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The people who have the money to buy the mega-tractors you see in the article don't care. That's why, unless someone outside the industry makes a stink, nothing

• beat 12y ago
  It's not just mega-tractors that are software-controlled these days. It's all tractors. Including those used by "small family farms".
  • Loughla 12y ago
    I understand that. It's not just tractors either, it's every implement from planters to bailers to rippers, discs and plows. Everything is chipped and controlled from the main-screen in the cab. But the individuals who have the power, money, and influence to do actually change anything are the large-scale farmers. They are not invested in changing the system; it works for them.
  • briantakita 12y ago
    Perennial polyculture food forests reduces the advantage of high tech equipment. Nature does the work of growing. Replanting is rare. Harvesting is more of a manual process.
    • bryanlarsen 12y ago
      Polyculture farming may be the next big thing in farming, enabled by machine vision automated systems. A typical small farmer in Saskatchewan can harvest 100-200 acres of wheat by himself on a single day using a modern combine harvester. Manual harvesting is not an option.
      • acveilleux 12y ago
        I don't think people outside of the prairies understand the scale of some of these farms. The average Sask farm was 1668 acres as of 2011.
        • Qworg 12y ago
          As that many acres is difficult to understand, that's a little over 2.6 square miles.
          • acveilleux 12y ago
            And John Deere makes combines as wide as 30 ft. So a 30ft. combine would have to drive 457.6 miles to harvest that farm. And that's not done at highway speed!
            • deleted 12y ago
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        • bryanlarsen 12y ago
          And that 1668 acre farm is not a corporate farm, it's a family farm run by a single operator without hired hands.
          • randomdata 12y ago
            May still be corporate, because corporations are a way of structuring a business, not an indication of how large or how many people are involved with the business. I expect most family farms are also corporations or even multiple corporations.
            • Loughla 12y ago
              No. Most family farms, at least in my part of the states, are not corporations. They are small businesses in that they have some tax exemptions for being farms, but they are not incorporated. Only the 'slick' farmers (you know, them city folks) or large businesses that are 'family farms' in name only are incorporated.
    • cbd1984 12y ago
      What are the yields like? What would doing that for all food do to the price of food?
      • briantakita 12y ago
        Yields are pretty high. Though there are many products. So you won't necessarily have high yielding corn, but you will overall have more food & materials. The fruits tend to be more of a mixed bag that is best distributed & consumed locally. > What would doing that for all food do to the price of food? Note that conventional petrol agriculture is heavily subsidized. Removing the subsidy will increase the price of food. It will favor small scale, high nutrition, gardening/farming. It will reduce waste as well.
        • cbd1984 12y ago
          > Removing the subsidy will increase the price of food. Then it would be wrong to do remove that subsidy. Poor people need to eat, too.
          • fennecfoxen 12y ago
            If you want to help poor people eat, you should give poor people money to help them eat, rather than paying farmers to make one specific type of farming easier and distorting the market to artificially favor something that's actually less efficient (and may have all sorts of crazy side effects on the rest of the world). Favoring direct intervention to fix the actual problem should be axiomatic, really.
            • cbd1984 12y ago
              > If you want to help poor people eat, you should give poor people money to help them eat The more food we can make per unit resource, the more food we have, given that resources are finite. Giving the poor more money does nothing to change that.
              • 12y ago
• bryanlarsen 12y ago
  Lots of family farms own tractors worth more than $200K, and combines worth more than $500K. They're paying significant interest to the bank for the privilege, but owning equipment that can cover twice the land in a day is a lot cheaper than buying and maintaining two smaller tractors (and accompaning accessories) and hiring a farmhand.
  • themartorana 12y ago
    Like my family. Also, small farmers buy a lot of tractors second, third, fourth-hand. Many are still running 50 years later. This is as much an attempt to kill the secondary market and the right to resell. Without being able to buy and fix up used farm parts/equipment, many (including my family) would be fiscally unable to farm - full stop.
    • beat 12y ago
      This is something to consider with any software-driven systems now... what's the realistic lifetime of the system? Will the vendor always be there to support the software? Ten year old software is a problem. Twenty year old software is a HUGE problem, from a vendor point of view.
      • knightofmars 12y ago
        There will always be tinkerers that take outdated hardware and breathe new life into it via new custom software. The problem lies in the new legal restraints placed around the marriage of the software and the hardware. I'll add, when I say "tinkerer" I'm not talking about an amateur hobbyist. I'm talking about the professionals who live and breathe in the world of after-market parts and their repair.
    • dublinclontarf 12y ago
      So this is the plot to Robots then?
  • fnordfnordfnord 12y ago
    >but owning equipment that can cover twice the land in a day is a lot cheaper It can make the difference between a successful harvest or not; but neither strategy is a guarantee. As an example, if you have your cotton defoliated and then your harvester goes on strike for two or more days, any rain in the interim will destroy your crop. Hiring a farmhand is cheap. Really, they work for almost nothing. But; the ones who know how to run the equipment are busy at harvest time.
• hharnisch 12y ago
  Disagree. The family owned farmers care too. For the big equipment, like combines, there's a handful of people everyone pays to have their fields harvested. This person get's compensation in the form of money and other services (someone else will plow their field for instance). People own their own tractors and share time to get things done, otherwise you'd have to own all of the equipment (which is only justified when you've got a giant factory farm). More of the small farms own new tractors, as the 70s era tractors have been overhauled to the point of junk. This is the current status of small town Iowa at least.
  • Loughla 12y ago
    I know they care, too. But, they lack the political pull, money and time to address these issues. Small town Illinois is similar to Iowa apparently, except for the last section. We do share labor, and rent/trade labor for the use of large machinery. But, the market for older machinery is still very strong. I bought 2 1970's masseys at auction last year, and one small mid-90's JD this year. The bids were competitive, but the price was fair.
  • JoeAltmaier 12y ago
    Iowan here. There are almost no family farms left at all. My neighbor would desperately like to be a farmer. But the scrubby 40-acre field across from his house just sold for $400,000. He'd get maybe 120 bushels of corn off of it. Current price per bushel: $3.80. So $456 income per acre == $18,240 per year. That's half the mortgate payments. Not to mention the cost of working the field. So a lost cause. The 13 farmers that lived and worked on my road when I was a kid are ALL gone. City folks rent those houses; corporations farm those fields.
    • protomyth 12y ago
      "Iowan here. There are almost no family farms left at all." We still have family farms in North Dakota, so I guess it might be a regional thing. Also, for those counting incorporations (like a couple of newspapers), you have to be stupid not to incorporate.
• mitchell_h 12y ago
  Maybe a BIT off topic...but I've got some experience here...We're seeing the death of EXCLUSIVELY family farms. The truly family farms that are surviving and even thriving are those that are diversifying. They're using their tractors to plant their soy beans than leasing them to the neighbor to plant their corn or wheat. Leasing their neighbors trucks to deliver their corn while the neighbors use them for wheat. All the while keeping the trucks/tractors/* on the move the entire year. The issue in the article is starting to hit medium sized farms. When old tractors broke they pulled them into the shop and fixed them. Now they can't even diagnose without having the local dealer come out. During harvest time a tractor being down for 12 hours is HUGE. Like make it or break your year huge. Even the "medium sized" tractors require a service tech with a laptop to come out for almost everything. Want to shift around your planting? Tech. Get a new field? Tech. Changing the type of seeds? tech. Farmers HATE those techs. Also this issue is a HUGE issue in cars and other consumer things. Which is where it will probably be fought in the end. If I buy a car today, in 20 years it's pretty assured I will NOT be able to find a computer or any information about the ECU on how to tune the engine or use the ECU to diagnose drive train issues. They're hiding the ECU specs in the name of safety and emissions. In the end it's hurting consumers and shops in a big way.
• ebbv 12y ago
  Independent farming is under siege by corporate agriculture, but it isn't dead. And independent farmers need tractors too.
• up_and_up 12y ago
  > I am in my early 30's and I guarantee I live to see the death of the actual family farm. Maybe the small corn and soybean farms. Which is a race to the bottom anyway. Small farms are booming here in MI but they are all either in veggies, mixed livestock systems, fruit, dairy or specialty crops of some sort. Small farmers need to think outside the box, adjust to the changing times and maximize their ROI/acre. - software dev with agroecology background
• cc438 12y ago
  "All they care about is whether or not it works." Which is why they care more about this issue than someone without a mega-tractor. These vehicles need to be operational when they're called upon, every minute of downtime costs a substantial amount of money that adds up incredibly fast. Sure, they have service contracts but waiting on a technician and waiting even longer for a replacement part is out of the question. A broken sensor will disable a tractor even if it would run perfectly fine without it. Mega farms care about losing the ability to improvise repairs in the field and/or take the risk of long term damage if its outweighed by the cost of the short term downtime. I've experienced the results of an ECU that can disable a perfectly functional vehicle. I had a ride day with one of our service technicians in our Class 7 truck. The "Check Engine" light had been coming on intermittently throughout the day but we ignored it as it came on inconsistently and we were already 2 hours behind. On our way back to our branch the light came on again at highway speed and 30 seconds later the engine went into "limp home" mode and then shut itself off. We came to a rest on the side of the highway, tilted slightly into a ditch. After calling the local service manager we were informed that the head gasket had blown and the last technician to drive the truck was supposed to refill the coolant and let us know about the issue. We hiked down the road with the empty coolant bottles the last tech left for us and brought back 20 gallons of water, filling the expansion tank. So we should be good as long as we kept tabs on the water level, right? Nope. The water level sensor was placed in in a position where we couldn't fill the tank high enough for it to read the tank as full due to the angle of the truck in the ditch. It wouldn't start without a "safe" reading from the sensor and we couldn't level the truck out without it's own power. That sensor left us stranded for 3 hours until a repair truck arrived and had us running in less than 10 minutes by jacking up the low side of the truck. Now imagine losing half a day during harvest for the same bullshit reason.
  • deleted 12y ago
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  • HeyLaughingBoy 12y ago
    Not to be nitpicky, but a vehicle with a blown head gasket is not a "perfectly functional vehicle." I'm amazed you were able to drive any distance with it at all. Must have been a tiny leak: I've blown head gaskets on two vehicles and the most I was able to get was about 5 miles before all the coolant went out the exhaust.
• AJ007 12y ago
  I wonder if it will ever make sense for full vertical integration of agriculture? Could one company own the seed DNA, land, all related equipment, and sell the outputted product directly to consumers? Could technology ever give one company such a great advantage that they could buy land at a price which would be a great loss to everyone else? The answer could be less about technology and more about the subsidized enforcement of intellectual property law and the strength or weakness of anti-trust law. We look at this from an IP right/wrong standpoint, but a lot of moral questions regarding food production sit outside that realm as long as many people are either not getting enough food or getting too much of food that is damaging their bodies.
• StavrosK 12y ago
  This doesn't only affect the US. Pretty much the entire world buys John Deere, Ford, Lamborghini, etc tractors.
• SovietDissident 12y ago
  It doesn't help that over 70% of farming subsidies go to ~10% of the farms in the country.