonomous vehicles. There are only well established obstacles, no pedestrians, and straight lines for large distances. Source: autosteer on JD tractors let me get really good at switch games.
- 9cb14c1ec0 1y agoNot only that, but if a tractor encounters an obstacle in the field that it doesn't know what to do about, it can simply stop right where it is and wait for human intervention, unlike cars where you don't want them stopping dead in the middle of the road. Also tractor speeds in fields are far lower than cars on roads, so automatically a huge safety advantage there.
- lokar 1y agoI agree, it’s private property not open to the public. As long as the owner assumes responsibility for injuries it should be fine. Perhaps some updated osha rules, I assume they have rules for existing equipment.
- aaronbaugher 1y agoUntil you get to the end of the field. If a malfunction means you don't turn or stop, the next thing in front of you might be a house, a school, or a highway. Today's farm tractors are powerful, heavy machines that can plow right through a lot of obstacles. I'd want to have a couple extra layers of fail-safes, and probably a human overseer with a kill switch. That could be someone watching a bunch of tractors remotely on monitors.
- Pet_Ant 1y agoI mean a GPS geo-fence is pretty simple and fail safe. I'm more worried about something like humans unexpectedly in the field. Imagine a migrant crossing a field and getting run over by a combine.
- aaronbaugher 1y agoYeah, that's a concern too. I'm not opposed to the idea of autonomous (or better near-autonomous) tractors working in fields. They'd definitely be safer than autonomous vehicles on roads. I just think people, especially at a tech-loving forum like this, are a little too quick to assume safety concerns are fully covered. Perhaps they can be, but will they be when large corporate farms cut corners on things like maintenance? I started driving tractors when I was 10, and I've been in a couple situations where equipment failure required some quick action to get stopped before serious damage was done. Shit happens, and should be expected to happen and prepared for.
- ccozan 1y agoBut I expect a autonomous tractor - like an auto - to have a radar and be able to stop if an obstacle is there - not only migrants, how about wild animals, etc.
- pfdietz 1y agoA GPS-driven cutoff seems like an obvious thing to have in this situation, no?
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- dragonwriter 1y ago> A field is sort of a best case scenario for autonomous vehicles There is no “autonomous tractor law”, the headline is misleading. There is a farm safety law that has been in place since long before any autonomous production farm equipment existed which prohibits self-propelled equipment without the operator seat occupied at all times while in operation. It was not unheard of for people to get on and off low-speed self-propelled (that was not self-driving) farm equipment while in operation, in an attempt at efficiency/multitasking, with attendant safety risks. That’s what the law was directed at.
- aaronbaugher 1y agoAlso, it's useful to remember that before tractors, there were horses, and the equipment pulled by horses was gradually converted to tractors. With horses, the farmer might sit on the equipment and use reins, or he might walk in front of the horses and lead them. Either way, he had control of them without literally sitting on them. So when the first tractors came along, it probably wasn't automatic to think you needed to sit directly on it. And it was a lot easier to hop on and off them when they were small machines without cabs. They were pretty dangerous, really, with little in the way of safety protection over moving parts, so I can see why people thought a rule was needed to keep the driver on the seat.
- burkaman 1y agoThe video says the regulation was written 50 years ago, and just says "operators must be stationed at the controls". Autonomous tractors were not commercially available yet, it's just a well-intentioned safety regulation that needs to updated now.
- tantalor 1y agoDoes it define "stationed" and "controls"? If the automated tractor is remotely controlled by my smartphone (IANAF) in my pocket, does that count?
- burkaman 1y agohttps://www.dir.ca.gov/title8/3441.html https://www.dir.ca.gov/title8/3441.html It says: "All self-propelled equipment shall, when under its own power and in motion, have an operator stationed at the vehicular controls. This shall not prohibit the operator occupying or being stationed at a location on the vehicle other than the normal driving position or cab if controls for starting, accelerating, decelerating and stopping are provided adjacent and convenient to the alternate position." So you do explicitly need to be physically on the vehicle at all times while it's moving. It has further rules for remotely operating "Furrow guided self-propelled mobile equipment" (which is not how modern autonomous tractors work), but even for those you need to be actively watching it and have immediate access to steering and braking controls.
- tantalor 1y agoThis seems to open the door to operators not being literally in the driver's seat. I think "location on the vehicle" could reasonably be interpreted as including virtual locations. For example a drone operator is physically in a little room somewhere but they are in actuality operating controls that fulfill all of those requirements remotely. It's not hard to go from there to "I can press the stop button on my phone whenever I want" so I am effectively "stationed at the vehicular controls".
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- alistairSH 1y agoThe actual regulation in question is part of CA's state-wide agricultural safety code... (b) All self-propelled equipment shall, when under its own power and in motion, have an operator stationed at the vehicular controls. It's been in place since the 1970s. At the time it was passed, it was probably reasonable to require a human operator at the controls at all times. The law is just an anachronism that the state legislature should remove/update.
- londons_explore 1y ago> operator stationed at the vehicular controls. I wonder how the law is written? Could you have a set of vehicular controls in Kenya remotely hooked up to control it? And then you only pay kenyan not US labour rates? Can't imagine tractors move fast enough whilst plowing that the extra 67 milliseconds of latency matters.
- alistairSH 1y agoI literally quoted the law... Like I said, it was written in the 1970s, before remote controls and GPSes and AI and things existed.
- aerostable_slug 1y agoCalifornia has some other interesting legacy laws, like the one banning night vision use on weapons. IIRC, in theory a modern thermal imaging rifle sight wouldn't violate the law as written (but I wouldn't want to be the test case).
- pfdietz 1y agoI have to wonder why the regulation was written in the first place. Was there really an outbreak of rogue machinery that necessitated the regulation?
- andrewmutz 1y agoIf legislators are concerned about safety, what are they seeing in other states that indicates a safety problem? If legislators are concerned about farm jobs, this is short-sighted, as technology-driven productivity improvements are the basis for the prosperity we experience today.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 1y agoThere might be a very important difference between automation pursued because we don't have enough workers to do all the work we would like to see completed, and automation pursued because it is cheaper for the gigantic corporations who will profit from employing fewer workers. But since we are still in the phase where there are too many jobs and not enough people to do them, I think we don't have to worry about those yet. We should revisit this issue in 300 years.
- immibis 1y agoWe're already in the insufficient jobs phase, but not for farm work. Everyone hates doing farm work and rightfully so. The commenter below me has never actually done farm work. Doing more for less is just better. We should probably invent an economic system that doesn't kill people when efficiency improves.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago>Everyone hates doing farm work and rightfully so. Yes, everyone hates sitting in the million dollar tractor's cab, sitting on the cushioned seat and enjoying the air conditioning while looking at the dozen screens that remind one of piloting the space shuttle. I'm glad that California's legislators are taking a look at that, and making sure no one ever has to do it again. It's a horrible job, and the sooner it has been eliminated the sooner we can all celebrate.
- bluGill 1y agoMost farm jobs are not sitting in the tractor all day. There are only a few farms in the world where a tractor has someone sitting in it all day every day. Most farms the tractors are used for 80 hours a week just a couple weeks per year (planting and harvest time). The rest of the time the tractors sit in the shed. There is a lot of non-tractor jobs farmers do. Many of the farms where the tractor is used full time every day the tractor is just pulling the harvest wagon and the crops are harvested by hand - one person drives the tractor while 30 walk behind it harvesting the crops. The autonomous tractors are for use in fields where there are no other humans (at least so far)
- fnord77 1y agoKinda odd that AVs are allowed on roads but not on farmland
- whalesalad 1y agoWild because most of the big ass combines and tractors you see out working the field are essentially already autonomous -- a human just happens to be sitting in the cab.
- jpalawaga 1y agoI come from a family of farmers, and some of my family does actively farm. None of them are wealthy enough or operate large enough farms for expensive self-driving tractors. And I share in their concern about the meta-game here: the consolidation of capital, land, and power over the food supply. Consumers already have a hard time having any lever against rising grocery costs. Consolidation earlier on in the supply chain is not helping. Which is to say, automation in this space isn't a bad thing in and of itself, but it can enable strange market dynamics (/imbalanced power dynamics) over food, which is objectively a bad thing.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- nozzlegear 1y ago> None of them are wealthy enough or operate large enough farms for expensive self-driving tractors. My father runs his own chopping business and his machines aren't automated or self-driven either. For him, it's all about being able to repair the machines himself. He's been a diesel mechanic and farm hand all his life, so if something breaks on a "traditional" harvester or tractor, he knows how to fix it and get it running again.
- lotsofpulp 1y ago>Consumers already have a hard time having any lever against rising grocery costs. Consolidation earlier on in the supply chain is not helping. Who in the grocery supply chain is earning huge profit margins? As far as I understand, consumers have long benefited from myriad subsidies provided to farmers, too low fossil fuel prices that do not price in externalities, too low water prices that deplete aquifers quicker than they can recharge, and extremely cheap labor due to cheaper labor in less developed countries and government looking the other way on farms that hire illegal immigrants. If anything, the mechanization of farms is the only force pushing food prices lower. Before that, it was the advent of the Haber-Bosch process which drastically increased yields.
- xnx 1y agoThe quality, safety, availability, and affordability of food amazes me every time I go to the grocery store.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 1y agoSounds like what corporations want, not family farmers.
- bluGill 1y agoThere are no family farmers. Tax laws demand you be a corporate farm, so all farms are corporate farms. (there are a few exceptions, but they are hobby farms where the farmer works full time off the farm)
- s1artibartfast 1y agoeyeroll Every family farm is also incorporated. Family farm is orthogonal to incorporation
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- aaronbaugher 1y agoWhen you see a headline that starts with "Farmers [something]", it always refers to large farming corporations and the lobbying organizations like Farm Bureau they fund. It never means they went and interviewed Farmer Hank with his 50 cow dairy or his 1000-acre grain and pasture operation.
- fourseventy 1y agoCalifornia overregulation is obscene.
- smm11 1y agoAutonomous cars are not a thing yet, too dangerous. So yeah, let's let giant farm tractors, larger and more dangerous than (non-firing) tanks from WWII, roam fields nationwide.
- stockresearcher 1y agoIt's an unintended consequence of a very old law. Getting worked up about it is extraordinarily counterproductive. It's very hard and time-consuming to repeal/replace a law. It's at least 10x easier to make a "technical fix"/"clarification" that preserves the original intent while removing the unintended effects. That's what should be done.
- burnt-resistor 1y agoself-propelled equipment shall, when under its own power and in motion, have an operator stationed at the vehicular controls. Wow. I didn't realize there was a ban and that it's from 1977. Btw, we had an almost autonomous Case tractor ("AutoSteer") at Trimble in Sunnyvale (department since moved to Colorado) in 2000 without an operator at the controls (so it was possibly illegal), but it's surprising that it's a blanket ban rather than a selective one like human-overseen. Perhaps it was written to protect jobs or there was subconscious fear over killer machines later epitomized by the film Maximum Overdrive (1986).
- dragonwriter 1y agoIts not a ban on autonomy, which didn't exist at the time to ban. It was directed at people trying to maximize use of their time by getting off slow moving, non-autonomous, equipment to do other things and then climbing back on when needed to make course changes. It also functions to ban unattended autonomous vehicles now that they do exist, and it may need to be adjusted to allow for an appropriate regulatory framework for limited and safe use of unattended autonomous vehicles, but that was not a subject of concern when it was written.
- david38 1y agoFood control is easy but we don’t actually want it. 1. Prohibit large companies from using their size to negotiate prices, like how it used to be 2. Stop farm subsidies for all but the most critical areas. If you want to make food available to the poor, give them food stamp cards, but further restrict junk food. Supply side subsidies just create excess crops which lead to everyone trying to use cheap corn in some way. This cheap corn is then used to destroy local farmers in Latin America, further increasing illegal immigration and the power of cartels over a newly destitute population.
- pfdietz 1y ago> which lead to everyone trying to use cheap corn in some way Example: corn burning furnaces. https://americasheat.com/post.php?pid=7 https://americasheat.com/post.php?pid=7