Up until a year ago I was regularly using a Massy Fergusson 135 [0] (Perkins Diesel version), made sometime in the 1970s. It was wonderful! So amazing to drive and use. Clunky and heavy, but you really really felt like you were using a machine. In low gears, if you put you foot down on the accelerator the engine would roar, and your speed would barely change!
And there was no fancy technology in it at all. If I was in the forest and had forgotten the key, I'd just reach behind the dashboard and hot-wire it. The air filter was basically a shisha-pipe that bubbled the incoming air through wire wool and engine oil.
Its fuel gauge didn't work either. You just had to take a look in the tank, or quickly react as soon as the revs started dropping. I ran it dry a few times and had to sit there with a spanner in one hand and YouTube into the other, while trying to bleed all the fuel lines. But they were all on the outside of the vehicle, which made it comparatively easy I imagine.
I've never actually driven a modern tractor, so don't know how it compares. I imagine the clutch is easier on the knees these days!
Anyway, this just felt like the place to share this.
> Up until a year ago I was regularly using a Massy Fergusson 135
There is a tradition in several European countries named Affouage: If you live in a rural area, you can get very cheap (or even free) wood at the condition that you go to cut it yourself in the close-by forest.
Many many people who are doing this practice are still using today Massy Fergusson 135, Renault R98/461, Ford 3000-4000 series, SOMECA or similar low tech tractors.
The reason are simple: They are cheap to operate, cheap to repair (damages happen easily forest environment) and their small size is perfect for the task.
The demand for these things will never die. Rugged environment requires cheap and robust hardware.
If this startup can capitalize on that, they do have a market.
I learnt to drive on one of those. I'm a city kid but my grandfather was a wool farmer. Every school holiday we'd visit and I's spend my days literally puttering around the farm, which was pretty huge (~2000ha).
When I started out, 13ish or so, I had to stand on the clutch to get it down.
If you gave it enough beans and dropped the clutch it'll pop a wheelie! (Don't tell my grandpa)
Honestly, I still had to practically stand on the clutch with mine!
I'd teach someone to drive it and say, "now push down on the clutch". They they would heave and struggle, then eventually succeed and look victorious. I'd say, "well done, it is now half way down! But that's all you need for now!"
EDIT: To fully explain: It has a two-stage clutch. You half-press it and it disconnects the wheels from the engine. If you fully depress it all the way to the floor, it additionally disconnects the power-take-off shaft (PTO) from the engine. The PTO shaft is a spindle on the back of the tractor which drives things like your flail mower, wood chipper, etc.
EDIT 2: Edit 1 was for the general audience, not the parent commenter ;-)
Why was the clutch so heavy? Did it serve some purpose or was it just due to the limitations of the technology at the time?
I have certainly driven cars with lighter and heavier clutches (I live in EU, automatics weren't popular until recently and are still far from ubiquitous) but I couldn't tell you why every model just doesn't get a light clutch for comfort. A diesel Subaru I drove had a particularly heavy clutch as I recall, so at stop lights I would pop into neutral instead of holding the clutch down for an extended period.
To deliver very high torque, the clutch plates needs to be pressed very hard together to generate enough friction. This also means that it take a lot of force to pull them apart, if you use a simple lever, as older machines do.
Modern machines may use complex mechanical linkages to make the clutch easy to pull apart but still maintain a firm contact, but that also means higher cost and fragility. Or they use pneumatics or hydraulics to assist, sorta like power steering.
That, and design tolerances. A fancy clutch can be light and strong (think ferarri) but farm machines need to work in the dirt/rust and so need larger tolerances. So heavier springs and bigger .... Bigger everything. A slipping clutch in a Ferrari is annoying. A slipping clutch on a tractor means a missed harvest.
Plus mechanical release mechanisms of heavier machinery were often designed in a way that the clutch snaps at a certain point (also in order to reduce wear in the clutch).
I once changed a broken release bearing of a truck. It was a relatively simple repair but the very heavy gearbox has to be taken out to do this - which is problematic especially if done on a yard without proper equipment.
Since then I always pop into neutral when standing at a traffic light. It is interesting how many people in manual driving cultures think there would be no wear and tear if they press the pedal down completely.
Of course there is, as there has to be a force translating connection between rotating parts and parts of the release mechanism which cannot rotate. Only when the pedal is left alone, the release bearing disconnects from the rotating clutch.
As a motorcyclist stopped at the traffic light I always keep the gear on and clutch pulled in. Why? Because I have to be ready to take off when the moron driver on the phone behind me fails to stop.
I mowed using a Farmall H on a family farm when I was about 12 y/o. I don't remember ever having deadly serious conversations with family members up to that point in my life. All four grandparents, aunts and uncles-- it seemed like everybody-- sat me down, looked me dead in the eye, and told me sternly and bluntly "you turn off the PTO and see the shaft isn't turning before you get off the tractor. Every. Time."
All of them knew somebody who lost an arm or leg or got killed when they got pulled into a PTO.
That was probably the first time I'd ever been given the opportunity to operate a machine that would fucking kill me if I shirked on respecting it. I will never forget the tone of that communication.
Without going too far into the weeds here, IMO this experience is representative of gun rights, zoning, and all sorts of other differences between urban and rural.
Rural kids are put into situations where they are expected to rely fully on themselves, with life-or-death consequences, from a young age. When your pre-teen is driving a machine on their own that could easily kill them or those around them, giving them a .22 rifle is just... normal. It's not at all the same situation as a kid the same age who lives in an apartment and who may have never been in a place where no one would be close enough to hear them if they screamed for help.
I can't wrap my head around the idea that a large number of people who live in cities seem to want to extend childhood through age 25. My daughters are 12 and 17, and between them have over fifty animals directly depending on them for survival. It's just... foreign.
I think you're generalizing too much. Rural communities take gun safety seriously. Farming communities take farming equipment seriously. Kids grow up internalizing the seriousness of these things, which is communicated expressly and tacitly their whole lives by countless people around them, including their friends. Plus they encounter walking examples of what can go wrong, like a missing finger, burn scars (not careful around bonfires or burn pits), or bullet holes (I knew at least 2 or 3 kids growing up with scars from shot). But put those same kids or adults who are careful with those machines in a similarly dangerous but novel situation, and they'll do dumb shit like anyone else. I'm tempted to argue they're more likely to do something dumb because they have a false confidence from their experience with other dangerous situations, whereas suburban and city kids may be more likely to be too scared to play around with any dangerous machine or situation.
I lived on a farm for a year as a young kid (farmer rented a couple of trailers on his land). I remember one day I was hanging around the hog pen watching the giant hogs mill about, probably contemplating trying to pet one. Mr Austin came by and sternly told me to not to reach through the fencing, then knelt down and showed me his ear, which was missing a big chunk.
On the flip side, plenty of Rural and Suburban people are terrified by the city, which kids growing up in the city shrug off.
Rural folks might learn to respect a PTO or the varmint rifle by age 10, but city kids learn how to navigate the bus routes and subway. They learn how to walk on crowded streets, how to live among a lot of different people, including dangerous people(and how to avoid the conflict).
It's all quite interesting. Different kinds of toughness, different kinds of mental fortitude.
I don't "want" to extend childhood; but where I live makes it a little difficult to let my kids roam the way I did. Go too far one way and you're heading into busy highway traffic hell, go too far the other way and you're heading into hobo territory.
Wish I could move; I could sell this overpriced place and almost retire.... not under my control
The phrasing of "gun rights" in the context that's really about gun responsibilities is a big part of the problem. And I say this from an unusual position; I'm a Brit who was taught to shoot at school (cadets). The urban gun control question is not so much about responsibility as about malice. There's not a huge number of people with murderous intent, but there are enough. And the resistance of rural America to the questions of either "do you actually need a gun?", "are you a responsible person?", and "no, you can't bring that into the city" result in thousands of deaths every year in the city. If they were willing to allow separate rules for different areas, this wouldn't be nearly as heated.
> a large number of people who live in cities seem to want to extend childhood through age 25
This is not great, and a more complicated problem of percieved danger.
People can have different lived experiences and it's OK; they are differently valuable and beneficial. I'm a certified unc, easily double the age of your oldest, and I have 0 animals depending on me for survival. It means, among other things, that I can simply decide to leave town for a week and don't need to arrange for replacement humans to take care of other living beings -- and this is a valuable freedom to have.
>Rural kids are put into situations where they are expected to rely fully on themselves, with life-or-death consequences, from a young age.
come to the city, farm boy, and we'll give you a corner you can sling the brown from and we see how you do. we find something fo yo daughters to do too*
*i have absolutely no street smarts, country or city, but I do watch Law & Order and know how to pound a nail and know what to grease the maitre d' to get into the hottest restaurants in town. and beyond that i got friends, some of these guys know people who know people, just sayin
I have never driven a tractor, but clearly remember our headmaster giving us this exact lecture when I was about 8. This in a town of 20,000 people where I expect not even 2% of the kids would even visit a farm outside of an organised trip, but clearly an important enough message to be worth broadcasting.
That seems to be common, the communist-era tractor I was riding was pretty much "stand with full weight and still have to brace by the steering wheel to push it"
Good that at least there wasn't much gear changing, pick one for task and just use it
You say “up until a year ago”, what ended up replacing it?
I’m in the market for a tractor in roughly that size, and am very tempted to just find an old machine in decent shape. I’d be very curious about the decision/experience if you did upgrade to something more modern?
My grandfather had one of these, though gas powered. It may have been the Ford model, cannot remember, though his was built I believe in the late 40s / early 50s. One story that still makes me laugh, he couldn't start it one day, and asked my grandmother to give him a pulling start w/ their ford diesel pickup. One look and my about 12 year old self just knew she wanted to be anywhere else but there (some foreshadowing, she had a reputation for a lead foot). Grandpa had already tied a rope from the tractor to the truck, and I believe he was in maybe one of the lower gears ready to pop the clutch after he got up to speed. Grandma tore (yes, tore) out of the yard shifting gears, and she was accelerating down their long driveway headed for the main road as Grandpa started frantically waving his hat trying to get her to stop. I'm pretty sure he never asked her again to help start the tractor. And yeah, the tractor was started, probably in the first 50 feet of that episode.
We used to have a really old Massey Ferguson, I think TE-20, at the family (moonshine) farm. It was finally retired around 15 years ago and replaced with a MF 165. I hear you about the clutch--sometimes I feel I can't even push it down far enough.
I also love driving it, apart from the fact the hydraulics are somewhat off, so the front/rear lift won't ever stay in position.
The name of the brand is "Massey Ferguson" not "Massy Fergusson".
The reason I know that is not that I'm a farmer. It's that 20 years ago a bunch of friends and I wrote and performed a parody song of Gainsbourg/Bardot song "Harley Davidson" where the motorbike brand was replaced with the tractor one.
My father drove one of those in his childhood. Now retired, he has bought a used one and uses it to maintain about an acre of land (and his grandkids love helping him).
Once, it broke down, and I was astonished to see that there are forums dedicated to this tractor. If I remember correctly, it was a problem with the fuel line that is rather common, and we managed to fix it thanks to these communities.
As I was researching it, I read stories of MF135s found abandoned in a ditch and starting immediately again. A robustness that makes this and other models popular in Africa...
The one I drove (and a much older MF as well) had both. A lever on the steering column, as well as a foot pedal. I've never seen anyone without one elsewhere either, maybe they were only sold that way in my country.
Wild. We ran a 175 and 1100 for our daily tractors before Grandpa died and I quit farming (big ass John Deere machines for the real work at planting and harvest though).
They're phenomenal little machines that can do 99% of what you need. It blows my mind that for years, Grandpa farmed with a little Ford smaller than the 175. I can't imagine planting with that thing. The ww2 generation really were tough as nails.
So our main small tractors were a 175 and an 1100. The 1100 had a bucket but I would've killed for a bucket on that little 175. Man that thing was handy. You could drive it through the yard without leaving tire tracks.
I shamefully have some Facebook Marketplace notifications for some Massy tractors. I'd love one. I don't even have land to use them, I just think they are neat.
I wonder if it's legal to just park your tractor in a regular parking spot across your apartment. I'm European so we have small parking spots. But would a small tractor fit in the parking spot of the biggest Ford truck?
I went through my teenager years driving one of those MF 135 machines. A very versatile tractor. I enjoyed driving tractors (including a much older MF), when I eventually got my car's driver license some years later I found that driving cars weren't really that interesting.
During certain kinds of driving gear shifts became.. tricky. That's when I learned how to double-clutch, something I kept doing on cars as well, for many years after (think going steep uphill on snow and then having to shift into first gear without stopping)
Still rocking one over here. The thing had not been maintained for 20 years while still being used, ran several times with almost no oil in the engine, drank gasoil full of water.
And it still works.
Things were made different back then.
I looked up the manual, you got everything you need to repair it. Maintenance is extremely easy. Even have electric schema.
Now my BMW, I looked into the manual how to change a light. It said to go to the dealer lol.
Fuck the modern car / tractor / tools. I blame the people for that, we went from customer that demanded to be able to repair their stuff to people who are now mechanically illiterate. I'm not sure they would even know how to replace a tire on their Tesla :)
That's why manufacturer have all the latitude to do what they do. And that's why it didn't go very far with farmers.
It's amazing we let it slip this far. Even cars from a decade or so ago feel much more repairable. I bought an EV and I haven't even seen the motor yet, because I'm going to have to dismantle a bunch of plastic-clipped stuff to remove the frunk, and I've broken enough brittle tabs for one lifetime. God forbid they'd just use actual metal fasteners for this stuff.
It's even worst tho, one day I layed a little bit against the front of the car and it made a reverse bump in the bodywork right on my ass.
Got a 2000 Suzuki that is full metal.
I think the trend of plastic went around 2000 to 2010 because of regulation on crash, plastic absorbs better the kinetic energy so we don't get our head smashed.
But yeah, no excuse to not make it easy to dismantle. It's the equivalent of Volkswagen using all kind of different screws to hold the plastic protection under the car, so that the average Joe who has standards screw drivers can't bleed his oil himself or change the gasoline filter.
This is maddening but you don't know it when you buy the car. It's only later.
Go back to 1910, and more than 50% of the population lived in rural areas. And rural doesn't mean "suburbs". As this trend continues further back in time, I'd expect that people in their 30s may be living in cities in 1910, but we often not born there. They migrated from rural areas to the city.
Which means that city people even into the 50s had a very, very rural background.
So people who grew up on farms miles from any town or neighbours or stores, who had to rely upon themselves entirely, were the ones buying machines. But if you look at today, many people are apartment dwellers, or live in townhomes. They don't even have a place to fix something, let alone the tools or background.
I could fix any small engine before I was 10, work on cars before I could drive, and it's because you just picked up this stuff in a rural area. I guess my point is, if you don't know how to fix anything, and no one around you does except for specialists?
Then you probably won't care about owner repairability as much.
Sad, but probably a likely reason why we're where we are.
I have the original 1940's Minneapolis Moline R and my wife has the original Farmall H and we both currently live in the city (but grew up farming or close to it) so we're not city kids, but somewhere stuck in between. I deeply get the feeling of using a non-tech machine, and how simple it is but intuitive to use. We used a pain mixing stick to check the gas level in our tractors on the farm, I don't think the gas gauges ever worked. You'd have to whack the starter with a wrench since they didn't ever work half the time. They worked over 60 years before they got their first oil change (my grandpa didn't believe in changing them - but my dad and I think it's just because you'll never get the canister filter to seal ever again if you did change it)
I'm not sure the majority of the population will ever need, or even want, to learn to bleed fuel lines, so I wouldn't consider it reluctance. And I would wager that the majority of the (internet) population does engage in learning activities on the regular.
My son recently broke the string on the light cord in the bathroom. I opened it up in perhaps the naive expectation that someone would have designed that in such a way that the string can be reattached. Sadly it wasn't.
In fact when you open the interior plastic piece the whole thing springs apart and everything from the clicking mechanism to the electrical terminals explode in different directions.
Thankfully, someone had uploaded a video of a very similar switch and, after a few cross words (man I hate assembling mechanisms with springs), I had a new overhand knot in the string and all of the contacts, springs and terminals back in place.
I would, without doubt, drive down to a shop and buy a new one next time...
The ones here in the UK have these little plastic connectors on the string. The switch itself has a very short string coming out of it(<10cm), the plastic connector and then the main pull cord. These connectors are simple tubes with an opening that hold and hide the knots. Makes changing the pull cord quite easy, you just feed it through the hole in the connector, tie a simple knot at the end and pull it back into the connector body.
I actually had one of these connectors break on a bathroom light and just 3D printed a new one. But it should be fairly trivial to add one of these to any light pull you already have.
I think this kind of thing is much more commonplace than you think.
Never underestimate a young person and their phone. They not only use youtube or chatgpt to solve daily problems, but date, pay bills, and communicate with their friends using mostly videos/photos/emojis (and occasionally english).
New Zealand tree farmer Marty T has been posting detailed "back from the dead" tractor / bulldozer / grader / etc. restoration project videos for some time.
> I imagine the clutch is easier on the knees these days!
Modern tractors don't really have a clutch. I mean they sorta do, but it's electronic. Even on sizable consumer positioned tractors(I have a JD 5055, but it applies to almost all the JD models), there's just a lever for forward, N, and reverse. Gear shifters work MUCH MUCH better now.
When I was younger I absolutely HATED changing gear on the tractor - it was a matter of dropping the revs which caused a dive, then a clunk finding the gear, then a jolt as the gear took hold and the revs came back up
Changing gears while driving? Are you sure you where supposed to? Many old tractors are without synced drives, so you are supposed to select gear before you start driving. Of course you can change when driving, but then you have to match revs to not get the drop betwen
One of my early memories was driving a tractor like this hauling potato harvest with my late grandfather when his "big" tractor wouldn't start. Feels like a 1000 years ago...
My father still has one of these in orange and white. I remember when I was a little child and he would start it up, I could feel the concussion of the exhaust in my chest.
Those are so cool. First motorized thing I ever drove was some 1950s Ford tractor, as a little kid. My uncle showed me how to use it. I almost had to stand with both feet on the clutch and pull myself up to release it, while my brother manned the wheel and throttle separately.
The smaller tractors now mostly use a hydrostatic transmission instead of a clutch[]. You just move a plate that changes the mechanical advantage of the engine powered hydraulic drive. It's basically another set of hydraulics but for driving the tractor.
I loved the MF 135 my neighbour had. It was great. The injector pump had failed and we'd swapped it with one off a marine version of the Perkins AD3, which had a reasonably "opened up" governor on it. Flat it out could do a whopping 20mph!
Any technology from before the time of your grandparents, and often parents, is usually perceived to be "not fancy". Because then those elders can't tell you in your childhood what life was like before that technology. So in your lived experience that technology was always there. Reading history later on, doesn't change your emotional experiences.
Disagree. There's lots of products and goods that have become less fancy as a result of changes in labor/material cost as industrialization ran its course and the old way is considered the fancy way.
Wood furniture joined with glue and pegs rather than inserts and screws. Solid wood furniture at all. Leather and natural fibers gave way to plastics. Ornate castings gave way to simple stampings and simply castings (where things are still cast).
An internal combustion engine may be complex, but it's not fancy. I can see and touch and understand every part of it. I can maintain and modify and repair it. This is not true for fancy electronics and certainly not locked-down proprietary firmware.
For every modern car I had or used in the last 20 years, the engine itself never was a problem, other than the regular maint, oil, filters, belts, plugs, cables...
Now, electronics problems, albeit relativelly rare, were far more common and fucking expensive.
And then, but this more due to the state of modern roads and streets than the car themselves, suspension issues.
The magic of an engine is less in how it operates, and more in how it was built. At least around the time they started showing up, manufacturing lots of precision metal parts was not trivial.
Although modern electronics take this further, with both operation and construction being utterly complex.
One of my vehicles is a 2009 Civic. It continues to amaze me that with minimal maintenance, that 17-year-old vehicle will fire right up with the turn of a key, with hundreds (thousands?) of parts moving in a specific way, many of them with tolerances in tiny fractions of an inch.
2010 MB C300 I bought in 2013 from a dealer after the lease expired, parked outside without a garage or cover since then (Virginia).
About 3 years ago a large branch (about 8" diameter) from an old overhanging tree fell right on the transparent sunroof cover and shattered it into a million pieces. After picking them out of the sunroof mechanism (which no longer worked after the impact) and the inside of the car, I covered the opening with several sheets of magnetized vinyl. Works great, never a drop of water inside since then and it's stayed in place without any attention. Temperature control inside the car at rest or while driving at highway speed is like it was before the damage.
Being old now I never go anywhere since I can get stuff delivered. About every 3 weeks I go out and the car starts right up, I drive a 5-mile loop to circulate the oil and then park it for another 3 weeks. Been doing this for years. I do get an oil change annually.
I learned how engines worked by taking apart, cleaning and reassembling an ancient lawnmower engine so I could use it on my go-kart. I then learned how cars worked by taking one apart and putting it back together again.
Neither of those machines had a transistor in them. It was all basic electricity.
Wait a few years and no HD will be able to do something similar.
See other story on front page right now: educational scores are trending down and that trend is only going to accelerate now that every student is using LLMs.
I think this is a reaction to the incredibly locked down ecosystem that most of these mfgs are pushing.
However, the tech exists for a reason and is not inherently bad, the issue is the lock-in, the lack of choice and interoperability.
IMO, there is plenty of space for an OEM who can play nice with others, offer an open (and vibrant ecosystem), and keep users coming back by choice, not by lock-in.
I think going bare-metal at cut-rate might've been the only way to actually kick-start that. F.ex. ECU's make things more optimal so buyers will be paying extra for fuel in a bad economy, but the lock-down was worse when it was causing downtime.
But tech in general is perhaps in a growing-up phase, we had Arduinos and Raspberry PI's filling a similar need (computer to electronics being needlessly complicated) that was initially filled from the low-end, but now we have faster SBC's and stuff like Framework laptop's that is expanding the range of options for repariable/replaceable/hackable parts up to the high end today and farming equipment is probably destined to get a similar range of options.
An interesting note here is, will cars also start getting a range of more hackable options, mechanics are ingenious already but it's still very much hacks without manufacturer support, but a new manufacturer providing a low-cost base could very well pop up and grow quickly if they establish an ecosystem.
> However, the tech exists for a reason and is not inherently bad, the issue is the lock-in, the lack of choice and interoperability.
These low-tech tractors could become a hot bed for open source experimentation. Nothing stopping someone from sticking a tablet on the dash. You could run GPS harvesting optimization software or some webthing locally. Could be cloud or clever DiY farmers could run their farm off a local instance on a small machine using a WiFi AP atop the barn or whatever.
This was my take as well. How many 3rd parties might be able to bring on upgrades/modifications to a "dumb" tractor to make it smart vs only being able to buy a "smart" tractor from one vendor and be forced into it's rules/restrictions/prices
But there's more to agtech than driving a tractor around, a lot of what these big integrated systems do (at the high end) is very data driven -- determining where and how to plant, irrigate, fertilize, etc. There's a lot of integration work beyond just making the tractor drive.
> But there's more to agtech than driving a tractor around, a lot of what these big integrated systems do (at the high end) is very data driven -- determining where and how to plant, irrigate, fertilize, etc.
How difficult is this to implement outside of big ag-tech? I feel that a community of experienced farmers and programmers (or programmer-farmers) could tackle this.
The machine, from tractor to combine and everything in between often feeds data together to produce a holistic understanding.
Things like
- How much fuel was used
- Where your tractors and sprayers drove
- Soil samples and content
- How and where every bit of chemical and fertilizer was applied
- What weather hit your field
- How much and and the moisture content of every bit of the field you harvested
But if you're observing a fleet of 100+ machines you kinda need some integration and a central location. Which in turn connects to multiple other services like weather, crop markets, fuel prices etc.
The software is certainly easier to build, but there's a lot of hardware involved here beyond the tractor. Claude is not necessarily going to make it easier to do soil sampling or measuring field conditions or yield outputs.
Farmers would be foolish to rely on an LLM because farming margins are too low to makeup for even a small quick mistake. Many farms will profit 1% on investment over 1-2 decades, although year to year yield can vary 30%.
What kind of sensors do those cheap kits come with?
A tractor is a big thing to have rolling around unsupervised. I would want a lot of safeguards. Blindly going from one GPS point to another sounds like a nightmare.
The cheapie aliexpress specials simply drive the line they're programmed to drive. They have GPS and a gyro to account for the slope of the land. You're supposed to stay in the tractor while they're operating as a safety... but this doesn't always happen in some parts of the world.
30 years ago you had a hand-gas and clamped the wheel to drive the tractor in a line. Using GPS is a litle bit more safe than that. And I talk about Germany!
Right, but that has nothing to do with a vendor making a dumb tractor. Why do we need to dismissively move the conversation from TFA. The data driven approach is made up of several parts, and we're looking at a specific part
Making a dumb tractor for the use-case of dumb tractor is obviously a winning idea.
I just don't think you're going to effectively compete with big agtech by putting a bunch of parts in a box, shaking it, and hoping you end up with a beautifully integrated solution. Integration hell is the reason big commercial firms dominate when it comes to large integrated systems.
Why not? They sell telematics systems separately from cars. It’s possible to do this and it might not be too difficult depending on how the system is composed.
Precision ag is orders of magnitude more complicated of a system than vehicle telematics. Again, driving the tractor is the easy part, and you can already get cheap systems to do this.
admittedly, i'm not a farmer nor an expert in data driving farming. but getting a farmer the ability to precisely drive a tractor in a field so that planting seeds, applying fertilizer, and any of the other steps would be a huge win. The settings used when doing that can easily come from bigFarmData gained from other sources. Can it be used even more precisely when everything is gathered/integrated by one company? That's a question that I'm not by default saying yes to, but it seems like you do think that is true. Even if it is true, does that mean the difference from a farmer going broke because his DIY tractor behaved slightly differently than your solution? I'd posit that a farmer only being allowed to play the bigFarmData game by only being allowed to buy from one vendor that is expensive while also forcing any repairs to be expensive will cause farmers to financially unnecessarily struggle.
The economics of farming (at least in the US) are brutal. Scaling up is really the only way to make a living long term. Some of this is due to equipment cost (look up how much a combine costs), and some is due to competition. It's not unusual for a farmer to be land rich and cash poor.
If you want to see a couple of guys learning how to farm from scratch, visit https://www.youtube.com/@spencerhilbert. Spencer and his brother made a bit of money off games and Youtube and have been starting out on corn, hay, as well as raising beef. It gives a pretty good insight into how pervasive tech is in farming, and how despite that, how much of farming still relies on hard, physical work.
I'll check out Spencer's channel. For a comedy perspective, there's Clarkson's Farm or Growing Belushi. Even though they are for entertainment, there's a still a lot of info in those shows to not be written off.
However, I'm not as interested in being a farmer at that level. I'm much more interested in the homesteading aspect of farming. I'm not trying to feed the world as much as me and mine and maybe some extra. So not just farming, but also some ranching with sheep/goats/chickens/pigs. I have friends doing this that I'm keeping an eye on. They had a head start as their kids grew up in FFA and are already familiar with raising live stock, and then having them processed to make that part much less daunting.
Scale is a huge factor. It makes the most sense to invest in precision ag tech when you have enough acres that the investment pays off. At 5000+ acres, farms are using integrated systems that combine satellite data, on-tractor sensors, soil sensors, drone sensors, in-field weather sensors, with a lot of science to squeeze the most out of the land. At that scale, there's a lot of money invested in a season and you aren't looking for a DIY project, you need production quality product with proven scientific rigor. You probably don't have the manpower to do a DIY project anyway, you are relying heavily on automation and outsourcing. And at the low end, it it more effort to implement any of this than you'll get out of it.
So a DIY solution is aiming for somewhere in the center of the market -- enough scale that it makes sense to bother, but not enough enough money to avoid the headache of DIY. It might make sense for some mid-sized farms in developing economies, but it seems to be a narrow window to me.
Is suspect most farmers would prefer the diy add-on version of these than the single manufacturer integrated one. A modern smartphone and stay of I/o sensors send like it could do pretty much the entire job
I had to scroll back up to see what this reply was to, to get the full chuckle and yup, I was told frequently by my male parental unit that the top two reasons for having kids was chores and tax deductions. But there's a reason farm families leaned on the large side. The more hands you had helping the less hard things could be while never being easy
Years ago, there was a TED Talk[0] from the guy that started Open Source Ecology[1]. The TED Talk was really cool, but I haven't really followed what they did. It sounded promising to have open-source technology for use in this space.
I absolutely love this vision. He's still working towards the goal. It seems that his vision has problems scaling up though. He seems to mostly still drive this himself.
My bet would be there will be a niche for these tractors at hobby farms but the reality is outside of niche goods and hobby farms, farming is about scale and the machines that companies like JD sell help a lot. Sure the tech is locked down but at the scale those players are running at it’s baked into the service contract to minimize downtime.
They have no driving electronics, electronic throttle, ECU controlled injection etc, so you are limited, you can't for example easily make it go constant set speed, because the throttle isn't electronic.
It went a bit too far, optimum would be modern enough to have drive by wire but with open ECU and documentation
You can still control a completely mechanical engine to work with set speeds. There are mechanical governors that can do this, or you can get an electronic component that moves the throttle for you. Fixed speed engines with variable load are much older than the transistor.
It is no harder than doing it with an ECU, except that you need to install a servo or speed governor with hand tools, instead of fiddling with ECU code.
It has a governor.. The P pump 12 valves (and many other multi-application diesels) come with either one of two different governors, an automotive one which has a high idle and low idle, but unrestricted fueling in between. This is what you want in a car or truck where you're controlling road speed with your foot. There's also the "industrial" governor that essentially maps lever input linearly to engine RPM, and endeavors to maintain its set RPM independent of load. This is the kind you find in tractors, generators, boats, etc.
These governors are basically mechanical analog computers which use the inertia of flyweights, springs, and some very clever linkages to do their thing.
There's a device called an "aneroid compensator" that sits on top of the governor and is used to maintain a fueling profile for a specific density altitude (e.g. limit fuel at higher altitudes on naturally aspirated engines or off-boost on turbocharged engines). This effectively maintains AFR, although it is not a closed loop system. For closed loop control you need to measure AFR directly in the exhaust and compensate, which means you need an electronically governed injection pump. There's no good way to do this with some 3rd party add-on. You'd be much better off just using an electronically governed Bosch injection pump (like those found on 24 valve Cummins or 1998-1999 Mercedes OM606 turbodiesels). But then you incur the encumbrance of the ECU and all the bad corporate behavior that comes along for the ride.
Also note that maintaining a particular AFR in a diesel is kind of a non goal, at least from the perspective of engine performance. With the older style, simple injection systems that are user serviceable you only get one pulse per cycle. So you can't really change AFR without compromising torque output. For a tractor, when I set the lever all the way forward I (the operator) expect it to maintain revs sufficient to maintain 540rpm at the PTO unless it is not able to do so (fueling maxed out). Putting more load necessarily means more fuel in for a given RPM, ergo higher AFR. Note that turbocharging changes this equation a little.
There are already open source auto pilot and cruise control implementations for cars. (Not all cars are supported obviously!) so to have this in place for tractors off the road seems very doable.
Well open source AutoSteer exists it has a lot of features like rate control built in to it. The system is called AgOpenGPS it’s very popular for retrofitting older equipment with modern technology.
With high end tractors you can have them drive themselves on the rows based on a GPS map that was created when you planted. That's going to be difficult to retrofit.
The beauty here is even beyond experimentation the tech will change repeatedly over the life of the equipment, and you can cheaply adapt to that. There is very little advantage to the modern tractors, beyond luxuries and the finish of a self contained package. Farmers rarely ime prioritize either of these
OEM can change their mind at any moment and there is always going to be an MBA rubbing their hands together thinking about all the money that can be made.
This needs to be solved at government level with right to repair laws and requirement for open standards instead of believing in magic of "free market".
Now is especially a good time for Canada to do it. Cory Doctorow had a fantastic CBC interview about this. Scrapping anti-tampering protections would harm anti-Canadian tech companies while also building rapport with American farmers who would be able to use Canadian software on their tractors.
I have a hard time imagining that canada has expertise in tractor software. Let's rein our nationalist tendencies in to something that approaches common sense
Canada has the highest percentage of people with higher education. There's no qualifier for that sentence. Canada is the only country on earth where a majority of people over 25 have tertiary education.
It also has a massive agricultural sector. You know how Canada is known as an oil and gas powerhouse? Agriculture is more than double the size of o+g in Canada.
I think the most well educated country on earth, with a massive, highly automated, agricultural sector might be able to reason about tractor software.
Ever-more-restrictive government regulations are what allows these OEMs to ‘leverage’ their market power this way. I am not sure that a new regulation can solve it, as these sorts of mandates don’t seem to have worked in any other market.
The argument isn't 'more' regulations or 'less' regulations, it is the right regulations. The problem is that big companies slowly allow regulations that don't hurt them but do block competition by aggressively fighting regulations that help the startup (their competition) or help the consumer in ways that make them less money. It isn't hard to be evil and create regulatory capture. You don't actually have to be active in crafting regulation, just be active in blocking the right regulation. General statements that are 'against regulation' play into big companies making things worse.
These big companies absolutely allow regulations that "hurt" them. Deere doesn't want to deal with farmers who are pissed off that emissions stuff results in a service call at a bad time and can't be overridden, or obnoxious safety stuff that make products less useful outside of their "textbook" application, or something that forces them to expensively certify their product is XYZ or something.
Buuuuut, the cost of implementing that stuff hurts the competition way more, so Deere and friends don't really fight it.
They're trading absolute market size for stronger control over market share. Less people are going to buy their products at the margin if the products are made worse. But those that do will buy it from them, so more profit.
Those are load-bearing quotation marks: you're saying the regulation doesn't hurt them, only "hurts" them. If the regulation hurt them, they wouldn't allow it.
You're proposing a binary version of "hurt", they are proposing a spectrum. If a regulation hurts company A but it will survive whereas company B, A's main and essentially only competitor stopping A from a monopoly, will go out of business from that regulation, you know that company A won't fight it.
That's a double edged sword. Investors demand a return regardless of what IP law is. They'll invest in the companies that find some way to protect their investment -- NDAs, stronger technical protections, services-models, etc.
You don't have to prioritize them. You can choose to encourage the rich to hoard their money elsewhere. But there are consequences to every policy decision.
The rich don't have money, they have assets, and those assets can't go anywhere. It doesn't matter if the rich buy or sell a farm in Canada, the farm is still in Canada.
> It doesn't matter if the rich buy or sell a farm in Canada, the farm is still in Canada.
Have we learned nothing from what happened to the US's industrial economy.
If you turn the farm into an obviously poor investment it'll go tits up because neither wall street nor main street is dumb enough to invest money into a losing proposition.
Remember that those regulations are written by the OEMs they benefit and whom bribe legislators to pass those regulations.
Any argument made without acknowledging this is purely in bad faith. The problem is not regulation that benefits OEMs. The problem is that you can simply purchase regulations that benefit you.
There are many regulations, written by a variety of actors, often in strange alliances. Safety, environmental, and disclosure regulations are often the culprits behind industry consolidation and oligopolization.
It looks like magic because it works like magic. Surprisingly it is also possible to believe in the magic of "government intervention" though it looks less like magic and more like unintended consequences.
The thing is that not doing anything is still a policy decision. Unless you want to go full bore libertarian there will always be regulation. By saying that the market is magic and the government is intervention, then you ignore all of the intervention exists already and just saying you are fine with it.
Doing nothing and letting the market do whatever is also full of unintended consequences. Your argument is like letting your yard go to weed and accumulate a bunch of knotweed and himalayan blackberry. Yeah you can argue that you didn’t do anything to create that situation but at the end of the day you’re still responsible for it.
There's no magic necessary. TFA highlights the exact mechanism by which markets can fill a gap or need via entrepreneurship when incumbents fail to deliver what customers want. It's not guaranteed to happen or work in every case, but there's money to be made by giving people what they actually want.
A lot of electronics is useful, it can reduce fuel use or help with more accurate driving.
Farmers are just pissed they lose the ability to repair the vehicle easily or get stuck with monthly subscription because tractor company has changed the terms and you are praying they don't change it further.
A modern John Deere tractor with a robust right-to-repair would still be a pain to do maintenance on. A big part of the reason people want old tractors is because they don't have these additional computer controlled systems which break and require time and effort to fix.
It's almost as if freedom only exists for those with the money to hire lawyers to make it happen. Farmers are basically screwed in that their location at the bottom foundation level of society really ties their hands in what they can get away with before things start getting tumultuous. Yet get a few factories under your belt and enshittify, and suddenly it's all "your way or the highway". Odd that.
It would be nice if this could happen more smoothly and rapidly, without some random people having to become experts in tractors from the ground up, and that's what regulations could help with. Say, if it was legal to copy from the best.
But the company in the article isn't filling the gap. Farm owners want the technology. They don't want to be held hostage over the technology when it needs maintenance, repair, or adaptation after the initial sale.
Government regulations weren't necessary for Framework to make the most open laptop product line in history which includes a the 'Pro' 13" laptop chassis which is both backwards and forwards compatible with components that were sold 5 years ago on day 1.
"Downtime — the thing that actually costs a farmer money during planting or harvest — shrinks dramatically when you don’t need a factory technician with a laptop to diagnose a fuel delivery problem."
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Tractors aren't cars. It isn't merely inconvenient if they are unavailable at crucial times, so ease of repair is critical. Farmers have always done as much of their own maintenance as possible. John Deere has spent a lot of time taking away the reliability and ease of repair that farmers need in order to give them "advanced" features they don't need.
Farmers who want advanced capabilities might now look to build them on top of no-tech tractors with open-source solutions rather than trusting John Deere again. That way, if the "would be nice" tech has problems they can rip it off and get the harvest in without it.
> Farmers have always done as much of their own maintenance as possible.
Well, sure. Maintenance is an off-season job. Its that or sit on the couch watching TV, so you may as well be in the shop getting equipment ready. Even if it takes you longer than an experienced tech, does it really matter? Not really. The winters are long.
Repairs are a different story. When things break, you need it fixed now. Wasting a day trying to figure out how to separate complex, seized parts from each other isn't time you have. You're going to be hiring a mechanic who has done it a million times before.
Of course, more important than who does the work is part availability. Having the human capacity to get something fixed means nothing if you cannot also get the parts you need. I've certainly been caught more than once needing to wait a week on a part, which is not a fun place to be. And this is where John Deere has focused their business: Doing more to keep parts available near to where the farmers are, so that you can get parts exactly when you need them. This is, above all else, why John Deere is the market leader.
> Farmers who want advanced capabilities might now look to build them on top of no-tech tractors with open-source solutions
I have been going down this road and am starting to regret it a bit. The saving grace is that I have found enjoyment in building a system of my own. But if I found it to be a chore, at this point I'd have deep remorse that I didn't just pay someone like John Deere for a fully delivered, highly polished solution. I know the HN crowd tends towards the DIY, but, having actual experience here, I don't see this happening outside of the small subset of farmers who find fun in it. It is a decent hobby for those so inclined, but from a purely commercial perspective the time and effort can be better put to use elsewhere.
If you maintain your stuff you know enough to fix some things and you know when you can't and need to call a mechanic (or a friend who knows more and can do it).
You can fix things, but can you really justify the time to do when you need an operational machine?
1. No matter how great of a shade tree mechanic you are, you will never be able to fix it faster than someone who does it every day. They have found all the little tricks and quirks about your machine that your casual maintenance will never uncover.
2. While large farms with full-time mechanics on staff have been known to make deals to warehouse parts in their own shop on consignment, much more realistically for any kind of normal farm you are going to have to drive to the dealership to get the parts you need. Whereas the dealership tech can bring the parts to you. Meaning that you have to travel twice as far, taking twice as long, to get the parts back to your equipment than if you call a mechanic.
The things that are likely to fail under use where there has been proper maintenance tend to be the things that are unpredictable and catastrophic, at very least requiring parts, and most likely requiring advanced knowhow. And at that point, the dealership tech is going to be faster at getting you back up and running, even if you could theoretically pull it off yourself. So, realistically, there isn't much of a compelling case for doing your own repairs when time is of the essence.
Farmers are often willing to accept more downtime to do it themselves out of pride, though. I admittedly often fall victim to that myself, so I get it. But it’s clear that the farmers who are serious about farming as a business aren’t dinking around trying to fix things themselves. It is not economically prudent to do so. Granted, not all farmers farm for business sake. For many it’s more of a hobby or lifestyle and wanting to be a part-time mechanic can play into that.
This is probably not this companies vision but it does seem interesting if companies sell "dumb" machines and then consumers can BYO electronics. Like an agricultural version of comma.ai.
Not sure how much appetite there is for that but half price + 5 grand in off the shelf electronics seems like something margin sensitive farmers would do.
Reminds me of how I don’t ever want an infotainment system in my car. I want the peripherals: a touch screen and speakers. I’ll supply my own phone to do the rest.
I disagree. While those are great points, I don't think that's the primary reason -- and maybe we're actually saying the same thing.
This tractor will last 50 years (and maybe more). Your grandchildren will be able to still use it. That longevity is the primary reason farmers would be super interested in this.
Some jobs (like mucking a barn for example) don't require a high-tech tractor. Sometimes you just need a workhorse that you can trust will start, run and do the job. Every single time. I still see farmers running old minneapolis-moline tractors from 100 years ago!
My in-laws use a Farm-all H around the yard for a lot of tasks. I don’t know what year it was made, but it looks like they were made from 1939-1954. It just… runs. We basically just do oil changes on it.
That’s part of the issue. But packing a tractor (or car) with electronics and computers does make it inherently harder to work on—even if it’s not locked down.
You need electronics and computers for cost-effective compliance with emissions requirements. Emissions limits have been one of the most positive government policies in my lifetime, saving millions of QALYs.
There's lots of other electronics in most modern vehicles, but the public manufacturer rationales for electronic lockdowns almost always point back to emissions concerns because they're so defensible. How do you separate them?
These are regulations, not laws, and can be changed fairly easily. E.g the EPA recently changed the rules requiring NOx sensors and power downs, which were the most failure prone components of the system, while still mandating the actual equipment that scrubs NOx.
There's no particular reason why a mechanical device needs computers for emissions, as the emissions removing components can still be attached and managed via simpler means. All emissions removing components are effectively physical devices, whether you are talking about carbon filters or PCV valves or particulate filters or the urea fluids that are added to the fuel. None of them requires complex software in order to function. There is no reason why you need to buy an official John Deere branded emissions component that is software locked to tractor and costs 10x the price of third party components that do the same thing.
Also, there is a large room to maneuver between "I want a sensor with some circuitry in it" and "the entire tractor is a proprietary computer with locked down parts". The right to repair movement is not about removing tech, but removing unnecessary proprietary tech that is designed to prevent owners of devices from repairing those devices themselves or with third party components.
Perhaps this is naive, but I would imagine that farm equipment is a rounding error in terms of global emissions. Compare the number of tractors to the number of trucks...
I would have expected policy to be pragmatic here, with (relatively) relaxed emissions requirements, since an affordable and reliable food supply is in the national interest? Sounds like that's not the case
Emissions regimes are complicated, but US tractors fall into the much less restrictive off-road category. As a result, they're a disproportionately significant contributor to things like NOx. A long time ago the off-road category was >20%, and I'm sure that percentage has only grown as regulations have forced emissions reductions in onroad vehicles.
The vast majority of offroad equipment is not farm equipment but operates in urban environments. As NOx is an air pollution concern, there should be different regimes for rural areas versus urban areas. Construction equipment operating in urban areas is different from a tractor on a farm.
I'd imagine it depends what kind of emissions you're measuring? Are we talking air quality or climate change?
Two stroke engines are pretty terrible in terms of unburned hydrocarbons and are disgusting for local air quality, which is why I'm glad they're being phased out in many areas.
I'd expect these tractors with I6 diesel engines to run pretty efficiently. I'd bet that the CO2 emissions from tractors are tiny in comparison from the emissions from trucks, fertiliser, and transporting the food.
Lawnmowers are usually four-stroke, with two-stroke engines reserved for lighter tools like string trimmers and chainsaws.
I would still guess that lawnmowers produce more emissions overall, given that there are so many more mowers than tractors. But they get used less often than tractors, so who knows? Either way, I agree with your thinking process, that the most economical way to reduce overall emissions is to focus on what are actually producing the bulk of emissions.
I don't know how much better cars and trucks can get, and for mowers maybe electric is the answer. Mine is gas-powered, and I know it runs rich. I would love to come inside after mowing and not smell like fuel, so I'm in favor of better emissions controls on mowers.
For tools electric is the answer. To take a chainsaw, the battery needs to be replaced just as often as with refilling the fuel tank. And with newer batteries you might recharge the depleted one as fast as discharging a fresh one. Not sure, just an assumption.
my brother in Christ, electric chainsaws are garbage, have you ever used one? I tried one out to clear a huge 3 foot wide tree that fell on my property and yeah those things cannot hang with gas powered chainsaws in any way, shape, or form. No one is using electric chainsaws for cutting anything significant.
they may have a place in the distant future but in 2026, aint no way.
I haven't used a chainsaw in a few years, but the last time I did, electric ones with a cord were great. I switched from a proper Stihl chainsaw to a budget electric one with a cord, and despite it being smaller and sort of flimsy, it did cut like crazy, comparable to the gas chainsaw. And it didn't require ear protection, didn't annoy the neighbors and didn't make you smell like a chainsaw for two days.
I like the electric saw for limbing and felling small stuff because it's light and quiet but yeah for anything bigger than like 9" or extended work it's not the tool for the job.
defeat devices aren't even complicated (they just fake the sensor data to ECU to get what owner needs). Locking down is pointless. Most people are not tuning their cars.
IF we wanted to do it properly, I'd imagine we'd have zero mandatory locks on ECU, just a little closed down black box with sensor installed in relatively tamper-proof way (of course there will always be one, the target is for 90% of people to not bother), logging away and maybe sending check engine light if it detects wrong AFR for too long.
Then you just check that on yearly MOT + any signs of tampering. Then owner is free to tune the engine as they want, provided the exhaust is still within the norms for most of the time.
What would you be accomplishing by trying to control end user behavior like that? As a manufacturer, there are certain standards your machine must meet when it leaves your factory. After that, a whole separate set of standards applies to users--e.g. EPA rules about emissions equipment tampering. As a manufacturer, though, you don't need to attempt enforcement. Leave that to the government, it's their job. Locked down, proprietary hardware and software doesn't ultimately achieve enforcement, it just makes tampering more difficult at the cost of serviceability. This is a dumb trade.
It's to contain the regulation into little box that controls the emission, rather than span it to entire system making it harder to repair. Then the EPA can have its "proof" the vehicle emissions are fine without compromising entire system for repairs.
I think you're asking for something magical, like when politicians go on TV and demand safe cryptosystems with government backdoors. Any time you try to do engineering work to hinder users from using devices they own it's a really bad time. That's the purview of law enforcement, not engineering.
Mandate common interfaces and open hardware. I shouldn't have to buy a $10k dongle to sniff codes. I certainly shouldn't have to buy a different one for each manufacturer.
The legislation has to be robust. No dice if the dongle is generic and $20 like OBD2 in cars, but that on top of that there's a per-manufacturer set of codes that only licensed dealers have access to the software to read those special codes.
The situation today is at least better than it used to be before OBDII. I much prefer using a scanner to get codes then having to count flashing lights. And back then you'd still have to pay a lot for the manufacturer's code reader. The only advantage was the ROM was small enough to disassemble and reflash with new features. I would not want to do that on a car made in 2026.
Most of the codes on a large tractor are j1939. You still want the manufacture database because it often says 'x sensor voltage out of range - check the wiring harness in some not obvious location'
How do you define "electronics" and "computers"? Is a general-purpose computer running Java in the same category as a microcontroller running a tight loop with lookup tables for fuel and spark?
The problem: Once you have a microcontroller running a tight loop with lookup tables for fuel and spark, it's very tempting to make it run a tight loop with lookup tables for fuel, spark, and time since license renewal - and there's no outward difference between the two microcontrollers until one of them stops working. This is where regulations can help: if a manufacturer is afraid of a zillion dollar fine, they won't do that, even if the chance of getting caught is low.
While I agree in principle, we went two or more decades with cars powered by microcontrollers, and I don't recall any manufacturers trying to charge for licenses until more recently. There is something fundamentally different about the economy we are now in, I suspect.
I think the difference is that in the past, companies expected to be punished for obviously evil behavior, but now, they know they can go very far. Toyota got punished for stuck accelerators. Would they get punished for the same thing today? Tesla had stuck accelerators and we all forgot about it.
They're still pushing the boundary today. The Ring Superbowl ad where they announced they're watching you (but they said "your dog") 24/7 apparently got a lot of people to quit Ring, and you know they're crunching the numbers to see if the retention rate is worth the extra surveillance collection.
They charge for the diagnostic systems. Bigly. For example, Mercedes-Benz's Star Diagnostic System (SDS) is necessary for a variety of repairs and diagnostic procedures. There are varying degrees of workarounds and alternatives but none of them work quite right, or for every model/year/variant. It's not just the embedded system, it's also the interface to it. That's where the really ugly rent seeking crops up. And that's precisely why a tractor with no computers is attractive--not because the embedded software might try to ransom itself (although that's a reasonable fear) but because some horrible rent seeking corporate functionary will do their utmost to cheat you (or your mechanic) out of as much money as possible when it comes time to do any maintenance or diagnostic testing. No computers means that little bastard can fuck right off.
Exactly. Electronically controlled unit injectors are expensive--like 10x the price of mechanical ones. They're super cool, they can produce like 10 separate metered injection events per cycle. This is great for efficiency, noise, emissions, etc. But I can rebuild mechanical injectors with a bottle jack pop tester I made from $100 worth of parts and a bench vise. There's no wiring harness, no computer.. If the injector is getting fuel, has decent spray pattern, and is popping at the right pressure I know for certain the fuel system is good. With an electronic common rail system I need some expensive proprietary computer equipment to diagnose it, and there's no way I can build a test bench to rebuild those injectors.
You can't build a test bench to rebuild current OEM's electronic common rail injector systems that rely on expensive proprietary computer equipment, but there's no reason that has to be the case.
With a $20 CAN transceiver, documentation and/or config files from the manufacturer, and a bit of Python or something, you could absolutely bench test those electronic injectors. You might even be able to pick your injection events and adjust the metering, supporting the equipment as it ages. I'd love to see Ursa Ag put in a Megasquirt engine controller [1] or Proteus [2] or similar. You can run TunerStudio on a Raspberry Pi and show it on a touchscreen on the dash.
It's possible to build user-friendly, inexpensive and open engine and vehicle controls. You don't need to have zero electronics to not have locked-down proprietary electronics, you just need to build the electronics in the right way.
Controls are one thing, but there's also the problem of generating 20k psi of oil pressure and some thousands of pounds of continuous common rail fuel pressure to actuate the injector. Compared with older MW, M, P, etc. styles it's a whole different beast. Also, we're talking past each other a little--I'm talking about diesel injectors, you're talking about otto cycle equipment ;)
Surely there’s room for a middle ground. There are plenty of 1990s-era engines that were excellent designs, had no meaningful connectivity to anything except their own ECUs, and could be produced new for not very much money. Some of them were quite modular, too — I know someone who took the drivetrain out of a salvaged Honda Civic and built an entire car (with no resemblance whatsoever to a Civc) around it.
If a tractor with a clean-burning, efficient $7500k engine could be purchased and were designed around the theory that, in 20 years or so, the owner could reasonably quickly replace the entire engine (with a first-party or aftermarket solution), would that be a good solution?
The common tech that has solved these problems nicely (IMO) is network transceivers: SFP and similar modules are built according to multi-source agreements. They contain all kinds of exotic tech, and they are not intended to be serviced at all, but (unless your switch or NIC has an utterly stupid lockout) you can pull it out and replace it with an equivalent part from a different vendor in seconds, and those parts can be unbelievably inexpensive considering what’s in them. (Single-mode bidirectional 1Gbps transceivers are $11 or less, retail, in qty 2. This is INSANE compared the the first time I lit up a 1Gbps SMF link. To be fair, this particular tech may require one to replace both ends if one fails, but if you can spare a second fiber, the fully IEEE-spec-compliant interoperable ones are even less expensive.)
It's not the craziest idea. A tractor is basically just a big hydraulic pump driving a bunch of linear and rotary actuators (commonly called "motors" and "cylinders"). Especially if it's got a hydrostatic transmission. If you design it in such a way that it's relatively easy to adapt different clutches and bell housings, maybe with a little driveshaft and u-joint between the clutch and the pump, you could theoretically accomplish something like this.
However one major sticking point is that (often.. maybe always?) the engine block casting is actually a structural component of the tractor "frame". Unlike e.g. a truck that has its driveline mounted between frame rails, a tractor's "frame" is its driveline . So this might add quite a bit of complexity and cost.
Eh to henerate a decent nozzle takes some precision lazer drilling (e.g.trumpf) or edm drilling (e.g posalux)and some grinding + a quality test bench. Its not that easy having good lowtech solutions either.
Yeah you're definitely gonna want to purchase nozzles. They're extremely precise and manufactured to very high tolerances. I've rebuilt plenty of 30+yr old injectors and haven't yet been unable to find newly manufactured or new old stock nozzles though.
EDIT: I did have some nozzles bored out a little bit once by a shop with EDM equipment. Terrible results, not worth it.
Note that that OEM would still have to deal with the minefield of patents created by the John Deere's of the world. I once worked for a company that had to work around an electronic circuit patent to detect a pulse. That was it, that was all it did. But if you used a standard differentiator circuit to detect the pulse created by a optical sensor watching for falling seeds you would violate the patent.
So a prerequisite might involve fixing the patent system...
It goes much deeper than that. The John Deere ecosystem is designed to trap farmers using a combination of the closed ecosystem and financing. They've been at it for years, selling precision agriculture advances as the thing that will maximize all yields and turn profits, and then following up with economic manipulations to create what amounts to tech-enabled sharecropping.
Do you work in the agricultural industry? Farm equipment is expensive, farmers will maintain the equipment as long as possible, which is a long time. Manufactures such as John Deere have tried to make it not possible for farmers to do self repair.
John Deere has lost so much good will among farmers due to their lock-in efforts, it's wild. Unfortunately, many farmers are stuck with them because the only tractor dealership within a reasonable distance is John Deere.
>> However, the tech exists for a reason and is not inherently bad, the issue is the lock-in, the lack of choice and interoperability.
The marketing excuse for the tech might be features or efficiency, but the reason for the tech is lock-in and minimising product lifetime.
The days when manufacturers had friendly, cooperative relationships with their customers are long gone :( Can we bring them back? I hope so, but am not hopeful.
> However, the tech exists for a reason and is not inherently bad, the issue is the lock-in, the lack of choice and interoperability.
The problem is computers and software enable lock-in, because of their flexibility and communications capability. Get rid of them, and you make lock-in much more difficult (or even impossible if you use "standard" parts).
Also, computers and software are complex, and that complexity is not physically visible. If you want something you can completely understand, it's probably a good choice to simplify by cutting them out completely.
There's some nuance here. If you care about fuel consumption or emissions, then EFI is the current best way to reduce both, and that requires "computers and software" to operate on the timescales required. I put scare quotes around those terms because you can do EFI on an Arduino, which is at least an order of magnitude more powerful than what automakers shipped in the 80s.
In any case, EFI gives you more control over the engine and vastly simplifies the overall product. I don't know if you've seen the mechanical fuel-injection pumps used by tractor diesels; they are basically tiny engines unto themselves, with their own little block and camshaft [0]. There is an entire world of diesel performance modding with a subset of it dedicated to modifying the Bosh P1700 mechanical fuel-injection pump to change timings, handle higher RPMs, and run higher pressures. I would not call it, or its carburetor cousin in the gasoline world, "simple" compared to computer-controlled fuel delivery.
An open-source ECU project, on the other hand, enabled a hacker to implement Koenigsegg's Freevalve tech on a Miata [1].
The best analogy that I can think of is cruise control on a car.
Do you need it? No. Is it nice to have? Yes.
The strict "no tech" premise of these tractors feels comparable to someone disabling the cruise control feature on their own car because they read an article about BMW locking heated seats behind a subscription.
I don't know much about tractors, but I would think that surely there are some modern benefits that these Ursa tractors are missing out?
However, the article claims that they're selling really well, so maybe at that price point the tradeoffs are still worth it.
Ultimately the “lock in” boils down to “when this breaks someone has to pay to fix it”. Automation and tech makes the galaxy of things that can break much larger, and the pinpointing of “who should pay to fix this” much harder. “Lock in” feels like an attempt to simplify toward “only we can fix it”, with the downsides of cost and time.
Maybe not inherently bad, but clearly not inherently necessary or useful if they're already getting so many inquiries from farmers. Could just be that the tech doesn't offer enough meaningful value when the core mechanical functionality can be achieved at a lower price.
What if an OEM did the IBM thing and published open specs and software, spawning a whole industry? It's a shame the incentives don't seem to be there for it.
It's not only the lock-in, as the document says, its about limiting the downtime.
Sailboats have the similar issue:
When are are in the middle of the pacific and get an egine problem, you want the engine to be low tech enough to be able to fix, or at least patch, yourself with minimum parts.
Yanmar switched its whole lineup of engines to ECU around 2014, but the one without ECU are very much sought after for the above reason.
Unfortunately it's doomed as soon as you read "startup". Why? There are two possible outcomes:
1. This fails, goes away and we're back where we started; or
2. They take the bag and sell to John Deere, who then locks down the tractors in the same way to force you to buy support, official parts and so on. And that'll happen. It's a bait-and-switch so somebody can get rich.
The only solution to this is collective ownership or some other non-profit structure so a handful of owners can't sell out and cash in.
Look to Spain's Mondragon Corporation [1] for inspiration.
3. JD buys them, competition works, others notice they can just "build a tractor that's simple", and suddenly there are more competitors to choose from. JD still can't compete, and can't buy them all...or operate on small margins.
For the farmers I know the price tag is the first thing they were looking at. So much grumbling about how Deere is using software to egregiously pad the price tag. Looking at a tractor that is going to take 5 or 6 years to pay off instead of 15 is tempting. Sadly Trump is absolutely going to slap a 400% tariff on these if they are even allowed to be imported.
I want this for cars but to keep the modern powertrain. So an EV without the tracking/touch screens, etc etc. Or an internal combustion engine car that is just simple and efficient (and again, no tracking). I'll take the low-tech but nice features like heated seats and power windows still thank you.
I'd love this. I really don't want my car to be an iPhone with "apps" and random background software on it. The car touchscreen was perhaps the worst design choice in the history of the automobile, and is likely the cause of countless crashes. It's insane when I see car UIs that have the 'cancel / go back' button located in DIFFERENT areas depending on the screen context.
I always thought of it this way: software engineering/UI/UX to most car companies is a cost center. Something to be minimized, workers to be provided minimal resources and pay. The compensation is not competitive with what you’d find at a tech company, but they’re hiring from the same talent pool.
The effect of this is obvious and felt in the end product.
I favor my 2018 car with knobs and buttons but has car and android auto and a modern turbo inline 4...just wish it had metal valve covers and coolant joints instead of crappy plastic...
The irony is cars got screens largely due to the backup camera mandate which was intended to be a safety feature. Governments are very bad at understanding unintended consequences.
- The mandate is for rear visibility. Car manufacturers choose to implement it with the back-up camera. Beyond that, it's obviously safer to be able to see everything behind the vehicle.
- My vehicle has a backup camera with a screen, but has physical buttons for all controls (A/C, audio system). There's no reason cars can't have both.
Specifically, 10 feet by 20 feet directly behind the vehicle. I'm actually curious how this could be achieved with only mirrors. That's a pretty big swath for anything with a viewpoint where the driver is sitting.
> My vehicle has a backup camera with a screen
Early implementations just used a screen in the rearview mirror. No need for any kind of infotainment screen.
Nah, it was relatively common on base models that did not have a head unit with a screen, and that definitely includes Hondas and Toyotas, for example. The most common type of vehicle to use such a setup were pickups. For Toyota, the Taco and Tundra are the only vehicles I can think of which used an in-mirror screen. Honda did it in the base model CR-Z. Ford, Chevy, and RAM did it on their trucks.
my 2011 F150 has a rear view mirror backup display, and it's quite nice.
It's there when the truck is in reverse and otherwise just a normal mirror.
Early 2010s actually seems like a sweet spot for a lot of automotive tech - it's decent enough, but "mobile" wasn't really a thing yet, and bandwidth was expensive, so there's no assumption that everything should be an app phoning home yet (iPhone was still brand new).
When it already has a screen it's much cheaper to get rid of the buttons then. The screen as a requirement is priced in whereas the buttons are not and thus cut.
I last had that on a (rented) Fiat 500: the "standard" controls (including the monochrome LCD in the instrument panel) looked really clunky and old-fashioned, and all the advanced features (audio, navigation, mobile phone connectivity, not sure if it had a backup camera) were via the (third party, Pioneer) entertainment system which was state-of-the-art with a nice high-res touchscreen. That's probably because this was the more expensive version of the car, I guess the "basic" version only has a radio - no navigation, no backup camera, no nothing. Not sure if it's the same principle at work at Toyota, I haven't driven one in a while?
I tried a 2025 Ford Maverick for a year before I traded it for the Tacoma. All the AC/Heat/Etc controls were on the screen. Couldn't stand it. Put me off of ever considering a new Ford again.
Not all screens are touchscreens. Manufacturers complied with those regs without touchscreens for years. My 2012 mitsubishi's reverse camera is displayed in the rear view mirror; the head unit is a dead simple dot matrix display which I adore.
It's the regulations (or lack thereof) that allow touchscreens in cars as they are that should be the target of ire. Reverse camera regulations or not, the current state of touchscreen car rubbish was inevitable without the existence and enforcement of regulations addressing it.
The EPA push for fuel efficiency made it easier to hit targets by selling huge trucks instead of small cars.
There is a value in safety regulation but the incentives as legislated have led to negative results. It needs to be fixed or repealed. Not sure there's a clean solution here.
> Bring the apps you know and love to create the experience you want. Instead of a bulky, distracting, and quickly outdated infotainment system, a Slate can come with something simpler: a smartly designed mount that fits a phone or tablet and a holder for a portable Bluetooth speaker. Heating and air conditioning are included, no need to bring your own fan.
> Your Slate will age gracefully, because it’ll always have the latest tech—yours.
Slate are trying to cut cost everywhere they can to provide the cheapest barebones EV truck possible. My Volvo EX30 also lacks door speakers and while it's not top tier it's fine tbh. Volvo just put a giant speaker bar across the base of the windshield.
it seems like Slate might be trying that but there's no real cars from them yet so they're just renders at this point. but yes, same concept but printers is my wish.
There is a golden era of cars, say 5 to 10 years ago that have things like heated seats but no tracking.
Personally I have a 2019 Mazda 3 which has camera vision all around, radar cruise control and heated seats but no lane assist bumping you around or a cellular connection relaying any information.
The only anti feature it has is that stupid idle stop, but that’s easy to permanently disable. It also has car play but doesn’t have a touch screen.
Anyway I’m not saying you should get this car specially but there are cars out there that are like what you want.
FWIW: Hyundai EVs have physical buttons for everything important. It has a screen for CarPlay but it’s small compared to competitors. (I got the Kona for these reasons)
As much as I and (probably) most other consumers agree with you, I don't think the car insurance industry does. Very similarly to how governments being buyers of data from adtech companies makes it an impossibility for governments to enact good privacy laws, there are massive perverse incentives here that place too much money on the table for good things to ever happen; car manufacturers want to gatekeep the sale of our data to insurance companies and governments, insurance companies want to lobby for laws that mandate data collection so that more claims can be denied and profit can rise, and governments are happy to enforce data collection because it strengthens their surveilance mechanisms.
The problem is that the difference between a low tech and a high tech diesel tractor is mostly emissions and some loss of efficiency. The difference between a low tech and a high tech electric car is a 25 mile range and a 250 mile range, a top speed of 35 mph and 100 mph, carrying capacity and so on.
I recently did a lawn tractor conversion from gas to electric and what I got was in my opinion significantly better and more reliable than a commercial option at 20% of the price but it is limited to 4mph. Scaling it to 5 would require a lot of custom fabrication and a much more expensive drive motor. Once this tech is significantly better and cheaper to the point of being a commodity it will be a different story. For now it just isn’t.
It's an EV, so what little nose it has is probably all crumple zone (as opposed to having a big ol' engine in the way. Popping the hood on most EVs is pretty funny, actually, because of how little there is under there.
I know nothing about automobile design, but the Smart Fortwo [1] seemed to solve this problem just fine (IIRC they had a very good NCAP safety rating).
Modern cars evolved in terms of safety, this includes active safety too. All the safety features require OEM hardware/software that locks you in, for example replacing windshield in many models requires dealership calibration.
And with all the distracted drivers looking into their phones while driving, I want more and more cars to get at least emergency breaking systems.
> All the safety features require OEM hardware/software that locks you in...
I'm unclear whether you're stating the current state of affairs, or arguing that such safety features cannot exist without this lock in.
If it's the latter, you may have missed the point. GP was clear they want modern safety and powertrain, just without the tracking.
None of the safety features you mention require the manufacturer to harvest and sell personal data — that's a separate choice OEMs have made, not a technical prerequisite.
I was stating current state of affairs. I don't think the point is only about avoiding tracking and personal data harvesting. My 10 years old Honda has emergency breaking and lane assist and it's not connected to the internet, nor I'm servicing it at the dealership to be concerned about data harvesting. I still couldn't enable the system after replacing broken windshield - I had to get it to the dealership so they could re-enable the safety system.
People who says this never even consider Nissan Leaf. "Because the charging..." or whatever.
So consumers DO want all-touchscreen disposable cars like Tesla - it's similar to how disposable phones had replaced phones with removable batteries(even among IP rated phones). Wallets vote strongly against consumers.
I would have considered a Leaf but they have NMC batteries. Also, the earlier versions had terrible battery cooling issues. Give me a Leaf with an LFP and I would buy one.
There are many different NMC battery chemistries, and they are still evolving. It's likely that whatever you think would be a problem (because NMC) wouldn't actually be a problem for you. But yes, the first two generations of the Leaf weren't exactly great EVs and there's a lot of FUD and missing based just on the Leaf.
I've been dreaming of doing an EV conversion on my 2008 Honda Civic that I barely even drive. No cellular radio, no OTA updates, no touchscreen. I lack the mechanical skills and time though, and I'm not aware of people in my area that do conversions as a service for anything but like high end classic cars(which a Honda sedan is not).
I own a base model 2020 Suzuki Swift GL, which I specifically bought because it has no touchscreen. It has a radio with Bluetooth and dials - that is it.
I wonder if we'll see a repeat of what happened in the 60's and 70's: American car companies didn't want to make small and cheap fuel efficient cars, so an upstart (Japanese automakers) came in with exactly that and stole their lunch money.
These days, the big foreign manufacturers are all in the same game as the domestic ones - software nonsense. Tariffs are keeping other foreign competition out at the moment, so it'd have to be a new domestic manufacturer, or an existing one who deviates from the standard auto playbook.
Seeing all the gigantic and very-high-priced Pavement Princess Pickups clogging dealer lots, it's plain that the auto industry in general didn't learn a damn thing. It's easy to point fingers in all directions, but it always ends up that we get the worst outcomes.
People are brainwashed into thinking a pickup truck is the only practical car even though it's the opposite. It's not just EPA regulations, it's what people want.
It can be built but it wouldn't be legal to sell commercially. Closest thing would be a kit car (which I've always felt haven't scaled as much as they theoretically could)
Citation needed. What law requires tracking software, touch screens, and vendor-lock-in for automobiles? I disbelieve there is anything preventing the commercial sale so long as it has the minimum safety standards and roadworthiness. Costs money to get everything certified, but it doesn't have to also be enshittified.
I honestly don't care about power windows (or seats), do you really? I guess one advantage is being able to easily open windows other than your own.
Heated seats and stearing wheel, yes please.
But yep what I want is a Saab 900 "cockpit" car -- everything can be focused on and manipulated (physically!) without my eyes leaving the road or my hand having to explore too much.
1. LOVE this idea as I've always been a big fan of "right to repair" and even at work, FinTech SRE/DevOps, I say things like "we want this to be like a 1975 Ford: you open the hood, look inside, understand it and it's easy to fix. We don't want a 2026 Ferrari."
2. The Econ major/MBA in me wonders how long you can sell cheaper tractors that last forever. I say this b/c it's like trying to sell 100 year lightbulbs: markets are not infinite so if you have everyone buy them in years 1-10, what do you sell after that? The general idea is that you charge MORE for these things since a. "easy to repair" is now an added feature, b. people will buy less of your thing so you need to make more money upfront.
Granted, there is probably some sweet spot and/or "even selling 1,000 == a couple million and that's enough for anyone" but I still like to debate the points
On the econ Point I think you’d still have someone come in and undercut it. If you can steal a big share of a 10 year market then it could make sense for a lean startup as a once off sprint even if you know after that it’s dead.
The bulb stuff was a cartel not normal functional markets.
Point #2 ought to be good reason for us to move past our archaic consumption-based economies into something where less consumption isn't considered a "problem."
You probably can’t sell tractors forever but that’s short-sighted: you can sell parts and service that’s reasonably priced. People don’t just refuse to buy OEM parts on principle, they do it because the prices are often outrageous and/or the procedure to do so sucks and/or is arbitrarily restrictive like needing dealer licenses or what have you.
And just because a tractor is low tech and designed to run forever doesn’t mean it won’t still need parts and service. Time comes for us all and that includes your wheel bearings, bushings and seals.
Late to the party here, so I don't expect this to get a lot of traction, but I'd like to point out that part of the reason this hasn't existed until recently as an option in the US is because it's functionally illegal for it to exist.
> The 12-valve Cummins is arguably the most widely understood diesel engine in North America. Every independent shop, every shade-tree mechanic with a set of wrenches, every farmer who grew up turning bolts has encountered one.
That's great! I'd point out the 12 valve wasn't introduced until the 90s, but that's kind of immaterial -- it's as simple to work on as any other mechanically injected analog diesel is and they were in widespread use for nearly a century before that. One immediately wonders why we moved away from these and towards more complex options, and why this startup has to remanufacture old engines instead of sourcing new engines. The answer among those of us who care about right to repair tends to be "evil corporations want to make proprietary systems that require ongoing fees!" which is true for John Deere, but also, the EPA mandated DEF/DPF systems + limp modes on all farm equipment since 2014, and the new relaxed standards include complicated rules about what percentage into limp mode they go at different intervals during different periods of time after those notoriously unreliable systems start to have errors. You can't do that without modern ECUs!
I'm all for reducing the harm caused by running diesel engines in the most densely populated cities on the planet (DEF and similar systems are about particulate emissions, not carbon), but we're being naive if we pretend that extending these regulations to farm equipment isn't a huge factor in why that same equipment has gotten more expensive and less reliable over the past decade.
I wish someone would do this for the pickup truck market. Lol, like make a truck for people that actually want to use it just for hauling things. Kind of like trucks used to be in the 1960's and 1970's. Not the modern ones that are more like a luxury SUV that happens to have a tiny truck bed in the back.
I've been musing with friends that this is a growing and untapped market. Not merely for analog-only tractors or heavy machinery, but for stripped-down/basic machinery in general. EVs eschewing the myriad of sensors and driver assists that talk back to the cloud in favor of cruise control, local cameras, and a double-din slot for aftermarket head units; cars built for simplicity of ownership and maintenance rather than service revenue extraction; computers that get work done and turn off after, rather than constantly phoning home with cloud accounts and telemetry.
It's nice to see this company doing well for itself so quickly, and I hope they deliver on every promise made while reaping immense success. At the very least, it'd send a clear and unambiguous message that the market for simplicity is there and desperate for products that cater to it.
I wonder how sustainable the business model is. Eventually, you saturate the market with your tractors, and if they work as advertised, they are owned and maintained for decades. A lot of people are out there farming with 60-80 year old tractors. I would suspect most of the OEM parts that need replacing are where most wear and tear is happening (the engine). Those parts come from Cummins, not this startup.
In the meantime, they have to maintain a very high fixed cost base in their factory, distribution network, and skilled unionized workforce. I'm really not even asking about how will they maximize shareholder dividends, I just mean how do you not go bankrupt after you sell your first 10,000 tractors.
The disincentive to provide a durable product is unfortunate. Ideally businesses pair high-ticket one-time sales with low-cost recurring sales of related products and services.
Must we sell more than 10,000? That seems like a reasonable check for a small business to take home and go solve some other problem for someone.
The thing is, your reputation will get out there. Folks will want to work with you because of who you are; it'll be profitable (in many ways) even if it isn't a 100-year dynasty.
So lay off thousand of employees, shutter a factory, close dozens of distribution centers. Degrowth has real world consequences for real world people, and sustainability is generally good.
Prior to the idea of planned obsolescence and vendor lock-in / maintenance revenue once you saturate a market the pivot would be to use that infrastructure and expertise to enter other markets. They could still sell tractors but there's tons of other stuff they could make and sell as well, like maybe much smaller tractors for one.
> The farm equipment industry spent 20 years adding complexity and cost. Ursa Ag is wagering that a significant number of farmers never wanted any of it.
Nice tag line but not a complete picture. The "significant number of farmers" in terms of actual market spend driving the equipment industry is not mom-and-pop outfits but rather agri-industrial complexes with machines to match. What they want is (1) availability and (2) ROI. For (1), that is first and foremost subject to legal stipulations like EPA etc, then secondly subject to production availability. For (2), electronics are the name of the game if you are looking to turn a profit with farming because counting every seed, measuring every drop of chem, and tracking every inch of plotted ground leads to better ROI.
Farming is a way of life for a lot of people, not just a business. That’s what is missing from your picture. And by population, small time farmers significantly outnumber industrial outfits, regardless of how much they spend. Sure you can make more money selling the most advanced tech to the biggest spenders. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a market for affordable, reliable equipment that gets the job done. Add on the risky nature of farming and its untenable to trap yourself in high 6 figures of debt and pray that you can optimize your way to enough profit to pay the interest.
Fancy gains in ROI come from smart seeder/sprayer attachments and combine harvesters (a completely different piece of machinery), not from the tractor that's pulling those equipment. At best there's the ROI from less seed overlap, but plenty of GPS systems integrate well into any tractor and the gains are really marginal. I don't think tractor electronics are as important as they're hyped up to be.
This is the way if we can ensure manufacturing of the parts. It won’t catch on but it would be awesome to have “base” tractors that are mechanical and predictable. Then you slap on whatever software on top that helps (automation, etc). But they need to be decoupled imo.
i have a farmall hand cranked tractor, going on 90 years old, so far its been rubber parts, and clutch pads.
as far as auto mation goes, thats how implements used to work. it was a tracter/thresher/combine. then a bale counter is slapped on then maybe row sighting or guidance, etc.
if your really snazzy, the implement is actually mapping the soil for moisture, or rough composistion and holding data to use in reformulating or notating your current cultural plans, i.e. supplemental spot feeding and irrigation.
I still got a farmall 230, super easy to fix and maintain and works perfect for my small bit of land. An electric starter addon is really nice for winter starts though instead of killing your arm.
While I’m not at all surprised that they’re still running, I am a little surprised at how many Farm-all owners are on HN. Farm-all H owner checking in :)
And how many acres are you farming on it? Today's world of agriculture is much higher tech-based (for many good reasons, primarily yield) than back in the horse and buggy days of farming.
I know of a forklift that's pushing 80 and still used in a lumber yard (i.e. a material handling centric workplace)
Other than ~30min it takes to teach an employee to drive manual it doesn't do anything worse than the modern ones it works alongside and it does a handful of minor things much better by virtue of predating OSHA.
This is what a "bobcat" has become for UGV startups. It's a low tech proven platform that you can basically modify with attachments to do a lot of UGV work.
I was assuming the same. This might be fine for a small setup but I'd imagine all the digitization shenanigans was done so efficiency could increase. I imagine for large scale operations this would be like replacing your steam engine with a horse.
I'm not totally sure I understand. I expected these to be selling for twice the price, not half price.
I thought the whole idea of so much of the tech is to be able to lock you in and make profit that way, through servicing and features and subscriptions and whatever else.
If they're giving up that entire profit stream, they have to make money somewhere else. So how are they selling these for so much less and still making a profit? What am I missing?
They're using an absolutely ancient engine from Cummins that has probably paid off its r&d and assembly line costs at least 10x over. It has virtually no pollution controls on it like DEF or DPF. That alone is saving a fair amount of money.
But I could be wrong. I can't know but I'm pretty sure the GP was writing tongue in cheek. As in mocking the business strategies that have been eroding the engines of our economy.
Mules are hybrids of donkey and horse. This was an important technological advancement some 3000 years ago, providing benefits of both breeds in one animal. The donkey and horse themselves of course are products of one of the most important technologies in human history - domestication!
Yes, they're engines that you wouldn't be allowed to build and put in a new tractor.
Like, the signals seem pretty clear to me. The spirit of the regulations is that these shouldn't be produced and put into operation anymore. The company is doing it anyway.
> The 150-horsepower model starts at $129,900 CAD, about $95,000 USD. The range-topping 260-hp version runs $199,900 CAD, around $146,000.
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the MTZ Belarus 82.3 can be had for the equivalent of $50k.
It's a simple machine for a simpler time, so obviously doesn't meet any emissions regulations. But at least in my region farmers went to great lengths to acquire them - even illegally. By the time the tractors are confiscated, they'll more than pay for themselves.
I’m genuinely confused. Why not buy an entry level kubota?
I guess the startup is selling low tech stuff in the 100-200hp range, but you start getting computers and stuff at that point with the conventional manufacturers?
They certainly sell sub 100 hp / $100K tractors that are reliable and low tech, so I’m struggling to see any differentiator except the engine size.
Also, half price is an odd claim. The Kubota M6 looks comparable to the $130K option from the startup, but starts at $100K.
I can’t read the article because cloudflare is blocking iOS now, apparently.
Also, for the small-medium range, a BEV or plugin / serial hybrid powertrain would be a game changer. Lots of low end weight, infinite torque at low speeds, and no hearing protection required to operate it. Also, it wouldn’t get as wicked hot in the summer for the operator, nor would it dump diesel exhaust everywhere.
A low tech version of that would be compelling (similar to slate).
Edit: they could even use standard mounts electrical for the generator and common battery packs, so if either powerplant blew up, it’d be a bolt-in replacement. The actual electric motors probably would never blow out.
You’re rounding down the Kibota price (starts at 109k) and mixing in Canadian $.. You get a cummins 12v with more power than an m6 (and bigger more capable chassis) for ~10k less than the kubota.
I bought a chinese mini excavator. It is super simple and I am sure things will break on it (I already had a qc issue with the fuel gauge) but I don't fear things breaking. With the competitors the dealer had to service everything. With the chinese one I text someone on whatsapp, diagnose remotely, and they send me a part. Honestly I like this model more. If you have a lot of money the dealer is great.
Mine comes in tomorrow. When researching, I was amazed at the simplicity of these machines. The engine is essentially available at Harbor Freight, then it’s basically just a hydraulic pump and valves. When things break, I’m sure I can find a replacement part or hack something together.
I think the trend we are seeing with tractors and cars is a circular one that the industry isn't ready for: we moved from pure mechanical machines to "mechanical + some electronics," and we are currently in the "some mechanical + more electronics" phase. But the next logical step for longevity is a return to "mostly mechanical" interfaces powered by open standards.
The problem isn't the presence of electronics. It's the use of electronics as a proprietary layer to gatekeep physical hardware. When a tractor becomes a "software platform," the farmer loses the ability to perform basic maintenance because of DRM and encrypted ECU handshakes.
We need to treat the electronics as a component of the tool, not the owner of the tool. If the software is the only thing preventing a mechanical machine from functioning, that's not a feature but a defect
There was a blender that uses a printed or CNC case and basic repair parts for all the mechanicals… Open Funk re:Mix blender https://www.openfunk.co/pages/re-mix
That's what I always want -- all of my appliances should look like the ones we got in the 90s/2000s. Some Chinese companies should take this niche or maybe not-niche field, sell at a premium, which hopefully is still cheaper than smart ones.
> Some Chinese companies should take this niche or maybe not-niche field, sell at a premium
A friends dad sold his existing business and has been making $$$ in semi-rural texas importing and selling Chinese skid loaders. This market already exists.
Part of the story why we can‘t feel the hypothetical productivity gains of the last century is that certain goods became 1. more expensive and 2. last shorter.
This movement (as mentioned in the tractor example) might be the result of people realizing this: what drives GDP (expensive throw away crap) might not always drive wealth.
Is part of the appeal due to the fact that being remanufactured engines they don't need modern emissions control, aka Diesel Exhaust Fluid (DEF)? Farmers hate DEF.
That's most of it. It gets lost in the right to repair conversation, I think because many of the same individuals who care about that also tend to be very pro-environmental-regulation, but one has to take a step back and acknowledge the fact that the EPA made it illegal to build this tractor new instead of with a rebuilt truck engine from the 90s. You literally cannot build a legal diesel tractor in the US that doesn't involve an ECU, sensors, DEF, and all the proprietary electronics to go along with those systems.
If it was legal to build these at industrial scale, we'd already have it in the US because there's blatant market demand for it. This is functionally no different from the shops putting 30 year old diesel engines in modern pickup trucks for the same reasons.
The emissions are so unreliable that the only legal market for vehicles without them in the US is... the federal government.
Anyone who actually has to use their equipment to get shit done dislikes DPF/regen. It's like Windows Update --- you might be in the middle of a serious task but screech "time for a scheduled update! we dgaf what kind of critical task you were just doing, you want updates!"
Modern diesel systems equipped with DPF tech (which consumes DEF, the fluid) require a regen cycle which is kinda like an oven cleaning itself - they get super hot and burn away particulate before they can be used again. Farmers are more frustrated by the system than the fluid. In fact, DEF is really just piss (urea) which is the same kind of product that they use for fertilizer. Although the prices for urea have skyrocketed recently so perhaps they truly do hate DEF too.
The awesome thing about these 'older' Cummins engines is yes they lack DEF systems and also have mechanical fuel injection. As is commonplace with diesel, there are no spark/glow plugs either. So ostensibly once you have the engine started, it requires zero electricity or computer systems to operate. The RPM of the engine dictates everything else mechanically through gearing. This is a big win for equipment that needs to "just work". Of course they still have sensors and all kinds of systems that are kinda layered on top... but they're not strictly required. This is also why the "runaway diesel" problem exists. You cannot stop an engine like this without starving it of air or fuel.
DPF (Diesel Particulate Filter) and SCR (Selective Catalytic Reduction, which uses DEF, Diesel Exhaust Fluid) are two mostly different systems. DPF traps soot in a filter which then burns the soot off into gas later (regen). SCR reduces NOx using urea.
This is important to know in the context of tractors because in the US, 25-74hp tractors generally need only DPF without SCR (there are basically three bins depending on horsepower level). This makes these midsized tractors a bit of a sweet spot for a lot of tasks; of course, you still have to deal with regen (which is where the DPF gets heated up to convert trapped soot into gas), which is annoying, but you at least don't have to fill up with DEF or risk the DEF injection system failing.
That’s exactly what I was thinking. And it makes me wonder if the future is manufactures repurposing older engines in new shells to bypass the increasingly more regulatory environments they operate in. Kind of a funny thing to think about.
This is a great initiative. However, I feel that "no-tech" shouldn't be a target and that isn't necessarily good. Ex. Precision tech helps reduce operator fatigue and increases efficiency with respect to equipment operation time and material used.
This isn't to say that tech can't be shoved in every other panel on the tractor - but hope this drives Big companies towards considering where tech is necessary and where it's not.
That's untrue. I know a farmer, who buys a John Deere combine before harvest. It stays unused until his harvests are done, and returns it by end of harvest season incurring $30k on this entire transaction. Why does he do that? Because he has two weeks to finish up harvesting or start incurring losses on his harvest. Farmer does care about saving costs/losses AND getting the job done in time.
There are farmers who join agricultural co-ops to do similar things. I've seen few operate differently - the co-op owns the machines and maintains a bunch of operators. These are requested by farmers who want work done - spraying, tilling, harvesting, etc.
The trouble is they all need them at the same time. In the UK you will see farmers in a break in the weather, all out testing the moisture in the wheat. As soon as it is right it is all hands to get it in on every farm before it rains again!
Cessna 172s are great if you are learning to fly. But most people using these things for actually getting from A to B will be looking for something with a bit more range, speed, etc. That still might be sixty year old plane but one with a bigger engine; or two of them even. And if you want to go really fast you get something with a turbo prop or even jet engines. The newer ones are a bit more efficient with the fuel but also more in demand and therefore more expensive. You get what you pay for.
My understanding of the aviation market is that there are some bargains to be had with planes that are old but still very servicable. But if you are flying longer distances regularly, you kind of gravitate towards the more expensive ones. Because they go faster, use less fuel, are more comfortable, have more useful load, etc.
The point of a tractor is that is used to do useful work by farmers who earn their living working these things hard. If they break down, work stops until that can be fixed. The value of being able to fix these machines yourself is that you get them back in action quickly. But the value of a newer one is that it presumably wouldn't need a lot of fixing to begin with. And maximizing power while minimizing fuel usage means the job gets done quicker and at a lower cost. And that's what modern manufacturers sell of course.
IMHO, electric is going to revolutionize farming. Diesel is expensive (a lot more lately). And farmers burn a lot of it. Electric motors are small, reliable, quiet, etc. They have loads of torque. And if you are a farmer, you have plenty of space to harvest your own electricity with solar panels and maybe a wind mill and some batteries. There is a growing amount of high end stuff available in this space but also very affordable low end stuff. And this technology can be very simple and tinker friendly. Buy some old EV batteries wire them up and you can make anything with wheels move. Including really old tractors, pickup trucks, etc. Anything from the largest mining trucks to the smallest lawn mower can already be powered by batteries. And everything in between. With battery cost dropping, there are very few obstacles that prevent adoption left. Mostly import tariffs in the US.
> IMHO, electric is going to revolutionize farming. Diesel is expensive (a lot more lately). And farmers burn a lot of it. Electric motors are small, reliable, quiet, etc. They have loads of torque. And if you are a farmer, you have plenty of space to harvest your own electricity with solar panels and maybe a wind mill and some batteries. There is a growing amount of high end stuff available in this space but also very affordable low end stuff. And this technology can be very simple and tinker friendly. Buy some old EV batteries wire them up and you can make anything with wheels move. Including really old tractors, pickup trucks, etc. Anything from the largest mining trucks to the smallest lawn mower can already be powered by batteries. And everything in between. With battery cost dropping, there are very few obstacles that prevent adoption left. Mostly import tariffs in the US.
Yes. But maybe not a 1:1 of current petroleum-powered equipment with an equivalent electric one? Say, crop dusting aircraft are not being replaced by electric powered crop dusting aircraft, but by (electric powered) crop dusting drones.
Could something similar happen for, say, tractors? A tractor is of course an extremely versatile tool, and as long as there's a human driving it there's a tendency towards ever bigger tractors in order to minimize labor/ha. But big tractors are already a bit too big and expensive for many not-huge farms, ground compaction is a problem with large weight etc. Could we see these replaced by a fleet of electrical drones (drones as in autonomous, not necessarily flying) rather than "just" an electrical tractor? Of course, there's a certain minimum power required to pull a plow etc., so maybe not? Of course, autonomous fleets etc. goes a bit against the idea of DIY-fixable. Or does it? A different skill-set than wrenching on an old tractor, sure.
>Buy some old EV batteries wire them up and you can make anything with wheels move. Including really old tractors, pickup trucks, etc. Anything from the largest mining trucks to the smallest lawn mower can already be powered by batteries. And everything in between. With battery cost dropping, there are very few obstacles that prevent adoption left. Mostly import tariffs in the US.
It's not even close to that easy though is it? I've wanted to convert a car to an EV and it seems really complex.
What car? It probably depends on what you want the end result to be. You won't be able to DIY a Porsche Taycan, but basically if you can do an engine swap on an ICE car, you should be able to do a semi-ghetto EV conversion (i.e no fast charging or advanced thermal management, but safe and robust enough to run daily for years). Tons of people are doing it on YouTube.
Of course, there is a bit of skill involved and I don't claim to be able to do this. But then, putting together a combustion engine would also require a bit of skill. Lots of parts that need to be fitted together. Hoses, pumps, wires, and a lot of electronics as well with more modern cars.
EVs have less parts. There are some challenges with diagnostics for things like battery management systems. And given the high voltages, it helps if you know what you are doing with electrical systems.
In Queensland, Australia SwarmFarm might be worth a look - they're already deep into driverless automated agriculture .. making a non John Deere tech stack.
This is great, if there is some real competition, then we can see John Deere will have to figure out how to compete. Either with lower prices or less lock in.
They can't scale this model up because they legally have to use rebuilt engines from the 90s to do it to get around modern diesel emissions regulations. It's illegal to build this kind of engine in the US new, there's no way to compete with Deere's scale.
This feels like a great opportunity for Canada. We have tremendous need for tractors. The skillset for automotive/machinery and farming. A need for domestic industry development. Offers another non-American option. These don’t suffer as much from tech supply chain pains by not being full of electronics.
This is the way. The number one metric for any tool is how much you care TRUST it, and the number two metric for any tool is how quickly you can fix it when it breaks, and number three is how easy it is to understand and modify for your particular purpose.
I’ve always thought if we met super advanced aliens they would be… no more advanced than needed. In each domain they would use only the most complex thing needed to accomplish a task and no more.
100 years ago I might cook in a cast iron pan and use a slide rule to compute.
Now I cook in a cast iron pan and use a 5nm scale multi core CPU to compute.
In 100 years I might cook in a cast iron pan and use a topological quantum computer to compute. In my home in a spinning city at a Lunar LaGrange point.
We are in the try everything with everything phase of early technological development.
A friend is an organic farmer in Saskatchewan who has been buying specifically older mechanical only tractors; after a heart attack that will require him to sell off his farm, he’s finding lots of potential buyers.
"old" tractors from 10+ years ago and new tractors are really ... not different at all. mechanically and structurally they are all the same. you can get a 20 year old deere/kubota tractor that might even be better than a new one because of the decline in manufacturing, cost cutting across materials etc. if well maintained they last forever, and the older gear is easier to work on.
The energy balance just does not work with current agricultural paradigm. For example, plowing is really energy intensive and electric tractors just can't carry the required amount of batteries. Too heavy tractors compact the earth and sink in bad weather conditions.
For electrification to really proceed in ag, we need a revolution in the paradigm, something that removes most of the energy heavy processes.
JCB came to the conclusion there was no future in EV tractors and earth movers and went all-in on hydrogen ICE instead. We will shortly see if they were correct.
Electric excavators are there, as they are low duty cycle, see sibling comments for details, but high load percent for long time is a killer for battery tech.
I could imagine tethered tractors with power line tensioned in the air, but the grid building cost will be quite high for intermittent usage. Only some land usages and plot shapes would work economically.
the battery in a tesla would run a medium tractor for less than an hour. The tesla can produce more power - but soon it is up to speed and so making a lot less. Tractors are expected to produce their full rated power for 10 hours without stopping.
Maybe a row crop tractor, but a utility tractor is not running continuously for 10 hours. Just running around doing chores and a lot of that time is sitting idling a diesel engine.
Depends on the farmer. The utility tractor is commonly used by farmers for 12 hours a day every day. these are however farmers in poor countries with a much worse economy than anyone who has time for discussions here lives in and so we don't think of them - but they are the an important customer for the utility tractor.
A tractor does actual work like pulling an implement like a plow or spinning the PTO to power a machine like a wood splitter or well drill.
Airplane engines are rebuilt every 5,000ish miles because they’re constantly running at like 50% load, it’s much harder on the engine than moving a car, a tractor is very similar.
Car engines do very little work once you’re up to speed, it only takes a fraction of the max power available to keep the car moving. This is why EVs are possible.
Running a tractor engine under load requires a lot of energy, battery density isn’t quite there yet, diesel has around 50x more energy by weight than a battery.
Off by an order of magnitude. Average TBO (which airplane engines routinely exceed if they don’t rust out) is 2,000 hours assuming piston, or about 300,000 miles for a Piper Arrow at cruise speed.
For comparison, latest commercial turbofans approach 6000h (they don't have a strict TBO limit AFAIU, overhauls are decided based on various inspections and measurements). At a typical airliner speed that's something like 3,000,000 miles.
Thanks for clarifying, I thought that sounded wrong - otherwise aeroplane engines would have to be "rebuilt", each and every time, after more than half of all international flights in and out of Australia (5000 miles, aka 8000km, is just down the road to grab a sausage roll for us!).
There's been a few. The big manufacturers don't really want to make them, and for the last decade just show off expensive concepts at industry shows and that's it. The small companies only get investment by making a VC play for "autonomous" and "smart" agriculture; they soak up investment, make very expensive product, then go out of business.
I think Monarch tractor just folded up and sold their assets, for example. They were a nice looking product but did what I described above.
Innovation here will happen in Europe and China, not here in North America. "Tractor" here in North America means big giant machine that is owned in a fleet by a giant corporation that manages multiple properties, and works over a dozen fields in a few days.
Every time I've looked into it for my hobby farm, a compact utility tractor that is electric ends up either being vapourware or twice to three times the price and missing features.
I don't know if distrust is the right word, because it's right out there in the open: a significant amount of technology is objectively not used for improving your life. It's used for improving a CEO's bank account. Technology has been actively and intentionally weaponised against consumers to strip more and more of their rights away in the name of the almighty dollar, and anyone with eyes can see it.
Sadly it will also burn other stuff around. If it would only eat itself, I would watch with glee. But when it eats the life-sphere and our lifesupport before, I feel less gleeful
I saw George Bush at a tractor factory. He asked what the most important tractor innovation was. No hesitation whatsoever ... air conditioning. AC and a radio, and backup cameras ... there is a place for reasonable electronics.
We need a 'Framework (as in laptop maker) for physical devices'. Basically most of this physical tech can be relatively easily recreated with current tech and 3D printing. In fact probably better done with electric motors and batteries. There is definitly a moat there to be disrupted.
The market for used tractors went through the roof years ago--20 to 40 year old tractors with tens of thousands of miles on them sell for not so far from new prices because farmers value being able to fix them without paying $$$
They get used in burst cycles -- like 10 days straight at harvest time, other times not started for months. Battery cost per kwh used is very low amortized over its full lifespan, but if you only use it to 1% of its capability your costs are now 100x higher.
Now, hang a high voltage wire down from a big-ass catenary, so you don't need batteries, and it'll be cheaper upfront and in use, but nobody does that because of 1. safety 2. if everybody did it the grid would need upgrades
Almost certainly it's energy density for long running, high load usage.
If a family car energy usage is 1x, then a light duty truck is about 1.5x, and a heavy duty truck doing hauling or towing is about 4x. A medium sized farm tractor would probably be 20x or more.
In that light, it's not hard to see how cars and light trucks could fare well with today's battery energy density, while heavy duty trucks are at the limits. For a tractor, it's not even close.
I do think we'll see smaller tractors going electric in about 10-15 years.
For small tractors many only use them for an hour per day - often mowing the lawn once a week. I have used mine all day cutting wood - and only but 15 minutes on the engine (the rest was me running the chain saw of loading something by hand).
Which is to say an electric tractor would be great for me, but for most farmers useless.
I predict the next trend in technology will be low tech or analog whenever possible like SpeedQueen washer/dryers, etc. It's funny looking at antique appliances that actually have superior functionality and features to modern ones. There are old washing machines that have much faster rinse rotation speeds and can empty the water within seconds and almost always have replaceable parts. We need to somehow require machines and appliances be built like this and not this disposable trash we have become used to.
I feel this. I've been looking at ADV bikes and everything on the market has a cellular modem for always on cloud connectivity, and multiple vendors, including Zero (the electric internet darling) are offering paid feature unlocks via apps.
On top of this, I looked at Zero's job postings and they're desperately trying to hire a firmware lead to get the team to use Claude Code (precisely what I want managing a 100hp motor under my ass).
Not only are we in a world where everything is locked down with software, the software is about to get way worse and there's nothing you can do about it.
I wish someone would do something similar for TVs. Just a really fantastic panel with only the tech needed to decode HDMI or whatever and show it on the screen. No other tech whatsover: no telemetry, no smart anything, nothing.
No. Monitors are small, and suited for one person working close up. I am looking for a television without the "computer" inside of it.
Yes, of course, it needs to have a computer to decode and display images, but I don't want it to be running a stripped back version of Android, that shipped out of date and hasn't received any updates, with apps that are laggy and often not current relative to other "smart" providers, that also takes pictures of my screen once every thirty seconds to tell the manufacturer what I'm watching and for how long, to build a better marketing profile on me.
I want a big OLED panel with enough smarts to drive the screen. I will plug my own computer into the television, if the need should arise.
You can get a kubota M5-111 with a closed cab for $70k-100k, cheaper than these. Plus zero percent financing though then for 5-7 years. Well built and a comparable class in terms of weight and horse power.
People aren’t buying them for price, but the first sentence discusses it as if it’s relevant.
My assumption are farmers are trying to skirt the eco rules for vehicles in some way. Which by the way is insanely annoying and has caused issues for all the farmers I know at one point or another. Worse, you can’t fix the ecosystems on your own so you have to get them serviced costing quite a bit and importantly putting your tractor out of commission for a while. It’s why older tractors have a premium
> My assumption are farmers are trying to skirt the eco rules for vehicles in some way.
They're using remanufactured 90s cummins for this reason. They're pre-DEF. Modern regulations have killed the diesel engine as a reliable workhorse. It's easy to write off the woes of this segment as corporate greed, but we've made it illegal to build a simple reliable tractor like this.
> The Kubota M5-111 is a 105.6 HP utility tractor that uses Diesel Exhaust Fluid (DEF) to meet Tier 4 emission standards, with common issues including Code 202A, DEF sensor failures, and clogged injectors. The system includes a dedicated tank and filter (Part #1J508-19660). Owners often report issues with the DEF system causing power derates, leading some to consider deletion or repair, though these issues can cause significant downtime
A few years ago, during the initial stages of the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, John Deere was remotely bricking any tractors that were stolen by Russia.
I'm sure this was meant to be a story about the bad guys being thwarted, but it only made my blood run cold. A single company can remotely destroy the agricultural sector of a country if they felt like it.
15 years ago, Dacia used to make stripped sedans that sold for as cheap as 7.5k euros. It was a wild success. Now, they've pivoted to making modern cars, still on the cheap side, but the cheapest now is a compact car that sells for 13k.
The only reason is that those modern cars have higher margins and there is no competition for cheap cars. So why make cheap cars to kill the market of higher margins ones?
The free market, if it works at all, should produce companies like wheelfront that caters to that share of the population.
One minor gotcha is they're currently dependent upon a limited supply of remanufactured and no longer available (NLA) parts. Some supplier(s) is going to have step up and make new ones to keep building and supporting tractors. It's not an unsolvable problem.
For anyone who likes rural shop repair videos of farm (mostly older), passenger, and commercial vehicles of all makes and ages from ancient to modern, they might appreciate Watch Wes Work.
> Pre-war EIA forecasts projected U.S. diesel prices would average $3.47/gallon in 2026. As of late March, the national average hit $5.37/gallon, roughly 55% above where it was expected to be.
Diesel prices will continue to rise so it's not clear what these farmers are actually signing up for.
Good. There should be an option for a straightforward mechanical machine. This also has trickledown effect where hopefully regular town mechanics can fix things based on their historical knowledge of engines. Instead of not wanting to touch anything because of the all the electronics involved.
Also, I know this is a strange parallel, but it feels similar to what Dell and HP did to their servers. They made the BIO so complicated that it takes 5-10 minutes for their severs to boot up. Using an older Dell server with a straightforward BIOS that boots up in 30 seconds feels awesome.
What is it with American companies that eventually always try to sell crap and low moral products/services. As if the people are educated in luring people into traps to only benefit themselves.
Its the result of MBAs and private equity. Capitalist market economies have existed since the dawn of civilization. Money literally predates writing and the first writings were often invoices. There is no inevitable result of capitalism as almost all of human history happened under some sort of capitalist system.
This makes me think of the new toyotas, the rav4s, 4runner, and land cruiser. Through government regulations, they were forced to create smaller more fuel efficient engines. To get the same power, they overstrain them, and put huge turbos on the engines. The outcome is a strictly worse engine, that essentially uses the same fuel as older engines.
The demand for older vehicles in certain segments is actually increasing
The new models have engines that are smaller turbos, that part is true — but they get >30% better fuel economy, and they output more power.
The reliability might become an issue down the road especially in hybrid engines but the data so far don’t seem to support your assertions. The one exception is maybe the Tundra 3.4L but that seems to still be ambiguous as to the root cause, and may just be mfg process error.
I wonder if this notion comes from the 80s, when engines with turbos had lower compression ratios for reliability. Today's turbocharged motors have higher compression ratios than in the malaise era, and the turbos have a lot less lag. Turbos no longer mean you have to sacrifice fuel economy for performance (unless you have a lead foot).
Nope, just engineering to do not much more for warranty. Turbo engines arent inherently unreliable (tho you might need to replace the turbo itself every 100-200k so still more expensive to maintain), just need to build extra strong block and components if you want it to run for a long time.
And why would company do that if that would put it far over warranty period?
>Turbos no longer mean you have to sacrifice fuel economy for performance (unless you have a lead foot).
That's incorrect. Virtually every turbo'd gas car runs slightly richer than stoich to use the unburnt fuel to manage temp/knock. Diesels, you actually get more efficiency out of with a turbo for free. With gas you're practically guaranteed to be throwing fuel out the pipe.
> overstrain them, and put huge turbos on the engines
This doesn't really mean anything. You can build an engine at any point of the spectrum from naturally aspirated to turbocharged, to turbo-compound, to actually not having any pistons at all (e.g. the "turbofans" that we put on airliners). What you want is to match the engine to the machine and build it out of the right materials.
Most people don't know shit about engineering and have weak intuition about materials, stress and physics in general. What the common person thinks about a random engineering topic literally does not matter, because they are 90% wrong about everything. Regarding cars, it's more like 99%. People still recite torque figures like they mean anything, ffs. That bad boy with 200 Nm at the crank? Cool, I make 150 Nm pedalling a bike.
My previous car before an EV had a 1-litre 3-cylinder engine, a 1.0 TSI. Pure gas, not a hybrid. That's an engine that's rated for 81kW (it actually delivers a bit more than that) and that can do 60 mpg on country roads (regularly). When it came out in 2015, "car enthusiasts" were laughing hysterically at the idiots who'd buy the car and have to replace the engine every 2-3 years. 11 years later, the cars are driving around just fine. The 1.0 TSI, just like the entire EA211 family, is a good engine with no major reliability issues.
tl;dr engines today are not the same as an early 2000s Subaru EJ25 with a massive turbo bolted on.
> they overstrain them
Debatable. Materials science and engine construction science have advanced significantly since the V6 and V8s of the 1980s and 1990s Toyotas. Almost every auto manufacturer on earth is capable of getting >100hp/L out of a gas engine reliably. Toyota is certainly not the only OEM doing this reliably at scale. This stuff is no longer exotic. Gas engines today are designed from the ground up to be turbocharged and direct injected (and in Toyota's case, both direct and port injected), and built with the cooling systems to match.
> The outcome is a strictly worse engine
No one makes or has made a perfect engine but there's a lot of romanticizing engines from the past. These newer engines make more peak torque, their torque curves start much lower in the RPM band and remain more useful through whole rev range, they burn significantly less fuel when not under load, and the hybrid electric drivetrain mean the gas engine spends less of its life idling or lugging at low speeds and high loads. Whether some of these tradeoffs are worth it is debatable, but in no way are these engines "strictly worse".
Wish they sold something in the compact utility segment. 40-60hpish. I'd love an affordable Canadian made tractor for property maintenance / smaller farms.
(Though these days I've love something electric. I don't need long run time, I'm not doing row crops. Just market gardening and property maintenance stuff. All the electric stuff I see out there is aiming up at the high end and for autonomy / "smart" tractor stuff which I don't care about.)
If you're mechanically inclined, the compacts of yesterdecade are still out there. Popular brands like Ford or Massey Ferguson have amazingly good supply chain for 50 year old models. I run my hobby farm with a 1975 MF135, and I just sold a 1947 Massey Harris Pony that ran like a top doing pasture/arena dragging duties. I've put a ton of hours on the 135 and only done basic maintenance like replacing a few hydraulic lines and changing fluids.
Can you share more about your hobby farm? I would love to learn more about how you got into that? My family had a small farm growing up and my parents are still actively working on the farm everyday and I would like to take that up at some point. So curious to hear what you farm and how much involved you are in the process.
We're in the very early stages, but the short is that we're raising highland cattle and starting to board horses. We started after my wife bought a horse and we realized boarding costs in a HCOL area are pretty close to a rural mortgage in a LCOL area. So we moved and bought a farm property. Then we bought a couple highland heifers because they're very cute and fluffy. We're working towards growing that herd up to have a few calves to sell each year for pasture pets / meat. The property is also well suited for horse boarding with a sand arena and lots of trails accessible from the back woods. These first few years will be pretty scrappy. Mostly getting all the pasture acres fenced properly and rebuilding the forage quality, plus setting up all the other infrastructure to keep things running smoothly longer term. My wife handles the day-to-day on feeding and caring for the animals, she is a trained farrier and a licensed veterinary technician so we have a big advantage there. I step in for the project work and infrastructure planning. And anything that's an excuse to run the MF135 (snow plowing, moving manure and dirt, grading the driveway, post hole digging, dragging, mowing, etc...)
I have a Kubota L3010 HST (late '90s-early '00s) and it's fantastic. Fuel efficient, quiet, comfortable, minimal electronics, pretty easy to work on. It's a little underpowered (30hp/24 pto hp), but not egregiously. It'll run a 9" post auger or chip 6" logs if you feed them slowly enough. I'll have to split it this summer, unfortunately, it's developing a hydraulic leak from the clutch housing which almost certainly means the front driveshaft seal is failing.
Good. The John Deere monopoly is wild, but if you talk to a farmer they say they can’t handle the repairs. Sure, John Deere gets to make more expensive and complex machines and convince their customers that it’s “the future”.
Those buying new don't care about repairs. They were never going to do the warrantee work themselves anyway. Those buying on the used market have more reason to care about repairs, but used buyers are beholden to what new buyers purchased in the past.
Yes because thy live in the John Deere future. This was not always the case, surely. You used to be able to take high school classes to learn how to fix a combustion engine, even a new one!
Keep in mind that tractors are also getting massive.
The economics of row-crop agriculture is "you gotta farm more land". That means spending as much time in the field as you can with as big a machine as you can.
So not only is time you spend fixing your tractor yourself time you're not spending on your primary job, it's also working on a machine that's just monstrously huge. Delegating that work to a specialist with specialized tools is a very reasonable way to live.
The issue is that the specialized employees is not someone you hire on payroll who has access to tools you purchase. They must be a John Deere employee who comes from out of state and costs you $$$$$$ to calibrate a sensor that could just be a simple menu button and a 20 second wait
I mean, sure, right to repair and all that, but to be clear, unless you have like 50+ tractors to maintain, it's not going to make economic sense to have a full time employee to repair them. You still want to call out, you just want the option of calling someone local with more competitive rates and a faster response time.
If John Deere is sending a tech, you've encountered something that could never be just a simple menu button. You've found a major flaw that they need to investigate in detail. John Deere would never send a tech for routine troubleshooting/repairs. That falls on the local dealership franchises. Their employees are not John Deere employees.
Exactly! The old image of a guy on a Deere 4020 pulling an eight row implement is just unsustainable in today's agricultural system. Whether that system is sustainable is a different question.
Exactly. A 4020 is fun! It may not have as much torque and ground pressure may not be as good as a quad belt tractor, but for a lil farm where you just want to grow hay or screw around?
> The old image of a guy on a Deere 4020 pulling an eight row implement is just unsustainable in today's agricultural system.
That entirely depends on your business goals. If you want to leverage debt to amass wealth you need scale to eke out a living after the debt burden takes most of your potential profit. The 4020 is going to fall well short of what is required there. Those who see farming as an income source rather than a wealth generator, however, don't need scale and can do quite well with the venerable 4020. Eight rows is plenty when you don't have the bank breathing down your neck wondering if you are going to cover your six figure loan payment this month.
It's a lot like the business of tech, really. Some want to build the startup that never turns a profit but sells for billions years into the future, while others want to build the small "mom and pop" that offers a lifestyle, even if it never makes them rich. Both are valid and viable approaches. It depends on what you want out of it.
If I was a farmer and wanted a low-tech tractor that would be reliable into the future, why would I gamble on a startup when I could buy a Kubota tractor from a company that has been in business for 136 years, with an established dealer and parts network? I would certainly opt for the Kubota.
I’m not a farmer, but sometimes I sell generators. Even today, some specs only allow CAT and Cummins, even though Generac and Kohler have been around for decades and are perfectly good options, they haven’t been around as long as CAT and Cummins.
When purchasing capital equipment, some customers want to buy from a company with some longevity instead of a random startup, even if it costs more.
I’m always highly skeptical of startups in mature industries like farming (~10,000 years old, or hundreds of years for mechanized agriculture) with many established players already operating. I saw an article in the last year or two about a small directional boring machine from a startup company that claimed to be advancing the industry, but multiple manufacturers like Ditch Witch already manufacture and sell the exact same piece of equipment, they’re just not claiming to be revolutionary to attract investor capital.
What early demand are you seeing, exactly? The article does indicate that they plan to ramp up production in 2026, but no mention of actual sales. It is quite possible that they are increasing production thinking that they need to roll them out to dealer lots to gain any traction.
In fact, their TractorHouse profile shows that they are still struggling to sell last year's models. If there was demand, why hasn't that demand already gobbled up the stock? "I guess it would be cool to own one if it was given to me for free" isn't demand.
They need to swing the pendulum back, the current problem is that there is now a whole generation about to take over from the previous and the new gen has never had to use a non-John Deere a tractor. If they could evangelize their product as the “smarter farmer that doesn’t need all that tech” then they might have success.
Oh hey, do you happen to know if there's any tool incompatibility in the modern electronics?
The other thing about tractors is that the three point hitches, PTOs, etc etc, have been standardized forever, so there's very little lock in in terms of, swap out your JD for and IH and away you go, so I'm curious if eg modern seed drills have any fancy tech which locks you in.
The short answer is yes... As you mentioned, the physical side is generally standardized to some degree, but everyone I know tends to just use branded gear that's known to fit. Now if you like to resurrect old gear, then you become a shade tree mechanic pretty quick. I don't think that any farmer will survive more than a few seasons without being pretty smart at just getting stuff to work...
> if there's any tool incompatibility in the modern electronics?
Technically there are standards, but you know how that goes in the real world... Funnily enough, a friend bought a new tractor and planter, both from John Deere, and they weren't even compatible with each other. The tractor needed to have the cab removed to install the necessary hardware (ethernet) to be compatible with the planter.
> have been standardized forever
Hydraulic hose couplers didn't find common adoption until the mid-80s/early-90s, which is surprisingly late.
Yeah, I hate when I go to connect something and have to dig around for a hydraulic adapter. If I was smart, I'd just spend the winter making sure everything was matching, but I'm cheap and there's always something else that seems more urgent.
The farmer who doesn't want or need tech already buys from the likes of Versatile, Kubota, or maybe even Massey Ferguson if more towards the middle of the road. "Low tech" is already a serviced market. That's not to say there isn't room for another competitor, but there isn't much indication that Ursa is becoming one. When you can't even sell the product you produced last year... The bit in the article about them not wanting to really scale up is telling.
It is not like John Deere actually has a monopoly. There is just as much CNH (CaseIH, New Holland) seen out in the fields, and even when you want all the bells and whistles, Fendt is rapidly becoming understood to be the true king of tech. What John Deere does have going for it is that they generally do better than everyone else at keeping parts in stock where the parts are needed; local to the farmer. Ironically, repairability is where John Deere finds the win at the end of the day.
That's not true for commercial users the way it is for private cars.
Even if you have a service contract you're still gonna be pissed at the downtime cost of having a tech drag their ass out to wherever you are to initiate a forced regen or something.
You're pretty confident for someone who fundamentally does not understand the issue. During harvest season even hours of delay can be disastrous for farms that are barely solvent in the first place. When your only option is to call the dealer and hope and pray they deign to visit your farm in a timely fashion it doesn't matter how good the warranty is or is not. Farmers need to be self sufficient because time is money and money is survival.
It may be true that I do not understand whatever nondescript fundamental issue it is that you mention but don't elaborate on, but I most definitely understand the constraints of farming. Being a farmer, I live it each day.
And as a farmer who owns equipment from across all the major brands (and some unheard of brands to boot), you are right that John Deere is most reliable for having parts in stock. I've been burned by the others having to wait a week on parts to be delivered from who knows where. That is not a fun position to be in. Repairability is where John Deere has the clear advantage. That is, just as you point out, why they are most popular. Nothing else matters if your equipment doesn't work.
You pay a lot more for that luxury, but when the clock is ticking...
LOL. If you're a row cropper, you're running a big combine. Several grain trucks. Lots of expensive gear. Gear breaks down, that's why you buy something reliable, that has techs in your area who can fix things quickly, with a parts network that stocks stuff from decades back.
Farmers are self-sufficient in incredible ways, but maintaining a multi-million dollar combine is pushing it. They can do oil changes, filter changes, replace consumables on implements, and do basic trouble shooting, but there are limits.
And yes, time does matter. That's why farmers tend to help each other out a lot. Field catch fire because you didn't clean off your combine the previous day? It's going to be your neighbor coming out and helping firebreak your field so you lose 5 acres instead of 500. Can't afford to have your own sprayer for fertilizer, etc? You hit up the co-op.
And farmers have crop insurance. Doesn't make them whole, but the idea that they're going to be eating dirt if they harvest a day late is silly.
Even without limits, you're never going to be as efficient as someone who fixes the same failure every single day. I've certainly fallen into that trap before. Sure, I got it fixed myself in the end, but in hindsight I'd have been back in the field a lot sooner if I had simply brought in the expert. When time is of the essence, putzing around trying to fix it yourself is not the optimal choice.
And that's not even considering the need for parts. Driving all the way to the dealership and back to get the parts you need is much more time consuming than the dealership tech bringing the parts with him when he comes. He only has to travel half as far as you do.
I don't think the issue is "smarts" in our cars/tractors/light-switches/etc but the lock-in and "authorized repair" bullshit.
On the topic of Smart Home stuff (which is the only topic I'm even slightly qualified to talk about) I've heard about people wanting "dumb houses" after initially people wanting "smart houses". It's my opinion that this desire is driven mainly due to bad experiences and doing smart homes the "wrong way".
What do I mean by that? Either they got burned by XYZ Smart company going under and all their cloud-dependant devices dying/bricking. they had a system like Control4 which required authorized resellers to make even basic changes [0], and/or they were overwhelmed with juggling 5 different apps/platforms that don't talk to each other. That doesn't mean smart homes are bad, just that the hardware/software was bad. I fully recognize that for the "normal" person the only options are currently "bad hardware/software" or "dumb house" but there _are_ better alternatives.
My philosophy for "Smart Home" is one of progressive enhancement (and graceful degradation). What that means is everything I "enhance" with "smarts" should still work the old way that people are accustomed to. Every light in the house can be controlled via "Alexa|Siri|Google turn off the Kitchen Light" but they can also be turned off/on by walking over to the wall and flipping a switch [1]. This means Smart Switches _not_ Smart Bulbs [2]. If my Home Assistant (yes, I'm one of those people) server goes offline, everything still works, the switches work, the door lock works with a key, the garage still opens. My "smart-ifying" of the house is not replacing the way to do something, it's only adding additional control.
In addition to that, and something that should come as no surprise, I refuse to use a cloud, or at least depend on a cloud for my smart home. For this reason I prefer Z-Wave/Zigbee devices. If the manufacturer goes out of business it doesn't matter (no pun intended [3]). While I can, and have, used cloud integrations with Home Assistant, I try to make sure that's just a stopgap to decide if I want to go all-in. I own a few Z-wave devices from companies that don't exist anymore and they have been chugging along without issue for years. I love that stability.
There is nothing in my house where you have to walk over to a wall tablet to control something or open an app on your phone, I would consider that a failure. Everything flows through Home Assistant, it's the brain, I don't want multiple apps fighting or different ecosystems that don't mesh (radio-wise or functionality-wise).
What does this have to do with tractors? Glad you asked! I see this as the same for tractors, they should absolutely be "dumb" with the ability to control/query parts of it and add the "smarts" through an external system. Whatever the equivalent of Z-wave would be for monitoring/controlling the device, not something built-in or required for functionality. A modular, non-locked-down system. I'm sure we are nowhere near that point but I write all this as a "don't throw the baby out with the bathwater", I think John Deere was wrong in how they went about adding "smarts" but I don't think the idea is without merit either. They went down the greedy, anti-right-to-repair route which is clearly wrong.
I'd love to see a combo of Ursa Ag's tractor as a base platform where smarts can be added to it without compromising it's repairability. A take on the "naked robotic core"-idea if you will.
[0] And each time you have a authorized reseller come out they try to sell you on an expensive upgrade because they make (most) their money on selling you stuff, not maintaining it. I really dislike Control4 and things like it.
[1] Point of clarification, I use Decora style paddles as is common on smart switches. The only downside (IMHO) to my system is they always "rest" in the middle orientation so they are "worse" than "dumb switches" in that you can't look at the switch and see the state it's in. That said, 3-way switches have already eroded this ability and I feel like this is an acceptable trade off. Maybe in the future people will care enough to make the switch represent the state correctly (with little servos flipping it) but I don't feel like I'm missing much. You may disagree.
[2] My exception to this rule is I will allow a Smart Bulb as long as there is also a Smart Switch. Maybe you can't change to color temperature via hardware on the wall but you can always still turn it on/off at the wall. Graceful degradation.
[3] My information might be out of date but I have very little interest in Thread/Matter, I don't want my smart devices to _ever_ talk to the cloud. Which is why I love Z-wave/Zigbee, they talk to my hub, my hub talks to whatever I want/approve. I never want my devices updating (or more likely, bricking) due to the cloud. I understand that Thread/Matter do not immediately mean "cloud" and in fact might even require local control but I'll believe it when I see it. So far Thread/Matter have been a massive nothing-burger IMHO. Maybe in a few years I'll be all-in on it but so far, I don't find it compelling at all.
> What that means is everything I "enhance" with "smarts" should still work the old way that people are accustomed to.
Also the easiest way to achieve high WAF. I added an internet-connected (but self-hosted) garage door controller. My wife instantly got defensive about things when I said I was going to do this until I said that nothing at all that works now would change. It would add a new feature, not subtract anything. The old remotes work. The wall buttons work. It's just that you can do it from your phone, too. Been very handy, actually.
> It would add a new feature, not subtract anything. The old remotes work. The wall buttons work. It's just that you can do it from your phone, too.
Exactly! If I'm doing my "job" correctly then I should be able to add "smarts" without anyone noticing at all. It's purely additive. It lowers my stress levels immensely as well since there is a never a "P1" emergency of "The lights won't turn on" or "I can't open the garage door" (unless something lower-level is broken, like the power is out or the garage opener burned out).
I want guests to be able to come to my house and not even notice it's "smart". They should be able to stay in the guest room and not think twice about it. Yes, there will be laminated sheet in the side table telling them what the lights/fan are called if they want to talk to the Echos to control it and there will be a labeled remote (Z-Wave) on the bedside table so they can toggle the fan/lights from the bed but none of that is required. They can control it all from the switches on the wall if they want.
Earlier thread on the same tractors but article with less focus on John Deere BS. [1]
The problem for farmers isn't actually just the idea of one company that's decided to make $$$$ on servicing even for unlocking a repair that's even been carried out for by a third party - it's just many newer tractors have not been suitably robust or farmers are finding the specialised parts come at premium prices or those in countries that are a bit remote to tractor production, international delivery times are not exactly thrilling. It's not just electrics, but electronics is the more notable short coming.
The biggest issue in an agricultural setting is robustness - wiring is one element that is prone to being pulled out transiting a rough paddock or pasture or chewed via mice and rats. After wiring is the quality of switches available for hostile environments - in my locale tractor owners had come to accept every so often they'd be replacing a switch every so often.
Cloudflare is increasingly a problem in terms of blocking huge geographic regions, often without the website operators even being aware this is happening. All in the name of "security."
a quick search suggests that's just for municipal elections. As I understand the football internet blackouts are national government policy not municipal?
That's quite the leap. Not that it's relevant but I have no issue with european boycott or sanctions of Israel, though warcrimes accusations are pretty toothless. Almost no leaders past or present charged with war crimes were ever arrested.
My guess is that this is a direct response to all the claw stuff running on macs. I used to never get cf captchas from a mac + home IP (while getting plenty on my linux ws + work vpn). Now i've gotten 2 sites in the past week that not only show the captcha, but also loop once I click the human thing. Most likely mac + resIP is not a good signal anymore...
Worked for me just now on mobile safari. You get the cloudflare human test but I just clicked the box and was in. This was despite accessing the site while vpn’d from home and using multiple adblockers.
Yeah, I also wanted to comment on this, though I think it’s technically against the rules.
I hit this first on my VPN, so I disconnected, then got asked again from my home wifi. I dunno why I look like a bot to Cloudflare. I hate these prompts and it’s too bad they’re all over the web.
On HN, I often see comments like this, complaining about Cloudflare blocking access to pages. It makes me wonder if it’s due to a particular setup that triggers bot detection – like Tor or no-JS – that HN readers often use, or if Cloudflare has too many false positives.
I think it's aggressive user profiling, so anyone with a hint of privacy is not welcomed. I can't imagine this getting any better with Chrome MCP and other tools.
This sounds good until you remember that we have all these electronics precisely to avoid the 1955 smog situation and climate change. Going back to 1990-era cars isn't solving anything. What we need is a patent and intellectual property reform. My personal opinion is that the same company shouldn't be allowed to sell both the hardware and the software. Open source ECU, anyone?
I wonder by what mechanism they plan to import these into the US. This seems like a emissions regulation end-run like glider trucks, but my understanding of the EPA import rules doesn't really leave any room for this type of game.
Yes, a lot of modern tractors are locked down due to predatory dealer service lock-in, but they're also complex and locked down due to emissions regulations, which are ostensibly a net societal gain. The classic HN "everything should be totally open and free" conversation really needs to happen through this lens IMO.
Up until a year ago I was regularly using a Massy Fergusson 135 [0] (Perkins Diesel version), made sometime in the 1970s. It was wonderful! So amazing to drive and use. Clunky and heavy, but you really really felt like you were using a machine. In low gears, if you put you foot down on the accelerator the engine would roar, and your speed would barely change!
And there was no fancy technology in it at all. If I was in the forest and had forgotten the key, I'd just reach behind the dashboard and hot-wire it. The air filter was basically a shisha-pipe that bubbled the incoming air through wire wool and engine oil.
Its fuel gauge didn't work either. You just had to take a look in the tank, or quickly react as soon as the revs started dropping. I ran it dry a few times and had to sit there with a spanner in one hand and YouTube into the other, while trying to bleed all the fuel lines. But they were all on the outside of the vehicle, which made it comparatively easy I imagine.
I've never actually driven a modern tractor, so don't know how it compares. I imagine the clutch is easier on the knees these days!
Anyway, this just felt like the place to share this.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massey_Ferguson_135
> Up until a year ago I was regularly using a Massy Fergusson 135
There is a tradition in several European countries named Affouage: If you live in a rural area, you can get very cheap (or even free) wood at the condition that you go to cut it yourself in the close-by forest.
Many many people who are doing this practice are still using today Massy Fergusson 135, Renault R98/461, Ford 3000-4000 series, SOMECA or similar low tech tractors.
The reason are simple: They are cheap to operate, cheap to repair (damages happen easily forest environment) and their small size is perfect for the task.
The demand for these things will never die. Rugged environment requires cheap and robust hardware.
If this startup can capitalize on that, they do have a market.
I learnt to drive on one of those. I'm a city kid but my grandfather was a wool farmer. Every school holiday we'd visit and I's spend my days literally puttering around the farm, which was pretty huge (~2000ha).
When I started out, 13ish or so, I had to stand on the clutch to get it down.
If you gave it enough beans and dropped the clutch it'll pop a wheelie! (Don't tell my grandpa)
Honestly, I still had to practically stand on the clutch with mine!
I'd teach someone to drive it and say, "now push down on the clutch". They they would heave and struggle, then eventually succeed and look victorious. I'd say, "well done, it is now half way down! But that's all you need for now!"
EDIT: To fully explain: It has a two-stage clutch. You half-press it and it disconnects the wheels from the engine. If you fully depress it all the way to the floor, it additionally disconnects the power-take-off shaft (PTO) from the engine. The PTO shaft is a spindle on the back of the tractor which drives things like your flail mower, wood chipper, etc.
EDIT 2: Edit 1 was for the general audience, not the parent commenter ;-)
Why was the clutch so heavy? Did it serve some purpose or was it just due to the limitations of the technology at the time?
I have certainly driven cars with lighter and heavier clutches (I live in EU, automatics weren't popular until recently and are still far from ubiquitous) but I couldn't tell you why every model just doesn't get a light clutch for comfort. A diesel Subaru I drove had a particularly heavy clutch as I recall, so at stop lights I would pop into neutral instead of holding the clutch down for an extended period.
To deliver very high torque, the clutch plates needs to be pressed very hard together to generate enough friction. This also means that it take a lot of force to pull them apart, if you use a simple lever, as older machines do.
Modern machines may use complex mechanical linkages to make the clutch easy to pull apart but still maintain a firm contact, but that also means higher cost and fragility. Or they use pneumatics or hydraulics to assist, sorta like power steering.
That, and design tolerances. A fancy clutch can be light and strong (think ferarri) but farm machines need to work in the dirt/rust and so need larger tolerances. So heavier springs and bigger .... Bigger everything. A slipping clutch in a Ferrari is annoying. A slipping clutch on a tractor means a missed harvest.
Plus mechanical release mechanisms of heavier machinery were often designed in a way that the clutch snaps at a certain point (also in order to reduce wear in the clutch).
I once changed a broken release bearing of a truck. It was a relatively simple repair but the very heavy gearbox has to be taken out to do this - which is problematic especially if done on a yard without proper equipment.
Since then I always pop into neutral when standing at a traffic light. It is interesting how many people in manual driving cultures think there would be no wear and tear if they press the pedal down completely.
Of course there is, as there has to be a force translating connection between rotating parts and parts of the release mechanism which cannot rotate. Only when the pedal is left alone, the release bearing disconnects from the rotating clutch.
As a motorcyclist stopped at the traffic light I always keep the gear on and clutch pulled in. Why? Because I have to be ready to take off when the moron driver on the phone behind me fails to stop.
I do the same thing, and I rationalize it with the fact that the clutch in my motorcycle is is constantly bathed in oil so it can take the "abuse."
I don't ride anymore, but I always did the same at least until a few cars were at a dead stop behind me.
Fair
> The PTO shaft is a spindle on the back of the tractor which drives things like your flail mower, wood chipper, etc.
... and kills/maims anyone with lose clothing trying to step over it!
Oh, god yes.
I mowed using a Farmall H on a family farm when I was about 12 y/o. I don't remember ever having deadly serious conversations with family members up to that point in my life. All four grandparents, aunts and uncles-- it seemed like everybody-- sat me down, looked me dead in the eye, and told me sternly and bluntly "you turn off the PTO and see the shaft isn't turning before you get off the tractor. Every. Time."
All of them knew somebody who lost an arm or leg or got killed when they got pulled into a PTO.
That was probably the first time I'd ever been given the opportunity to operate a machine that would fucking kill me if I shirked on respecting it. I will never forget the tone of that communication.
Without going too far into the weeds here, IMO this experience is representative of gun rights, zoning, and all sorts of other differences between urban and rural.
Rural kids are put into situations where they are expected to rely fully on themselves, with life-or-death consequences, from a young age. When your pre-teen is driving a machine on their own that could easily kill them or those around them, giving them a .22 rifle is just... normal. It's not at all the same situation as a kid the same age who lives in an apartment and who may have never been in a place where no one would be close enough to hear them if they screamed for help.
I can't wrap my head around the idea that a large number of people who live in cities seem to want to extend childhood through age 25. My daughters are 12 and 17, and between them have over fifty animals directly depending on them for survival. It's just... foreign.
I think you're generalizing too much. Rural communities take gun safety seriously. Farming communities take farming equipment seriously. Kids grow up internalizing the seriousness of these things, which is communicated expressly and tacitly their whole lives by countless people around them, including their friends. Plus they encounter walking examples of what can go wrong, like a missing finger, burn scars (not careful around bonfires or burn pits), or bullet holes (I knew at least 2 or 3 kids growing up with scars from shot). But put those same kids or adults who are careful with those machines in a similarly dangerous but novel situation, and they'll do dumb shit like anyone else. I'm tempted to argue they're more likely to do something dumb because they have a false confidence from their experience with other dangerous situations, whereas suburban and city kids may be more likely to be too scared to play around with any dangerous machine or situation.
I lived on a farm for a year as a young kid (farmer rented a couple of trailers on his land). I remember one day I was hanging around the hog pen watching the giant hogs mill about, probably contemplating trying to pet one. Mr Austin came by and sternly told me to not to reach through the fencing, then knelt down and showed me his ear, which was missing a big chunk.
On the flip side, plenty of Rural and Suburban people are terrified by the city, which kids growing up in the city shrug off.
Rural folks might learn to respect a PTO or the varmint rifle by age 10, but city kids learn how to navigate the bus routes and subway. They learn how to walk on crowded streets, how to live among a lot of different people, including dangerous people(and how to avoid the conflict).
It's all quite interesting. Different kinds of toughness, different kinds of mental fortitude.
I don't "want" to extend childhood; but where I live makes it a little difficult to let my kids roam the way I did. Go too far one way and you're heading into busy highway traffic hell, go too far the other way and you're heading into hobo territory.
Wish I could move; I could sell this overpriced place and almost retire.... not under my control
> not under my control
Why, if I may ask?
Wife or custody orders, usually
The phrasing of "gun rights" in the context that's really about gun responsibilities is a big part of the problem. And I say this from an unusual position; I'm a Brit who was taught to shoot at school (cadets). The urban gun control question is not so much about responsibility as about malice. There's not a huge number of people with murderous intent, but there are enough. And the resistance of rural America to the questions of either "do you actually need a gun?", "are you a responsible person?", and "no, you can't bring that into the city" result in thousands of deaths every year in the city. If they were willing to allow separate rules for different areas, this wouldn't be nearly as heated.
> a large number of people who live in cities seem to want to extend childhood through age 25
This is not great, and a more complicated problem of percieved danger.
People can have different lived experiences and it's OK; they are differently valuable and beneficial. I'm a certified unc, easily double the age of your oldest, and I have 0 animals depending on me for survival. It means, among other things, that I can simply decide to leave town for a week and don't need to arrange for replacement humans to take care of other living beings -- and this is a valuable freedom to have.
>Rural kids are put into situations where they are expected to rely fully on themselves, with life-or-death consequences, from a young age.
come to the city, farm boy, and we'll give you a corner you can sling the brown from and we see how you do. we find something fo yo daughters to do too*
*i have absolutely no street smarts, country or city, but I do watch Law & Order and know how to pound a nail and know what to grease the maitre d' to get into the hottest restaurants in town. and beyond that i got friends, some of these guys know people who know people, just sayin
Ah yes, encouraging people into shitty situations, the hallmarks of city life.
His tone I did not like either, but his point was that city life is not without mortal dangers either, which I think is fair.
I have never driven a tractor, but clearly remember our headmaster giving us this exact lecture when I was about 8. This in a town of 20,000 people where I expect not even 2% of the kids would even visit a farm outside of an organised trip, but clearly an important enough message to be worth broadcasting.
He knew :)
That seems to be common, the communist-era tractor I was riding was pretty much "stand with full weight and still have to brace by the steering wheel to push it"
Good that at least there wasn't much gear changing, pick one for task and just use it
You say “up until a year ago”, what ended up replacing it?
I’m in the market for a tractor in roughly that size, and am very tempted to just find an old machine in decent shape. I’d be very curious about the decision/experience if you did upgrade to something more modern?
My grandfather had one of these, though gas powered. It may have been the Ford model, cannot remember, though his was built I believe in the late 40s / early 50s. One story that still makes me laugh, he couldn't start it one day, and asked my grandmother to give him a pulling start w/ their ford diesel pickup. One look and my about 12 year old self just knew she wanted to be anywhere else but there (some foreshadowing, she had a reputation for a lead foot). Grandpa had already tied a rope from the tractor to the truck, and I believe he was in maybe one of the lower gears ready to pop the clutch after he got up to speed. Grandma tore (yes, tore) out of the yard shifting gears, and she was accelerating down their long driveway headed for the main road as Grandpa started frantically waving his hat trying to get her to stop. I'm pretty sure he never asked her again to help start the tractor. And yeah, the tractor was started, probably in the first 50 feet of that episode.
Never do a job well if you never want to do it again.
My dad had one of these, to support his farming hobby. (He used to joke that we ate fifty dollar cucumbers, and a hundred-dollar ear of corn.)
It came in handy living in the country, when occasionally someone would get bogged down on a dirt road, and this thing would come to the rescue.
My grandpa was a high school principal to support his love of farming, not because he wasn't dedicated, but because they wanted to survive
We used to have a really old Massey Ferguson, I think TE-20, at the family (moonshine) farm. It was finally retired around 15 years ago and replaced with a MF 165. I hear you about the clutch--sometimes I feel I can't even push it down far enough.
I also love driving it, apart from the fact the hydraulics are somewhat off, so the front/rear lift won't ever stay in position.
The name of the brand is "Massey Ferguson" not "Massy Fergusson".
The reason I know that is not that I'm a farmer. It's that 20 years ago a bunch of friends and I wrote and performed a parody song of Gainsbourg/Bardot song "Harley Davidson" where the motorbike brand was replaced with the tractor one.
"Je n'ai besoin de personne en Harley Davidson"
became
"Je n'ai besoin de personne en Massey Ferguson".
My father drove one of those in his childhood. Now retired, he has bought a used one and uses it to maintain about an acre of land (and his grandkids love helping him).
Once, it broke down, and I was astonished to see that there are forums dedicated to this tractor. If I remember correctly, it was a problem with the fuel line that is rather common, and we managed to fix it thanks to these communities.
As I was researching it, I read stories of MF135s found abandoned in a ditch and starting immediately again. A robustness that makes this and other models popular in Africa...
Did yours have a foot feed for the accelerator? I've never seen one without a hand feed for the rpm's on the steering column.
The fancy ones had an accelerator pedal, but most just had the lever on the steering column.
The one I drove (and a much older MF as well) had both. A lever on the steering column, as well as a foot pedal. I've never seen anyone without one elsewhere either, maybe they were only sold that way in my country.
Wild. We ran a 175 and 1100 for our daily tractors before Grandpa died and I quit farming (big ass John Deere machines for the real work at planting and harvest though).
They're phenomenal little machines that can do 99% of what you need. It blows my mind that for years, Grandpa farmed with a little Ford smaller than the 175. I can't imagine planting with that thing. The ww2 generation really were tough as nails.
Mine and a pedal and steering column lever, so I guess I got one of the fancy ones!
So our main small tractors were a 175 and an 1100. The 1100 had a bucket but I would've killed for a bucket on that little 175. Man that thing was handy. You could drive it through the yard without leaving tire tracks.
"Mash the foot feed" is a phrase you'll hear mostly in the southern US, and rarely elsewhere, including HN.
I shamefully have some Facebook Marketplace notifications for some Massy tractors. I'd love one. I don't even have land to use them, I just think they are neat.
I wonder if it's legal to just park your tractor in a regular parking spot across your apartment. I'm European so we have small parking spots. But would a small tractor fit in the parking spot of the biggest Ford truck?
Definitely
I went through my teenager years driving one of those MF 135 machines. A very versatile tractor. I enjoyed driving tractors (including a much older MF), when I eventually got my car's driver license some years later I found that driving cars weren't really that interesting.
During certain kinds of driving gear shifts became.. tricky. That's when I learned how to double-clutch, something I kept doing on cars as well, for many years after (think going steep uphill on snow and then having to shift into first gear without stopping)
Still rocking one over here. The thing had not been maintained for 20 years while still being used, ran several times with almost no oil in the engine, drank gasoil full of water.
And it still works.
Things were made different back then.
I looked up the manual, you got everything you need to repair it. Maintenance is extremely easy. Even have electric schema.
Now my BMW, I looked into the manual how to change a light. It said to go to the dealer lol.
Fuck the modern car / tractor / tools. I blame the people for that, we went from customer that demanded to be able to repair their stuff to people who are now mechanically illiterate. I'm not sure they would even know how to replace a tire on their Tesla :)
That's why manufacturer have all the latitude to do what they do. And that's why it didn't go very far with farmers.
> It said to go to the dealer lol.
It's amazing we let it slip this far. Even cars from a decade or so ago feel much more repairable. I bought an EV and I haven't even seen the motor yet, because I'm going to have to dismantle a bunch of plastic-clipped stuff to remove the frunk, and I've broken enough brittle tabs for one lifetime. God forbid they'd just use actual metal fasteners for this stuff.
Yeah that also.
It's even worst tho, one day I layed a little bit against the front of the car and it made a reverse bump in the bodywork right on my ass.
Got a 2000 Suzuki that is full metal.
I think the trend of plastic went around 2000 to 2010 because of regulation on crash, plastic absorbs better the kinetic energy so we don't get our head smashed.
But yeah, no excuse to not make it easy to dismantle. It's the equivalent of Volkswagen using all kind of different screws to hold the plastic protection under the car, so that the average Joe who has standards screw drivers can't bleed his oil himself or change the gasoline filter.
This is maddening but you don't know it when you buy the car. It's only later.
And example, in the US, is how much the population makeup has changed over time:
https://dailyyonder.com/census-report-unusually-informative-...
Go back to 1910, and more than 50% of the population lived in rural areas. And rural doesn't mean "suburbs". As this trend continues further back in time, I'd expect that people in their 30s may be living in cities in 1910, but we often not born there. They migrated from rural areas to the city.
Which means that city people even into the 50s had a very, very rural background.
So people who grew up on farms miles from any town or neighbours or stores, who had to rely upon themselves entirely, were the ones buying machines. But if you look at today, many people are apartment dwellers, or live in townhomes. They don't even have a place to fix something, let alone the tools or background.
I could fix any small engine before I was 10, work on cars before I could drive, and it's because you just picked up this stuff in a rural area. I guess my point is, if you don't know how to fix anything, and no one around you does except for specialists?
Then you probably won't care about owner repairability as much.
Sad, but probably a likely reason why we're where we are.
Must be used all around the world. My parents had one on our farm in the 70s. Maybe it is still there- as a "back up" tractor. I remember it well.
I spent the night on Flatéy, a 2km long Icelandic island, in 2024, and there were around a half dozen Massey Fergusons strewn about.
The old church had a mural of Icelandic Jesus wearing a fisherman’s sweater.
You'll likely appreciate this then: https://farmboymusic.bandcamp.com/track/we-couldnt-start-the...
> The air filter was basically a shisha-pipe that bubbled the incoming air through wire wool and engine oil.
What is a shisha-pipe?
Class of Middle Eastern tabletop usually-tobacco smoking devices with water based filtering
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hookah
The other name for these filters are "oil bath filters" basically it snorkles the intake air through oil and that sticks to any dust and dirt.
Also known as hookah or just waterpipe.
Basically a fancy bong.
I have the original 1940's Minneapolis Moline R and my wife has the original Farmall H and we both currently live in the city (but grew up farming or close to it) so we're not city kids, but somewhere stuck in between. I deeply get the feeling of using a non-tech machine, and how simple it is but intuitive to use. We used a pain mixing stick to check the gas level in our tractors on the farm, I don't think the gas gauges ever worked. You'd have to whack the starter with a wrench since they didn't ever work half the time. They worked over 60 years before they got their first oil change (my grandpa didn't believe in changing them - but my dad and I think it's just because you'll never get the canister filter to seal ever again if you did change it)
Great memories.
My Ford 2N has exactly two gauges: oil pressure, and ammeter. And the ammeter doesn't work.
But the tractor does.
with a spanner in one hand and YouTube into the other
There are so many useful videos on this stuff, but unfortunately the majority of the population still seems reluctant to learn.
I'm not sure the majority of the population will ever need, or even want, to learn to bleed fuel lines, so I wouldn't consider it reluctance. And I would wager that the majority of the (internet) population does engage in learning activities on the regular.
My son recently broke the string on the light cord in the bathroom. I opened it up in perhaps the naive expectation that someone would have designed that in such a way that the string can be reattached. Sadly it wasn't.
In fact when you open the interior plastic piece the whole thing springs apart and everything from the clicking mechanism to the electrical terminals explode in different directions.
Thankfully, someone had uploaded a video of a very similar switch and, after a few cross words (man I hate assembling mechanisms with springs), I had a new overhand knot in the string and all of the contacts, springs and terminals back in place.
I would, without doubt, drive down to a shop and buy a new one next time...
The ones here in the UK have these little plastic connectors on the string. The switch itself has a very short string coming out of it(<10cm), the plastic connector and then the main pull cord. These connectors are simple tubes with an opening that hold and hide the knots. Makes changing the pull cord quite easy, you just feed it through the hole in the connector, tie a simple knot at the end and pull it back into the connector body.
I actually had one of these connectors break on a bathroom light and just 3D printed a new one. But it should be fairly trivial to add one of these to any light pull you already have.
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5140505 (not my design)
Yeah, for some reason the knot broke on the inside rather than at that connector.
I think this kind of thing is much more commonplace than you think.
Never underestimate a young person and their phone. They not only use youtube or chatgpt to solve daily problems, but date, pay bills, and communicate with their friends using mostly videos/photos/emojis (and occasionally english).
Tangential, but made me think of this YouTube channel I like.
I have no plans to own a tractor but for some reason many others and I enjoy videos like this one:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pQO-pVxvKvA
New Zealand tree farmer Marty T has been posting detailed "back from the dead" tractor / bulldozer / grader / etc. restoration project videos for some time.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVvO1tKKjRQ
* https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrCvcRxFfyzt3vJmctRaN...
etc. Also hydropower from old washing machine parts and other associated stuff you do on the land videos.
> I imagine the clutch is easier on the knees these days! Modern tractors don't really have a clutch. I mean they sorta do, but it's electronic. Even on sizable consumer positioned tractors(I have a JD 5055, but it applies to almost all the JD models), there's just a lever for forward, N, and reverse. Gear shifters work MUCH MUCH better now.
When I was younger I absolutely HATED changing gear on the tractor - it was a matter of dropping the revs which caused a dive, then a clunk finding the gear, then a jolt as the gear took hold and the revs came back up
I never felt in control of that old beast
Changing gears while driving? Are you sure you where supposed to? Many old tractors are without synced drives, so you are supposed to select gear before you start driving. Of course you can change when driving, but then you have to match revs to not get the drop betwen
Ha ha, that's such a wonderful description, that's exactly how it feels!
One of my early memories was driving a tractor like this hauling potato harvest with my late grandfather when his "big" tractor wouldn't start. Feels like a 1000 years ago...
My father still has one of these in orange and white. I remember when I was a little child and he would start it up, I could feel the concussion of the exhaust in my chest.
An awesome memory. Lovely things, these.
I remember when I was young seeing a combine that had a radio and television in the cab. wow!
Now things have wrapped back around, and nobody would want that, they want less tech and to use their phone, lol.
Those are so cool. First motorized thing I ever drove was some 1950s Ford tractor, as a little kid. My uncle showed me how to use it. I almost had to stand with both feet on the clutch and pull myself up to release it, while my brother manned the wheel and throttle separately.
While I love wrenching on cars, I imagine a tractor like this would scratch a different itch—something more latent, leftover from childhood.
Do you still have the Massy?
I do, but a friend is taking care of the farm now. I moved back to the big city lights (Munich, as fate would have it).
The smaller tractors now mostly use a hydrostatic transmission instead of a clutch[]. You just move a plate that changes the mechanical advantage of the engine powered hydraulic drive. It's basically another set of hydraulics but for driving the tractor.
[] https://youtu.be/TunlPGZ3UOg?t=69
Basic models still sell like hot cakes in India. I see them all the time.
https://masseyfergusonindia.com/massey-ferguson/
I loved the MF 135 my neighbour had. It was great. The injector pump had failed and we'd swapped it with one off a marine version of the Perkins AD3, which had a reasonably "opened up" governor on it. Flat it out could do a whopping 20mph!
> no fancy technology in it at all
It's amazing we can use huge machinery with internal combustion engines and declare it "no fancy technology"
Any technology from before the time of your grandparents, and often parents, is usually perceived to be "not fancy". Because then those elders can't tell you in your childhood what life was like before that technology. So in your lived experience that technology was always there. Reading history later on, doesn't change your emotional experiences.
Freeze LLM progress right here and the future is still totally inconcievable. Humans who have only ever known being able to talk to machines...
It's already inconceivable since today's teenagers have never not had an iPad.
Disagree. There's lots of products and goods that have become less fancy as a result of changes in labor/material cost as industrialization ran its course and the old way is considered the fancy way.
Wood furniture joined with glue and pegs rather than inserts and screws. Solid wood furniture at all. Leather and natural fibers gave way to plastics. Ornate castings gave way to simple stampings and simply castings (where things are still cast).
An internal combustion engine may be complex, but it's not fancy. I can see and touch and understand every part of it. I can maintain and modify and repair it. This is not true for fancy electronics and certainly not locked-down proprietary firmware.
For every modern car I had or used in the last 20 years, the engine itself never was a problem, other than the regular maint, oil, filters, belts, plugs, cables...
Now, electronics problems, albeit relativelly rare, were far more common and fucking expensive.
And then, but this more due to the state of modern roads and streets than the car themselves, suspension issues.
The magic of an engine is less in how it operates, and more in how it was built. At least around the time they started showing up, manufacturing lots of precision metal parts was not trivial.
Although modern electronics take this further, with both operation and construction being utterly complex.
One of my vehicles is a 2009 Civic. It continues to amaze me that with minimal maintenance, that 17-year-old vehicle will fire right up with the turn of a key, with hundreds (thousands?) of parts moving in a specific way, many of them with tolerances in tiny fractions of an inch.
2010 MB C300 I bought in 2013 from a dealer after the lease expired, parked outside without a garage or cover since then (Virginia).
About 3 years ago a large branch (about 8" diameter) from an old overhanging tree fell right on the transparent sunroof cover and shattered it into a million pieces. After picking them out of the sunroof mechanism (which no longer worked after the impact) and the inside of the car, I covered the opening with several sheets of magnetized vinyl. Works great, never a drop of water inside since then and it's stayed in place without any attention. Temperature control inside the car at rest or while driving at highway speed is like it was before the damage.
Being old now I never go anywhere since I can get stuff delivered. About every 3 weeks I go out and the car starts right up, I drive a 5-mile loop to circulate the oil and then park it for another 3 weeks. Been doing this for years. I do get an oil change annually.
Any sufficiently mundane technology is indistinguishable from... furniture?
Nice one. Added to https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup
Maybe it is fancy to you now, but with a few primitive hand tools and no docs at all, a HS graduate can take it apart and figure out how it works.
Try doing the same on the ECU in your car. I'll wait.
I learned how engines worked by taking apart, cleaning and reassembling an ancient lawnmower engine so I could use it on my go-kart. I then learned how cars worked by taking one apart and putting it back together again.
Neither of those machines had a transistor in them. It was all basic electricity.
> HS graduate can take it apart and figure out how it works.
Sure you wouldn't like a qualifier on that? I've definitely met some HS graduates that would not be able to do this.
Wait a few years and no HD will be able to do something similar.
See other story on front page right now: educational scores are trending down and that trend is only going to accelerate now that every student is using LLMs.
We also don't call a hoe fancy technology, but it is.
I don't know about you, but my mother is definitely not technology
The hoe wasn't fancy, but the plow was (at the time).
Yeah, I was introspecting as I wrote that!
I think this is a reaction to the incredibly locked down ecosystem that most of these mfgs are pushing.
However, the tech exists for a reason and is not inherently bad, the issue is the lock-in, the lack of choice and interoperability.
IMO, there is plenty of space for an OEM who can play nice with others, offer an open (and vibrant ecosystem), and keep users coming back by choice, not by lock-in.
I think going bare-metal at cut-rate might've been the only way to actually kick-start that. F.ex. ECU's make things more optimal so buyers will be paying extra for fuel in a bad economy, but the lock-down was worse when it was causing downtime.
But tech in general is perhaps in a growing-up phase, we had Arduinos and Raspberry PI's filling a similar need (computer to electronics being needlessly complicated) that was initially filled from the low-end, but now we have faster SBC's and stuff like Framework laptop's that is expanding the range of options for repariable/replaceable/hackable parts up to the high end today and farming equipment is probably destined to get a similar range of options.
An interesting note here is, will cars also start getting a range of more hackable options, mechanics are ingenious already but it's still very much hacks without manufacturer support, but a new manufacturer providing a low-cost base could very well pop up and grow quickly if they establish an ecosystem.
> However, the tech exists for a reason and is not inherently bad, the issue is the lock-in, the lack of choice and interoperability.
These low-tech tractors could become a hot bed for open source experimentation. Nothing stopping someone from sticking a tablet on the dash. You could run GPS harvesting optimization software or some webthing locally. Could be cloud or clever DiY farmers could run their farm off a local instance on a small machine using a WiFi AP atop the barn or whatever.
This was my take as well. How many 3rd parties might be able to bring on upgrades/modifications to a "dumb" tractor to make it smart vs only being able to buy a "smart" tractor from one vendor and be forced into it's rules/restrictions/prices
Plenty of options for putting auto steer on a dumb tractor already exist.
Cheap ones too -- aliexpress has them.
But there's more to agtech than driving a tractor around, a lot of what these big integrated systems do (at the high end) is very data driven -- determining where and how to plant, irrigate, fertilize, etc. There's a lot of integration work beyond just making the tractor drive.
> But there's more to agtech than driving a tractor around, a lot of what these big integrated systems do (at the high end) is very data driven -- determining where and how to plant, irrigate, fertilize, etc.
How difficult is this to implement outside of big ag-tech? I feel that a community of experienced farmers and programmers (or programmer-farmers) could tackle this.
It really depends.
The bigger agcorps have tones of integration.
The machine, from tractor to combine and everything in between often feeds data together to produce a holistic understanding.
Things like - How much fuel was used - Where your tractors and sprayers drove - Soil samples and content - How and where every bit of chemical and fertilizer was applied - What weather hit your field - How much and and the moisture content of every bit of the field you harvested
It goes on an on.
> The bigger agcorps have tones of integration.
Yes, but how useful is the integration?
The sprayers/spreaders can be connected cheap computer to achieve most of what you describe.
I used to do literally that but in aircraft. Must be easier and cheaper in tractors
It's not complex if you have like three machines.
But if you're observing a fleet of 100+ machines you kinda need some integration and a central location. Which in turn connects to multiple other services like weather, crop markets, fuel prices etc.
I think this has all suddenly shifted with high-quality programming AIs available. How difficult is this to implement with Claude?
The software is certainly easier to build, but there's a lot of hardware involved here beyond the tractor. Claude is not necessarily going to make it easier to do soil sampling or measuring field conditions or yield outputs.
Farmers would be foolish to rely on an LLM because farming margins are too low to makeup for even a small quick mistake. Many farms will profit 1% on investment over 1-2 decades, although year to year yield can vary 30%.
What kind of sensors do those cheap kits come with?
A tractor is a big thing to have rolling around unsupervised. I would want a lot of safeguards. Blindly going from one GPS point to another sounds like a nightmare.
The cheapie aliexpress specials simply drive the line they're programmed to drive. They have GPS and a gyro to account for the slope of the land. You're supposed to stay in the tractor while they're operating as a safety... but this doesn't always happen in some parts of the world.
30 years ago you had a hand-gas and clamped the wheel to drive the tractor in a line. Using GPS is a litle bit more safe than that. And I talk about Germany!
Here you go, local grain farmer (4,500 hectares, barley, grains) reviews a fully automated driverless swarm bot in boom spray configuration:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljEKN7CsjnM
Right, but that has nothing to do with a vendor making a dumb tractor. Why do we need to dismissively move the conversation from TFA. The data driven approach is made up of several parts, and we're looking at a specific part
Making a dumb tractor for the use-case of dumb tractor is obviously a winning idea.
I just don't think you're going to effectively compete with big agtech by putting a bunch of parts in a box, shaking it, and hoping you end up with a beautifully integrated solution. Integration hell is the reason big commercial firms dominate when it comes to large integrated systems.
Why not? They sell telematics systems separately from cars. It’s possible to do this and it might not be too difficult depending on how the system is composed.
Precision ag is orders of magnitude more complicated of a system than vehicle telematics. Again, driving the tractor is the easy part, and you can already get cheap systems to do this.
admittedly, i'm not a farmer nor an expert in data driving farming. but getting a farmer the ability to precisely drive a tractor in a field so that planting seeds, applying fertilizer, and any of the other steps would be a huge win. The settings used when doing that can easily come from bigFarmData gained from other sources. Can it be used even more precisely when everything is gathered/integrated by one company? That's a question that I'm not by default saying yes to, but it seems like you do think that is true. Even if it is true, does that mean the difference from a farmer going broke because his DIY tractor behaved slightly differently than your solution? I'd posit that a farmer only being allowed to play the bigFarmData game by only being allowed to buy from one vendor that is expensive while also forcing any repairs to be expensive will cause farmers to financially unnecessarily struggle.
The economics of farming (at least in the US) are brutal. Scaling up is really the only way to make a living long term. Some of this is due to equipment cost (look up how much a combine costs), and some is due to competition. It's not unusual for a farmer to be land rich and cash poor.
If you want to see a couple of guys learning how to farm from scratch, visit https://www.youtube.com/@spencerhilbert. Spencer and his brother made a bit of money off games and Youtube and have been starting out on corn, hay, as well as raising beef. It gives a pretty good insight into how pervasive tech is in farming, and how despite that, how much of farming still relies on hard, physical work.
I'll check out Spencer's channel. For a comedy perspective, there's Clarkson's Farm or Growing Belushi. Even though they are for entertainment, there's a still a lot of info in those shows to not be written off.
However, I'm not as interested in being a farmer at that level. I'm much more interested in the homesteading aspect of farming. I'm not trying to feed the world as much as me and mine and maybe some extra. So not just farming, but also some ranching with sheep/goats/chickens/pigs. I have friends doing this that I'm keeping an eye on. They had a head start as their kids grew up in FFA and are already familiar with raising live stock, and then having them processed to make that part much less daunting.
I get that. Crop farming is so different than raising animals.
Good luck, but there’s a reason why subsistence farmers move to city slums as soon as they can.
Yes, because doing it with low tech and for money is backbraking. But doing it for fun with other sources of income is a different story.
Scale is a huge factor. It makes the most sense to invest in precision ag tech when you have enough acres that the investment pays off. At 5000+ acres, farms are using integrated systems that combine satellite data, on-tractor sensors, soil sensors, drone sensors, in-field weather sensors, with a lot of science to squeeze the most out of the land. At that scale, there's a lot of money invested in a season and you aren't looking for a DIY project, you need production quality product with proven scientific rigor. You probably don't have the manpower to do a DIY project anyway, you are relying heavily on automation and outsourcing. And at the low end, it it more effort to implement any of this than you'll get out of it.
So a DIY solution is aiming for somewhere in the center of the market -- enough scale that it makes sense to bother, but not enough enough money to avoid the headache of DIY. It might make sense for some mid-sized farms in developing economies, but it seems to be a narrow window to me.
Is suspect most farmers would prefer the diy add-on version of these than the single manufacturer integrated one. A modern smartphone and stay of I/o sensors send like it could do pretty much the entire job
The kid? :)
I had to scroll back up to see what this reply was to, to get the full chuckle and yup, I was told frequently by my male parental unit that the top two reasons for having kids was chores and tax deductions. But there's a reason farm families leaned on the large side. The more hands you had helping the less hard things could be while never being easy
Years ago, there was a TED Talk[0] from the guy that started Open Source Ecology[1]. The TED Talk was really cool, but I haven't really followed what they did. It sounded promising to have open-source technology for use in this space.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S63Cy64p2lQ
[1] https://wiki.opensourceecology.org/wiki/Main_Page
I absolutely love this vision. He's still working towards the goal. It seems that his vision has problems scaling up though. He seems to mostly still drive this himself.
My bet would be there will be a niche for these tractors at hobby farms but the reality is outside of niche goods and hobby farms, farming is about scale and the machines that companies like JD sell help a lot. Sure the tech is locked down but at the scale those players are running at it’s baked into the service contract to minimize downtime.
They have no driving electronics, electronic throttle, ECU controlled injection etc, so you are limited, you can't for example easily make it go constant set speed, because the throttle isn't electronic.
It went a bit too far, optimum would be modern enough to have drive by wire but with open ECU and documentation
You can still control a completely mechanical engine to work with set speeds. There are mechanical governors that can do this, or you can get an electronic component that moves the throttle for you. Fixed speed engines with variable load are much older than the transistor.
It is no harder than doing it with an ECU, except that you need to install a servo or speed governor with hand tools, instead of fiddling with ECU code.
It is far easier for 3rd party stuff to target say open bus protocol rather than a servo + speed sensor pair.
It has a governor.. The P pump 12 valves (and many other multi-application diesels) come with either one of two different governors, an automotive one which has a high idle and low idle, but unrestricted fueling in between. This is what you want in a car or truck where you're controlling road speed with your foot. There's also the "industrial" governor that essentially maps lever input linearly to engine RPM, and endeavors to maintain its set RPM independent of load. This is the kind you find in tractors, generators, boats, etc.
These governors are basically mechanical analog computers which use the inertia of flyweights, springs, and some very clever linkages to do their thing.
I know, I used tractor like this. Governor only keeps RPM, not the air-fuel ratio and a bunch of other emission and fuel usage related stuff.
And it's a bit easier to make 3rd party addons when you just have some open bus standard, not "mount that servo on a gas pedal"
There's a device called an "aneroid compensator" that sits on top of the governor and is used to maintain a fueling profile for a specific density altitude (e.g. limit fuel at higher altitudes on naturally aspirated engines or off-boost on turbocharged engines). This effectively maintains AFR, although it is not a closed loop system. For closed loop control you need to measure AFR directly in the exhaust and compensate, which means you need an electronically governed injection pump. There's no good way to do this with some 3rd party add-on. You'd be much better off just using an electronically governed Bosch injection pump (like those found on 24 valve Cummins or 1998-1999 Mercedes OM606 turbodiesels). But then you incur the encumbrance of the ECU and all the bad corporate behavior that comes along for the ride.
Also note that maintaining a particular AFR in a diesel is kind of a non goal, at least from the perspective of engine performance. With the older style, simple injection systems that are user serviceable you only get one pulse per cycle. So you can't really change AFR without compromising torque output. For a tractor, when I set the lever all the way forward I (the operator) expect it to maintain revs sufficient to maintain 540rpm at the PTO unless it is not able to do so (fueling maxed out). Putting more load necessarily means more fuel in for a given RPM, ergo higher AFR. Note that turbocharging changes this equation a little.
There are already open source auto pilot and cruise control implementations for cars. (Not all cars are supported obviously!) so to have this in place for tractors off the road seems very doable.
Edit: specifically thinking of https://comma.ai/
Well open source AutoSteer exists it has a lot of features like rate control built in to it. The system is called AgOpenGPS it’s very popular for retrofitting older equipment with modern technology.
With high end tractors you can have them drive themselves on the rows based on a GPS map that was created when you planted. That's going to be difficult to retrofit.
The beauty here is even beyond experimentation the tech will change repeatedly over the life of the equipment, and you can cheaply adapt to that. There is very little advantage to the modern tractors, beyond luxuries and the finish of a self contained package. Farmers rarely ime prioritize either of these
OEM can change their mind at any moment and there is always going to be an MBA rubbing their hands together thinking about all the money that can be made.
This needs to be solved at government level with right to repair laws and requirement for open standards instead of believing in magic of "free market".
Now is especially a good time for Canada to do it. Cory Doctorow had a fantastic CBC interview about this. Scrapping anti-tampering protections would harm anti-Canadian tech companies while also building rapport with American farmers who would be able to use Canadian software on their tractors.
Something tells me that the best tractor software would be free, not nationalized.
Yes, free, and created in Canada by developers not burdened by American red tape.
I have a hard time imagining that canada has expertise in tractor software. Let's rein our nationalist tendencies in to something that approaches common sense
Canada has the highest percentage of people with higher education. There's no qualifier for that sentence. Canada is the only country on earth where a majority of people over 25 have tertiary education.
It also has a massive agricultural sector. You know how Canada is known as an oil and gas powerhouse? Agriculture is more than double the size of o+g in Canada.
I think the most well educated country on earth, with a massive, highly automated, agricultural sector might be able to reason about tractor software.
Hum... i can understand your throwaway status.
You are certainly aware that we , in Canada, have expertise in software that is quite a bit more advanced than tractor software.
Do you think we live in fucking igloos bud?
I'm not your buddy, guy!
Here’s your Buddy Guy - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddy_Guy
I'm not your guy, pal!
I jailbreaked my Canadarm to prune my weed plants using a LLM.
Ever-more-restrictive government regulations are what allows these OEMs to ‘leverage’ their market power this way. I am not sure that a new regulation can solve it, as these sorts of mandates don’t seem to have worked in any other market.
The argument isn't 'more' regulations or 'less' regulations, it is the right regulations. The problem is that big companies slowly allow regulations that don't hurt them but do block competition by aggressively fighting regulations that help the startup (their competition) or help the consumer in ways that make them less money. It isn't hard to be evil and create regulatory capture. You don't actually have to be active in crafting regulation, just be active in blocking the right regulation. General statements that are 'against regulation' play into big companies making things worse.
These big companies absolutely allow regulations that "hurt" them. Deere doesn't want to deal with farmers who are pissed off that emissions stuff results in a service call at a bad time and can't be overridden, or obnoxious safety stuff that make products less useful outside of their "textbook" application, or something that forces them to expensively certify their product is XYZ or something.
Buuuuut, the cost of implementing that stuff hurts the competition way more, so Deere and friends don't really fight it.
They're trading absolute market size for stronger control over market share. Less people are going to buy their products at the margin if the products are made worse. But those that do will buy it from them, so more profit.
Those are load-bearing quotation marks: you're saying the regulation doesn't hurt them, only "hurts" them. If the regulation hurt them, they wouldn't allow it.
You're proposing a binary version of "hurt", they are proposing a spectrum. If a regulation hurts company A but it will survive whereas company B, A's main and essentially only competitor stopping A from a monopoly, will go out of business from that regulation, you know that company A won't fight it.
You're right, the solution is getting rid of swathes of intellectual property legislation, not adding more.
That's a double edged sword. Investors demand a return regardless of what IP law is. They'll invest in the companies that find some way to protect their investment -- NDAs, stronger technical protections, services-models, etc.
Maybe it's time the economy shifts from having to prioritize the investors for everything
You don't have to prioritize them. You can choose to encourage the rich to hoard their money elsewhere. But there are consequences to every policy decision.
The rich don't have money, they have assets, and those assets can't go anywhere. It doesn't matter if the rich buy or sell a farm in Canada, the farm is still in Canada.
> The rich don't have money, they have assets
Yeah, we're talking about the same thing.... the word for a rich person who exchanges their cash for non-cash assets is "investor"
> It doesn't matter if the rich buy or sell a farm in Canada, the farm is still in Canada.
Have we learned nothing from what happened to the US's industrial economy.
If you turn the farm into an obviously poor investment it'll go tits up because neither wall street nor main street is dumb enough to invest money into a losing proposition.
We got rich by not prioritizing the needs of investors in the first place. Maybe we need to start prioritizing the needs of the larger society again.
You certainly don't need economic investment to become "rich" in culture, enlightenment, or humanity, for sure. And there is value to that.
However, financiers played an indisputable role in the current state of economic wealth in today's world.
Indisputable role in economic precarity, more commonly known as wage slavery.
Remember that those regulations are written by the OEMs they benefit and whom bribe legislators to pass those regulations.
Any argument made without acknowledging this is purely in bad faith. The problem is not regulation that benefits OEMs. The problem is that you can simply purchase regulations that benefit you.
There are many regulations, written by a variety of actors, often in strange alliances. Safety, environmental, and disclosure regulations are often the culprits behind industry consolidation and oligopolization.
> instead of believing in magic of "free market"
It looks like magic because it works like magic. Surprisingly it is also possible to believe in the magic of "government intervention" though it looks less like magic and more like unintended consequences.
The thing is that not doing anything is still a policy decision. Unless you want to go full bore libertarian there will always be regulation. By saying that the market is magic and the government is intervention, then you ignore all of the intervention exists already and just saying you are fine with it.
Doing nothing and letting the market do whatever is also full of unintended consequences. Your argument is like letting your yard go to weed and accumulate a bunch of knotweed and himalayan blackberry. Yeah you can argue that you didn’t do anything to create that situation but at the end of the day you’re still responsible for it.
There's no magic necessary. TFA highlights the exact mechanism by which markets can fill a gap or need via entrepreneurship when incumbents fail to deliver what customers want. It's not guaranteed to happen or work in every case, but there's money to be made by giving people what they actually want.
A lot of electronics is useful, it can reduce fuel use or help with more accurate driving.
Farmers are just pissed they lose the ability to repair the vehicle easily or get stuck with monthly subscription because tractor company has changed the terms and you are praying they don't change it further.
A modern John Deere tractor with a robust right-to-repair would still be a pain to do maintenance on. A big part of the reason people want old tractors is because they don't have these additional computer controlled systems which break and require time and effort to fix.
It's almost as if freedom only exists for those with the money to hire lawyers to make it happen. Farmers are basically screwed in that their location at the bottom foundation level of society really ties their hands in what they can get away with before things start getting tumultuous. Yet get a few factories under your belt and enshittify, and suddenly it's all "your way or the highway". Odd that.
It would be nice if this could happen more smoothly and rapidly, without some random people having to become experts in tractors from the ground up, and that's what regulations could help with. Say, if it was legal to copy from the best.
But the company in the article isn't filling the gap. Farm owners want the technology. They don't want to be held hostage over the technology when it needs maintenance, repair, or adaptation after the initial sale.
Honestly do you even need to build a lowtech alternative? Just anounce you will and retire on cartel kickbacks to slow it down?
Government regulations weren't necessary for Framework to make the most open laptop product line in history which includes a the 'Pro' 13" laptop chassis which is both backwards and forwards compatible with components that were sold 5 years ago on day 1.
"Downtime — the thing that actually costs a farmer money during planting or harvest — shrinks dramatically when you don’t need a factory technician with a laptop to diagnose a fuel delivery problem."
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Tractors aren't cars. It isn't merely inconvenient if they are unavailable at crucial times, so ease of repair is critical. Farmers have always done as much of their own maintenance as possible. John Deere has spent a lot of time taking away the reliability and ease of repair that farmers need in order to give them "advanced" features they don't need.
Farmers who want advanced capabilities might now look to build them on top of no-tech tractors with open-source solutions rather than trusting John Deere again. That way, if the "would be nice" tech has problems they can rip it off and get the harvest in without it.
> Farmers have always done as much of their own maintenance as possible.
Well, sure. Maintenance is an off-season job. Its that or sit on the couch watching TV, so you may as well be in the shop getting equipment ready. Even if it takes you longer than an experienced tech, does it really matter? Not really. The winters are long.
Repairs are a different story. When things break, you need it fixed now. Wasting a day trying to figure out how to separate complex, seized parts from each other isn't time you have. You're going to be hiring a mechanic who has done it a million times before.
Of course, more important than who does the work is part availability. Having the human capacity to get something fixed means nothing if you cannot also get the parts you need. I've certainly been caught more than once needing to wait a week on a part, which is not a fun place to be. And this is where John Deere has focused their business: Doing more to keep parts available near to where the farmers are, so that you can get parts exactly when you need them. This is, above all else, why John Deere is the market leader.
> Farmers who want advanced capabilities might now look to build them on top of no-tech tractors with open-source solutions
I have been going down this road and am starting to regret it a bit. The saving grace is that I have found enjoyment in building a system of my own. But if I found it to be a chore, at this point I'd have deep remorse that I didn't just pay someone like John Deere for a fully delivered, highly polished solution. I know the HN crowd tends towards the DIY, but, having actual experience here, I don't see this happening outside of the small subset of farmers who find fun in it. It is a decent hobby for those so inclined, but from a purely commercial perspective the time and effort can be better put to use elsewhere.
If you maintain your stuff you know enough to fix some things and you know when you can't and need to call a mechanic (or a friend who knows more and can do it).
You can fix things, but can you really justify the time to do when you need an operational machine?
1. No matter how great of a shade tree mechanic you are, you will never be able to fix it faster than someone who does it every day. They have found all the little tricks and quirks about your machine that your casual maintenance will never uncover.
2. While large farms with full-time mechanics on staff have been known to make deals to warehouse parts in their own shop on consignment, much more realistically for any kind of normal farm you are going to have to drive to the dealership to get the parts you need. Whereas the dealership tech can bring the parts to you. Meaning that you have to travel twice as far, taking twice as long, to get the parts back to your equipment than if you call a mechanic.
The things that are likely to fail under use where there has been proper maintenance tend to be the things that are unpredictable and catastrophic, at very least requiring parts, and most likely requiring advanced knowhow. And at that point, the dealership tech is going to be faster at getting you back up and running, even if you could theoretically pull it off yourself. So, realistically, there isn't much of a compelling case for doing your own repairs when time is of the essence.
Farmers are often willing to accept more downtime to do it themselves out of pride, though. I admittedly often fall victim to that myself, so I get it. But it’s clear that the farmers who are serious about farming as a business aren’t dinking around trying to fix things themselves. It is not economically prudent to do so. Granted, not all farmers farm for business sake. For many it’s more of a hobby or lifestyle and wanting to be a part-time mechanic can play into that.
This is probably not this companies vision but it does seem interesting if companies sell "dumb" machines and then consumers can BYO electronics. Like an agricultural version of comma.ai.
Not sure how much appetite there is for that but half price + 5 grand in off the shelf electronics seems like something margin sensitive farmers would do.
Reminds me of how I don’t ever want an infotainment system in my car. I want the peripherals: a touch screen and speakers. I’ll supply my own phone to do the rest.
Same for Smart TVs.
Always better short and long term to bring and maintain your own smarts.
I disagree. While those are great points, I don't think that's the primary reason -- and maybe we're actually saying the same thing.
This tractor will last 50 years (and maybe more). Your grandchildren will be able to still use it. That longevity is the primary reason farmers would be super interested in this.
Some jobs (like mucking a barn for example) don't require a high-tech tractor. Sometimes you just need a workhorse that you can trust will start, run and do the job. Every single time. I still see farmers running old minneapolis-moline tractors from 100 years ago!
My in-laws use a Farm-all H around the yard for a lot of tasks. I don’t know what year it was made, but it looks like they were made from 1939-1954. It just… runs. We basically just do oil changes on it.
That’s part of the issue. But packing a tractor (or car) with electronics and computers does make it inherently harder to work on—even if it’s not locked down.
You need electronics and computers for cost-effective compliance with emissions requirements. Emissions limits have been one of the most positive government policies in my lifetime, saving millions of QALYs.
There's lots of other electronics in most modern vehicles, but the public manufacturer rationales for electronic lockdowns almost always point back to emissions concerns because they're so defensible. How do you separate them?
These are regulations, not laws, and can be changed fairly easily. E.g the EPA recently changed the rules requiring NOx sensors and power downs, which were the most failure prone components of the system, while still mandating the actual equipment that scrubs NOx.
There's no particular reason why a mechanical device needs computers for emissions, as the emissions removing components can still be attached and managed via simpler means. All emissions removing components are effectively physical devices, whether you are talking about carbon filters or PCV valves or particulate filters or the urea fluids that are added to the fuel. None of them requires complex software in order to function. There is no reason why you need to buy an official John Deere branded emissions component that is software locked to tractor and costs 10x the price of third party components that do the same thing.
Also, there is a large room to maneuver between "I want a sensor with some circuitry in it" and "the entire tractor is a proprietary computer with locked down parts". The right to repair movement is not about removing tech, but removing unnecessary proprietary tech that is designed to prevent owners of devices from repairing those devices themselves or with third party components.
Perhaps this is naive, but I would imagine that farm equipment is a rounding error in terms of global emissions. Compare the number of tractors to the number of trucks...
I would have expected policy to be pragmatic here, with (relatively) relaxed emissions requirements, since an affordable and reliable food supply is in the national interest? Sounds like that's not the case
Emissions regimes are complicated, but US tractors fall into the much less restrictive off-road category. As a result, they're a disproportionately significant contributor to things like NOx. A long time ago the off-road category was >20%, and I'm sure that percentage has only grown as regulations have forced emissions reductions in onroad vehicles.
The vast majority of offroad equipment is not farm equipment but operates in urban environments. As NOx is an air pollution concern, there should be different regimes for rural areas versus urban areas. Construction equipment operating in urban areas is different from a tractor on a farm.
> but US tractors fall into the much less restrictive off-road category.
Sometimes. Above 26HP tractors do have to have emissions controls like diesel particulate filters now. Below that they don't.
Compare the number of tractors to the number of gas-powered lawnmowers. Which do you think gets better emissions?
I'd imagine it depends what kind of emissions you're measuring? Are we talking air quality or climate change?
Two stroke engines are pretty terrible in terms of unburned hydrocarbons and are disgusting for local air quality, which is why I'm glad they're being phased out in many areas.
I'd expect these tractors with I6 diesel engines to run pretty efficiently. I'd bet that the CO2 emissions from tractors are tiny in comparison from the emissions from trucks, fertiliser, and transporting the food.
Lawnmowers are usually four-stroke, with two-stroke engines reserved for lighter tools like string trimmers and chainsaws.
I would still guess that lawnmowers produce more emissions overall, given that there are so many more mowers than tractors. But they get used less often than tractors, so who knows? Either way, I agree with your thinking process, that the most economical way to reduce overall emissions is to focus on what are actually producing the bulk of emissions.
I don't know how much better cars and trucks can get, and for mowers maybe electric is the answer. Mine is gas-powered, and I know it runs rich. I would love to come inside after mowing and not smell like fuel, so I'm in favor of better emissions controls on mowers.
For tools electric is the answer. To take a chainsaw, the battery needs to be replaced just as often as with refilling the fuel tank. And with newer batteries you might recharge the depleted one as fast as discharging a fresh one. Not sure, just an assumption.
The future for tools is electric 100%.
my brother in Christ, electric chainsaws are garbage, have you ever used one? I tried one out to clear a huge 3 foot wide tree that fell on my property and yeah those things cannot hang with gas powered chainsaws in any way, shape, or form. No one is using electric chainsaws for cutting anything significant.
they may have a place in the distant future but in 2026, aint no way.
I haven't used a chainsaw in a few years, but the last time I did, electric ones with a cord were great. I switched from a proper Stihl chainsaw to a budget electric one with a cord, and despite it being smaller and sort of flimsy, it did cut like crazy, comparable to the gas chainsaw. And it didn't require ear protection, didn't annoy the neighbors and didn't make you smell like a chainsaw for two days.
Which electric chainsaw did you use?
I haven't used one, but I saw a youtube review from Project Farm. You can check it yourself. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6FM_08066I
The DeWalt chainsaw was similar or better than Stihl, in a different series of tests, including cutting trough 10 inch logs.
There were other brands which would stall or be worse, so it depends on the brand.
I like the electric saw for limbing and felling small stuff because it's light and quiet but yeah for anything bigger than like 9" or extended work it's not the tool for the job.
defeat devices aren't even complicated (they just fake the sensor data to ECU to get what owner needs). Locking down is pointless. Most people are not tuning their cars.
IF we wanted to do it properly, I'd imagine we'd have zero mandatory locks on ECU, just a little closed down black box with sensor installed in relatively tamper-proof way (of course there will always be one, the target is for 90% of people to not bother), logging away and maybe sending check engine light if it detects wrong AFR for too long.
Then you just check that on yearly MOT + any signs of tampering. Then owner is free to tune the engine as they want, provided the exhaust is still within the norms for most of the time.
What would you be accomplishing by trying to control end user behavior like that? As a manufacturer, there are certain standards your machine must meet when it leaves your factory. After that, a whole separate set of standards applies to users--e.g. EPA rules about emissions equipment tampering. As a manufacturer, though, you don't need to attempt enforcement. Leave that to the government, it's their job. Locked down, proprietary hardware and software doesn't ultimately achieve enforcement, it just makes tampering more difficult at the cost of serviceability. This is a dumb trade.
It's to contain the regulation into little box that controls the emission, rather than span it to entire system making it harder to repair. Then the EPA can have its "proof" the vehicle emissions are fine without compromising entire system for repairs.
I think you're asking for something magical, like when politicians go on TV and demand safe cryptosystems with government backdoors. Any time you try to do engineering work to hinder users from using devices they own it's a really bad time. That's the purview of law enforcement, not engineering.
> How do you separate them?
Mandate common interfaces and open hardware. I shouldn't have to buy a $10k dongle to sniff codes. I certainly shouldn't have to buy a different one for each manufacturer.
The legislation has to be robust. No dice if the dongle is generic and $20 like OBD2 in cars, but that on top of that there's a per-manufacturer set of codes that only licensed dealers have access to the software to read those special codes.
The situation today is at least better than it used to be before OBDII. I much prefer using a scanner to get codes then having to count flashing lights. And back then you'd still have to pay a lot for the manufacturer's code reader. The only advantage was the ROM was small enough to disassemble and reflash with new features. I would not want to do that on a car made in 2026.
Most of the codes on a large tractor are j1939. You still want the manufacture database because it often says 'x sensor voltage out of range - check the wiring harness in some not obvious location'
How do you define "electronics" and "computers"? Is a general-purpose computer running Java in the same category as a microcontroller running a tight loop with lookup tables for fuel and spark?
The problem: Once you have a microcontroller running a tight loop with lookup tables for fuel and spark, it's very tempting to make it run a tight loop with lookup tables for fuel, spark, and time since license renewal - and there's no outward difference between the two microcontrollers until one of them stops working. This is where regulations can help: if a manufacturer is afraid of a zillion dollar fine, they won't do that, even if the chance of getting caught is low.
While I agree in principle, we went two or more decades with cars powered by microcontrollers, and I don't recall any manufacturers trying to charge for licenses until more recently. There is something fundamentally different about the economy we are now in, I suspect.
I think the difference is that in the past, companies expected to be punished for obviously evil behavior, but now, they know they can go very far. Toyota got punished for stuck accelerators. Would they get punished for the same thing today? Tesla had stuck accelerators and we all forgot about it.
They're still pushing the boundary today. The Ring Superbowl ad where they announced they're watching you (but they said "your dog") 24/7 apparently got a lot of people to quit Ring, and you know they're crunching the numbers to see if the retention rate is worth the extra surveillance collection.
They charge for the diagnostic systems. Bigly. For example, Mercedes-Benz's Star Diagnostic System (SDS) is necessary for a variety of repairs and diagnostic procedures. There are varying degrees of workarounds and alternatives but none of them work quite right, or for every model/year/variant. It's not just the embedded system, it's also the interface to it. That's where the really ugly rent seeking crops up. And that's precisely why a tractor with no computers is attractive--not because the embedded software might try to ransom itself (although that's a reasonable fear) but because some horrible rent seeking corporate functionary will do their utmost to cheat you (or your mechanic) out of as much money as possible when it comes time to do any maintenance or diagnostic testing. No computers means that little bastard can fuck right off.
Exactly. Electronically controlled unit injectors are expensive--like 10x the price of mechanical ones. They're super cool, they can produce like 10 separate metered injection events per cycle. This is great for efficiency, noise, emissions, etc. But I can rebuild mechanical injectors with a bottle jack pop tester I made from $100 worth of parts and a bench vise. There's no wiring harness, no computer.. If the injector is getting fuel, has decent spray pattern, and is popping at the right pressure I know for certain the fuel system is good. With an electronic common rail system I need some expensive proprietary computer equipment to diagnose it, and there's no way I can build a test bench to rebuild those injectors.
You can't build a test bench to rebuild current OEM's electronic common rail injector systems that rely on expensive proprietary computer equipment, but there's no reason that has to be the case.
With a $20 CAN transceiver, documentation and/or config files from the manufacturer, and a bit of Python or something, you could absolutely bench test those electronic injectors. You might even be able to pick your injection events and adjust the metering, supporting the equipment as it ages. I'd love to see Ursa Ag put in a Megasquirt engine controller [1] or Proteus [2] or similar. You can run TunerStudio on a Raspberry Pi and show it on a touchscreen on the dash.
It's possible to build user-friendly, inexpensive and open engine and vehicle controls. You don't need to have zero electronics to not have locked-down proprietary electronics, you just need to build the electronics in the right way.
[1] https://diyautotune.com/products/ms3357-c?_pos=2&_fid=69f494...
[2] https://rusefi.com/index.html#proteus
Controls are one thing, but there's also the problem of generating 20k psi of oil pressure and some thousands of pounds of continuous common rail fuel pressure to actuate the injector. Compared with older MW, M, P, etc. styles it's a whole different beast. Also, we're talking past each other a little--I'm talking about diesel injectors, you're talking about otto cycle equipment ;)
Surely there’s room for a middle ground. There are plenty of 1990s-era engines that were excellent designs, had no meaningful connectivity to anything except their own ECUs, and could be produced new for not very much money. Some of them were quite modular, too — I know someone who took the drivetrain out of a salvaged Honda Civic and built an entire car (with no resemblance whatsoever to a Civc) around it.
If a tractor with a clean-burning, efficient $7500k engine could be purchased and were designed around the theory that, in 20 years or so, the owner could reasonably quickly replace the entire engine (with a first-party or aftermarket solution), would that be a good solution?
The common tech that has solved these problems nicely (IMO) is network transceivers: SFP and similar modules are built according to multi-source agreements. They contain all kinds of exotic tech, and they are not intended to be serviced at all, but (unless your switch or NIC has an utterly stupid lockout) you can pull it out and replace it with an equivalent part from a different vendor in seconds, and those parts can be unbelievably inexpensive considering what’s in them. (Single-mode bidirectional 1Gbps transceivers are $11 or less, retail, in qty 2. This is INSANE compared the the first time I lit up a 1Gbps SMF link. To be fair, this particular tech may require one to replace both ends if one fails, but if you can spare a second fiber, the fully IEEE-spec-compliant interoperable ones are even less expensive.)
It's not the craziest idea. A tractor is basically just a big hydraulic pump driving a bunch of linear and rotary actuators (commonly called "motors" and "cylinders"). Especially if it's got a hydrostatic transmission. If you design it in such a way that it's relatively easy to adapt different clutches and bell housings, maybe with a little driveshaft and u-joint between the clutch and the pump, you could theoretically accomplish something like this.
However one major sticking point is that (often.. maybe always?) the engine block casting is actually a structural component of the tractor "frame". Unlike e.g. a truck that has its driveline mounted between frame rails, a tractor's "frame" is its driveline . So this might add quite a bit of complexity and cost.
Eh to henerate a decent nozzle takes some precision lazer drilling (e.g.trumpf) or edm drilling (e.g posalux)and some grinding + a quality test bench. Its not that easy having good lowtech solutions either.
Yeah you're definitely gonna want to purchase nozzles. They're extremely precise and manufactured to very high tolerances. I've rebuilt plenty of 30+yr old injectors and haven't yet been unable to find newly manufactured or new old stock nozzles though.
EDIT: I did have some nozzles bored out a little bit once by a shop with EDM equipment. Terrible results, not worth it.
Note that that OEM would still have to deal with the minefield of patents created by the John Deere's of the world. I once worked for a company that had to work around an electronic circuit patent to detect a pulse. That was it, that was all it did. But if you used a standard differentiator circuit to detect the pulse created by a optical sensor watching for falling seeds you would violate the patent.
So a prerequisite might involve fixing the patent system...
It goes much deeper than that. The John Deere ecosystem is designed to trap farmers using a combination of the closed ecosystem and financing. They've been at it for years, selling precision agriculture advances as the thing that will maximize all yields and turn profits, and then following up with economic manipulations to create what amounts to tech-enabled sharecropping.
It's so bad the FTC and states had to sue Deere over just the right to repair. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2025/01/...
Do you work in the agricultural industry? Farm equipment is expensive, farmers will maintain the equipment as long as possible, which is a long time. Manufactures such as John Deere have tried to make it not possible for farmers to do self repair.
https://youtu.be/EPYy_g8NzmI
John Deere has lost so much good will among farmers due to their lock-in efforts, it's wild. Unfortunately, many farmers are stuck with them because the only tractor dealership within a reasonable distance is John Deere.
More that even if there was suitable replacement, that costs money vs tractor they already have. Those machines are in service for decades
>> However, the tech exists for a reason and is not inherently bad, the issue is the lock-in, the lack of choice and interoperability.
The marketing excuse for the tech might be features or efficiency, but the reason for the tech is lock-in and minimising product lifetime.
The days when manufacturers had friendly, cooperative relationships with their customers are long gone :( Can we bring them back? I hope so, but am not hopeful.
> However, the tech exists for a reason and is not inherently bad, the issue is the lock-in, the lack of choice and interoperability.
The problem is computers and software enable lock-in, because of their flexibility and communications capability. Get rid of them, and you make lock-in much more difficult (or even impossible if you use "standard" parts).
Also, computers and software are complex, and that complexity is not physically visible. If you want something you can completely understand, it's probably a good choice to simplify by cutting them out completely.
There's some nuance here. If you care about fuel consumption or emissions, then EFI is the current best way to reduce both, and that requires "computers and software" to operate on the timescales required. I put scare quotes around those terms because you can do EFI on an Arduino, which is at least an order of magnitude more powerful than what automakers shipped in the 80s.
In any case, EFI gives you more control over the engine and vastly simplifies the overall product. I don't know if you've seen the mechanical fuel-injection pumps used by tractor diesels; they are basically tiny engines unto themselves, with their own little block and camshaft [0]. There is an entire world of diesel performance modding with a subset of it dedicated to modifying the Bosh P1700 mechanical fuel-injection pump to change timings, handle higher RPMs, and run higher pressures. I would not call it, or its carburetor cousin in the gasoline world, "simple" compared to computer-controlled fuel delivery.
An open-source ECU project, on the other hand, enabled a hacker to implement Koenigsegg's Freevalve tech on a Miata [1].
[0]: https://blessedperformance.com/ddp-cummins-hot-street-p-pump...
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9KJ_f7REGw
>An open-source ECU project, on the other hand, enabled a hacker to implement Koenigsegg's Freevalve tech on a Miata [1].
This is so cool, shame that Freevalve never seemed to go anywhere.
I don't know anything about tractors but our modern world is full of useless and inherently bad "tech" that only exists for the flashy factor.
People are just tired of being mislead and abused by corporations, which is why there is now a market for non-tech products.
The best analogy that I can think of is cruise control on a car.
Do you need it? No. Is it nice to have? Yes.
The strict "no tech" premise of these tractors feels comparable to someone disabling the cruise control feature on their own car because they read an article about BMW locking heated seats behind a subscription.
I don't know much about tractors, but I would think that surely there are some modern benefits that these Ursa tractors are missing out?
However, the article claims that they're selling really well, so maybe at that price point the tradeoffs are still worth it.
For cars the classic example of inherently bad tech are touchscreen controls instead of physical knobs.
If you want more examples look into IoT products like smart toothbrushes, many of them now are "AI enabled".
Just call it what it is, greed. The idiots at John Deer thought strangling their customers to death was a good business model.
Ultimately the “lock in” boils down to “when this breaks someone has to pay to fix it”. Automation and tech makes the galaxy of things that can break much larger, and the pinpointing of “who should pay to fix this” much harder. “Lock in” feels like an attempt to simplify toward “only we can fix it”, with the downsides of cost and time.
Maybe not inherently bad, but clearly not inherently necessary or useful if they're already getting so many inquiries from farmers. Could just be that the tech doesn't offer enough meaningful value when the core mechanical functionality can be achieved at a lower price.
The fact tractor isn't locked in means 3rd party equipment have a chance instead of having to sit in locked in garden of a given vendor.
Not sure they needed to go all the way to mechanical injection tho, this is just literally burning money away
If you add a bunch of tech to, well, anything you have to go out of your way to make it not locked down.
What if an OEM did the IBM thing and published open specs and software, spawning a whole industry? It's a shame the incentives don't seem to be there for it.
And there's also a place for OEMs who make the bare machines like this, and other people sell electronics to add!
Software or hardware, the lock-down for dollars will blow back.
Framework tractor when
It's not only the lock-in, as the document says, its about limiting the downtime.
Sailboats have the similar issue:
When are are in the middle of the pacific and get an egine problem, you want the engine to be low tech enough to be able to fix, or at least patch, yourself with minimum parts.
Yanmar switched its whole lineup of engines to ECU around 2014, but the one without ECU are very much sought after for the above reason.
Unfortunately it's doomed as soon as you read "startup". Why? There are two possible outcomes:
1. This fails, goes away and we're back where we started; or
2. They take the bag and sell to John Deere, who then locks down the tractors in the same way to force you to buy support, official parts and so on. And that'll happen. It's a bait-and-switch so somebody can get rich.
The only solution to this is collective ownership or some other non-profit structure so a handful of owners can't sell out and cash in.
Look to Spain's Mondragon Corporation [1] for inspiration.
[1]: https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/how-mondragon-be...
third outcome:
3. JD buys them, competition works, others notice they can just "build a tractor that's simple", and suddenly there are more competitors to choose from. JD still can't compete, and can't buy them all...or operate on small margins.
For the farmers I know the price tag is the first thing they were looking at. So much grumbling about how Deere is using software to egregiously pad the price tag. Looking at a tractor that is going to take 5 or 6 years to pay off instead of 15 is tempting. Sadly Trump is absolutely going to slap a 400% tariff on these if they are even allowed to be imported.
The tech is inherently more expensive though. So if you want to undercut on price you have to cut costs somewhere.
Whom tech benefits is worth keeping in mind.
Tech for improvement for customers vs tech for moats/enshittification, especially when imposed by one side on the other.
The latter is never very good.
I want this for cars but to keep the modern powertrain. So an EV without the tracking/touch screens, etc etc. Or an internal combustion engine car that is just simple and efficient (and again, no tracking). I'll take the low-tech but nice features like heated seats and power windows still thank you.
I'd love this. I really don't want my car to be an iPhone with "apps" and random background software on it. The car touchscreen was perhaps the worst design choice in the history of the automobile, and is likely the cause of countless crashes. It's insane when I see car UIs that have the 'cancel / go back' button located in DIFFERENT areas depending on the screen context.
I always thought of it this way: software engineering/UI/UX to most car companies is a cost center. Something to be minimized, workers to be provided minimal resources and pay. The compensation is not competitive with what you’d find at a tech company, but they’re hiring from the same talent pool.
The effect of this is obvious and felt in the end product.
I favor my 2018 car with knobs and buttons but has car and android auto and a modern turbo inline 4...just wish it had metal valve covers and coolant joints instead of crappy plastic...
The irony is cars got screens largely due to the backup camera mandate which was intended to be a safety feature. Governments are very bad at understanding unintended consequences.
- The mandate is for rear visibility. Car manufacturers choose to implement it with the back-up camera. Beyond that, it's obviously safer to be able to see everything behind the vehicle.
- My vehicle has a backup camera with a screen, but has physical buttons for all controls (A/C, audio system). There's no reason cars can't have both.
> The mandate is for rear visibility
Specifically, 10 feet by 20 feet directly behind the vehicle. I'm actually curious how this could be achieved with only mirrors. That's a pretty big swath for anything with a viewpoint where the driver is sitting.
> My vehicle has a backup camera with a screen
Early implementations just used a screen in the rearview mirror. No need for any kind of infotainment screen.
In rear view mirror display is mostly just on GM products.
Nah, it was relatively common on base models that did not have a head unit with a screen, and that definitely includes Hondas and Toyotas, for example. The most common type of vehicle to use such a setup were pickups. For Toyota, the Taco and Tundra are the only vehicles I can think of which used an in-mirror screen. Honda did it in the base model CR-Z. Ford, Chevy, and RAM did it on their trucks.
my 2011 F150 has a rear view mirror backup display, and it's quite nice.
It's there when the truck is in reverse and otherwise just a normal mirror.
Early 2010s actually seems like a sweet spot for a lot of automotive tech - it's decent enough, but "mobile" wasn't really a thing yet, and bandwidth was expensive, so there's no assumption that everything should be an app phoning home yet (iPhone was still brand new).
When it already has a screen it's much cheaper to get rid of the buttons then. The screen as a requirement is priced in whereas the buttons are not and thus cut.
A screen for the backup camera doesn't necessarily mean everything has to be through the screen at all.
Most Toyotas I've seen have a screen for the backup camera and the carplay/music/gps console, but everything else is still knobs and buttons.
This is true on both my 2013 and 2026 Toyotas.
I last had that on a (rented) Fiat 500: the "standard" controls (including the monochrome LCD in the instrument panel) looked really clunky and old-fashioned, and all the advanced features (audio, navigation, mobile phone connectivity, not sure if it had a backup camera) were via the (third party, Pioneer) entertainment system which was state-of-the-art with a nice high-res touchscreen. That's probably because this was the more expensive version of the car, I guess the "basic" version only has a radio - no navigation, no backup camera, no nothing. Not sure if it's the same principle at work at Toyota, I haven't driven one in a while?
Also true on my 2020 RAV4 and 2025 Tacoma.
I tried a 2025 Ford Maverick for a year before I traded it for the Tacoma. All the AC/Heat/Etc controls were on the screen. Couldn't stand it. Put me off of ever considering a new Ford again.
Not all screens are touchscreens. Manufacturers complied with those regs without touchscreens for years. My 2012 mitsubishi's reverse camera is displayed in the rear view mirror; the head unit is a dead simple dot matrix display which I adore.
It's the regulations (or lack thereof) that allow touchscreens in cars as they are that should be the target of ire. Reverse camera regulations or not, the current state of touchscreen car rubbish was inevitable without the existence and enforcement of regulations addressing it.
Are you suggesting that governments shouldn’t require safety features because car manufacturers might implement them badly?
The EPA push for fuel efficiency made it easier to hit targets by selling huge trucks instead of small cars.
There is a value in safety regulation but the incentives as legislated have led to negative results. It needs to be fixed or repealed. Not sure there's a clean solution here.
Not only huge trucks, but all vehicles got larger.
One example: https://www.caricecars.com (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45823186)
Another: https://www.slate.auto/en/personalization A basic truck that you can customize.
> BRING YOUR OWN TECH
> Bring the apps you know and love to create the experience you want. Instead of a bulky, distracting, and quickly outdated infotainment system, a Slate can come with something simpler: a smartly designed mount that fits a phone or tablet and a holder for a portable Bluetooth speaker. Heating and air conditioning are included, no need to bring your own fan.
> Your Slate will age gracefully, because it’ll always have the latest tech—yours.
No door speakers or mounts for them, like it hasn't been a thing for 70 years irks me to no end
Slate are trying to cut cost everywhere they can to provide the cheapest barebones EV truck possible. My Volvo EX30 also lacks door speakers and while it's not top tier it's fine tbh. Volvo just put a giant speaker bar across the base of the windshield.
it seems like Slate might be trying that but there's no real cars from them yet so they're just renders at this point. but yes, same concept but printers is my wish.
They have plenty of running/driving mules out there already:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6_9_HHLOSY
(Not for sale yet though.)
https://www.crowdsupply.com/open-tools/open-printer
Yes but not a pickup please
pickup culture sucking the life out of our car industry. give me real cars
But they have merch! Hats, apparel!
Why are you mad that they're trying to build brand recognition?
I get there's been plenty of vaporware cars in the past but by all signs Slate is making real progress towards delivering actual vehicles.
There is a golden era of cars, say 5 to 10 years ago that have things like heated seats but no tracking.
Personally I have a 2019 Mazda 3 which has camera vision all around, radar cruise control and heated seats but no lane assist bumping you around or a cellular connection relaying any information.
The only anti feature it has is that stupid idle stop, but that’s easy to permanently disable. It also has car play but doesn’t have a touch screen.
Anyway I’m not saying you should get this car specially but there are cars out there that are like what you want.
FWIW: Hyundai EVs have physical buttons for everything important. It has a screen for CarPlay but it’s small compared to competitors. (I got the Kona for these reasons)
As much as I and (probably) most other consumers agree with you, I don't think the car insurance industry does. Very similarly to how governments being buyers of data from adtech companies makes it an impossibility for governments to enact good privacy laws, there are massive perverse incentives here that place too much money on the table for good things to ever happen; car manufacturers want to gatekeep the sale of our data to insurance companies and governments, insurance companies want to lobby for laws that mandate data collection so that more claims can be denied and profit can rise, and governments are happy to enforce data collection because it strengthens their surveilance mechanisms.
The problem is that the difference between a low tech and a high tech diesel tractor is mostly emissions and some loss of efficiency. The difference between a low tech and a high tech electric car is a 25 mile range and a 250 mile range, a top speed of 35 mph and 100 mph, carrying capacity and so on.
I recently did a lawn tractor conversion from gas to electric and what I got was in my opinion significantly better and more reliable than a commercial option at 20% of the price but it is limited to 4mph. Scaling it to 5 would require a lot of custom fabrication and a much more expensive drive motor. Once this tech is significantly better and cheaper to the point of being a commodity it will be a different story. For now it just isn’t.
https://www.telotrucks.com/ is pretty much that
Cheap, fast enough, practical, goofey looking.
by the looks of it... any front collision == instant death?
They very much designed for collisions. They have an engineer discussing those aspects this video.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Tv5QwgQUMGY
It's an EV, so what little nose it has is probably all crumple zone (as opposed to having a big ol' engine in the way. Popping the hood on most EVs is pretty funny, actually, because of how little there is under there.
I know nothing about automobile design, but the Smart Fortwo [1] seemed to solve this problem just fine (IIRC they had a very good NCAP safety rating).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_Fortwo
Always a good time to share this video re: crashing a Smart Fortwo: https://youtube.com/watch?v=mnI-LiKCtuE
> IIRC they had a very good NCAP safety rating
3 out of 5, which I think merely qualifies it as "average"
Modern cars evolved in terms of safety, this includes active safety too. All the safety features require OEM hardware/software that locks you in, for example replacing windshield in many models requires dealership calibration.
And with all the distracted drivers looking into their phones while driving, I want more and more cars to get at least emergency breaking systems.
> All the safety features require OEM hardware/software that locks you in...
I'm unclear whether you're stating the current state of affairs, or arguing that such safety features cannot exist without this lock in.
If it's the latter, you may have missed the point. GP was clear they want modern safety and powertrain, just without the tracking.
None of the safety features you mention require the manufacturer to harvest and sell personal data — that's a separate choice OEMs have made, not a technical prerequisite.
I was stating current state of affairs. I don't think the point is only about avoiding tracking and personal data harvesting. My 10 years old Honda has emergency breaking and lane assist and it's not connected to the internet, nor I'm servicing it at the dealership to be concerned about data harvesting. I still couldn't enable the system after replacing broken windshield - I had to get it to the dealership so they could re-enable the safety system.
People who says this never even consider Nissan Leaf. "Because the charging..." or whatever.
So consumers DO want all-touchscreen disposable cars like Tesla - it's similar to how disposable phones had replaced phones with removable batteries(even among IP rated phones). Wallets vote strongly against consumers.
The Leaf is one of those cars now too: https://www.caranddriver.com/photos/g65082021/2026-nissan-le...
I would have considered a Leaf but they have NMC batteries. Also, the earlier versions had terrible battery cooling issues. Give me a Leaf with an LFP and I would buy one.
There are many different NMC battery chemistries, and they are still evolving. It's likely that whatever you think would be a problem (because NMC) wouldn't actually be a problem for you. But yes, the first two generations of the Leaf weren't exactly great EVs and there's a lot of FUD and missing based just on the Leaf.
It's just so ugly. Why did they make it so ugly? :(
I've been dreaming of doing an EV conversion on my 2008 Honda Civic that I barely even drive. No cellular radio, no OTA updates, no touchscreen. I lack the mechanical skills and time though, and I'm not aware of people in my area that do conversions as a service for anything but like high end classic cars(which a Honda sedan is not).
I own a base model 2020 Suzuki Swift GL, which I specifically bought because it has no touchscreen. It has a radio with Bluetooth and dials - that is it.
No issues so far.
Check out Slate auto
I wonder if we'll see a repeat of what happened in the 60's and 70's: American car companies didn't want to make small and cheap fuel efficient cars, so an upstart (Japanese automakers) came in with exactly that and stole their lunch money.
These days, the big foreign manufacturers are all in the same game as the domestic ones - software nonsense. Tariffs are keeping other foreign competition out at the moment, so it'd have to be a new domestic manufacturer, or an existing one who deviates from the standard auto playbook.
Seeing all the gigantic and very-high-priced Pavement Princess Pickups clogging dealer lots, it's plain that the auto industry in general didn't learn a damn thing. It's easy to point fingers in all directions, but it always ends up that we get the worst outcomes.
The auto industry is just responding to incentives, the EPA makes it way easier to hit emissions targets the larger the vehicle.
Those incentives went the way of the dodo last year. The fine for violating it is $0
It takes 6 years to develop a vehicle. You cant rely on it being 0$ forever, the laws/regulations didn't change.
People are brainwashed into thinking a pickup truck is the only practical car even though it's the opposite. It's not just EPA regulations, it's what people want.
So a Dacia?
It can be built but it wouldn't be legal to sell commercially. Closest thing would be a kit car (which I've always felt haven't scaled as much as they theoretically could)
Citation needed. What law requires tracking software, touch screens, and vendor-lock-in for automobiles? I disbelieve there is anything preventing the commercial sale so long as it has the minimum safety standards and roadworthiness. Costs money to get everything certified, but it doesn't have to also be enshittified.
Backup cameras are required by law, among other things
So slate.auto?
Sounds like you just want a car from the year 2000.
I drive a Honda from 2002 and love it. It’s starting to show its age but I don’t want to get a new car until this one dies for good.
why would it 'die for good' just fix it??
Yes or even better something like a Volvo from the 80s
Saturn with an updated i4 please
That's the pitch behind the Slate truck right? Just the basics to make it a functional vehicle and then you add only what you want.
a 2010-16 corolla is basically this
Honestly, all the modern tech, except the tracking and touchscreens, is pretty freakin' awesome.
I honestly don't care about power windows (or seats), do you really? I guess one advantage is being able to easily open windows other than your own.
Heated seats and stearing wheel, yes please.
But yep what I want is a Saab 900 "cockpit" car -- everything can be focused on and manipulated (physically!) without my eyes leaving the road or my hand having to explore too much.
But, yeah, electric.
I still often think of my old Saab 900’s Black Panel button—physical dark mode.
Two things:
1. LOVE this idea as I've always been a big fan of "right to repair" and even at work, FinTech SRE/DevOps, I say things like "we want this to be like a 1975 Ford: you open the hood, look inside, understand it and it's easy to fix. We don't want a 2026 Ferrari."
2. The Econ major/MBA in me wonders how long you can sell cheaper tractors that last forever. I say this b/c it's like trying to sell 100 year lightbulbs: markets are not infinite so if you have everyone buy them in years 1-10, what do you sell after that? The general idea is that you charge MORE for these things since a. "easy to repair" is now an added feature, b. people will buy less of your thing so you need to make more money upfront.
Granted, there is probably some sweet spot and/or "even selling 1,000 == a couple million and that's enough for anyone" but I still like to debate the points
On point 2: take a page out of John Deere's book, sell branded hats, t-shirts, toys and sell the movie license.
On the econ Point I think you’d still have someone come in and undercut it. If you can steal a big share of a 10 year market then it could make sense for a lean startup as a once off sprint even if you know after that it’s dead.
The bulb stuff was a cartel not normal functional markets.
Point #2 ought to be good reason for us to move past our archaic consumption-based economies into something where less consumption isn't considered a "problem."
You probably can’t sell tractors forever but that’s short-sighted: you can sell parts and service that’s reasonably priced. People don’t just refuse to buy OEM parts on principle, they do it because the prices are often outrageous and/or the procedure to do so sucks and/or is arbitrarily restrictive like needing dealer licenses or what have you.
And just because a tractor is low tech and designed to run forever doesn’t mean it won’t still need parts and service. Time comes for us all and that includes your wheel bearings, bushings and seals.
Late to the party here, so I don't expect this to get a lot of traction, but I'd like to point out that part of the reason this hasn't existed until recently as an option in the US is because it's functionally illegal for it to exist.
> The 12-valve Cummins is arguably the most widely understood diesel engine in North America. Every independent shop, every shade-tree mechanic with a set of wrenches, every farmer who grew up turning bolts has encountered one.
That's great! I'd point out the 12 valve wasn't introduced until the 90s, but that's kind of immaterial -- it's as simple to work on as any other mechanically injected analog diesel is and they were in widespread use for nearly a century before that. One immediately wonders why we moved away from these and towards more complex options, and why this startup has to remanufacture old engines instead of sourcing new engines. The answer among those of us who care about right to repair tends to be "evil corporations want to make proprietary systems that require ongoing fees!" which is true for John Deere, but also, the EPA mandated DEF/DPF systems + limp modes on all farm equipment since 2014, and the new relaxed standards include complicated rules about what percentage into limp mode they go at different intervals during different periods of time after those notoriously unreliable systems start to have errors. You can't do that without modern ECUs!
I'm all for reducing the harm caused by running diesel engines in the most densely populated cities on the planet (DEF and similar systems are about particulate emissions, not carbon), but we're being naive if we pretend that extending these regulations to farm equipment isn't a huge factor in why that same equipment has gotten more expensive and less reliable over the past decade.
I wish someone would do this for the pickup truck market. Lol, like make a truck for people that actually want to use it just for hauling things. Kind of like trucks used to be in the 1960's and 1970's. Not the modern ones that are more like a luxury SUV that happens to have a tiny truck bed in the back.
I've been musing with friends that this is a growing and untapped market. Not merely for analog-only tractors or heavy machinery, but for stripped-down/basic machinery in general. EVs eschewing the myriad of sensors and driver assists that talk back to the cloud in favor of cruise control, local cameras, and a double-din slot for aftermarket head units; cars built for simplicity of ownership and maintenance rather than service revenue extraction; computers that get work done and turn off after, rather than constantly phoning home with cloud accounts and telemetry.
It's nice to see this company doing well for itself so quickly, and I hope they deliver on every promise made while reaping immense success. At the very least, it'd send a clear and unambiguous message that the market for simplicity is there and desperate for products that cater to it.
I can only applaud it, however the challenge will be to make it meet modern standards / requirements for things like emissions and safety.
Better photos are found on their site: https://ursa-ag.com
Video the press are taking stills from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDR6g9iG9Ds
Interview with more details on trade show floor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9QxeNyKbB4
I wonder how sustainable the business model is. Eventually, you saturate the market with your tractors, and if they work as advertised, they are owned and maintained for decades. A lot of people are out there farming with 60-80 year old tractors. I would suspect most of the OEM parts that need replacing are where most wear and tear is happening (the engine). Those parts come from Cummins, not this startup.
In the meantime, they have to maintain a very high fixed cost base in their factory, distribution network, and skilled unionized workforce. I'm really not even asking about how will they maximize shareholder dividends, I just mean how do you not go bankrupt after you sell your first 10,000 tractors.
> maximize shareholder dividends
This is the whole reason why middle class is dying and power and wealth are being consolidated amongst the rich.
The disincentive to provide a durable product is unfortunate. Ideally businesses pair high-ticket one-time sales with low-cost recurring sales of related products and services.
Must we sell more than 10,000? That seems like a reasonable check for a small business to take home and go solve some other problem for someone.
The thing is, your reputation will get out there. Folks will want to work with you because of who you are; it'll be profitable (in many ways) even if it isn't a 100-year dynasty.
So lay off thousand of employees, shutter a factory, close dozens of distribution centers. Degrowth has real world consequences for real world people, and sustainability is generally good.
Prior to the idea of planned obsolescence and vendor lock-in / maintenance revenue once you saturate a market the pivot would be to use that infrastructure and expertise to enter other markets. They could still sell tractors but there's tons of other stuff they could make and sell as well, like maybe much smaller tractors for one.
> The farm equipment industry spent 20 years adding complexity and cost. Ursa Ag is wagering that a significant number of farmers never wanted any of it.
Nice tag line but not a complete picture. The "significant number of farmers" in terms of actual market spend driving the equipment industry is not mom-and-pop outfits but rather agri-industrial complexes with machines to match. What they want is (1) availability and (2) ROI. For (1), that is first and foremost subject to legal stipulations like EPA etc, then secondly subject to production availability. For (2), electronics are the name of the game if you are looking to turn a profit with farming because counting every seed, measuring every drop of chem, and tracking every inch of plotted ground leads to better ROI.
Farming is a way of life for a lot of people, not just a business. That’s what is missing from your picture. And by population, small time farmers significantly outnumber industrial outfits, regardless of how much they spend. Sure you can make more money selling the most advanced tech to the biggest spenders. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a market for affordable, reliable equipment that gets the job done. Add on the risky nature of farming and its untenable to trap yourself in high 6 figures of debt and pray that you can optimize your way to enough profit to pay the interest.
"regardless of how much they spend" is not a statement that you can put in a business plan
Fancy gains in ROI come from smart seeder/sprayer attachments and combine harvesters (a completely different piece of machinery), not from the tractor that's pulling those equipment. At best there's the ROI from less seed overlap, but plenty of GPS systems integrate well into any tractor and the gains are really marginal. I don't think tractor electronics are as important as they're hyped up to be.
This is the way if we can ensure manufacturing of the parts. It won’t catch on but it would be awesome to have “base” tractors that are mechanical and predictable. Then you slap on whatever software on top that helps (automation, etc). But they need to be decoupled imo.
i have a farmall hand cranked tractor, going on 90 years old, so far its been rubber parts, and clutch pads.
as far as auto mation goes, thats how implements used to work. it was a tracter/thresher/combine. then a bale counter is slapped on then maybe row sighting or guidance, etc.
if your really snazzy, the implement is actually mapping the soil for moisture, or rough composistion and holding data to use in reformulating or notating your current cultural plans, i.e. supplemental spot feeding and irrigation.
actual agricultural needs, not just fluff.
I still got a farmall 230, super easy to fix and maintain and works perfect for my small bit of land. An electric starter addon is really nice for winter starts though instead of killing your arm.
While I’m not at all surprised that they’re still running, I am a little surprised at how many Farm-all owners are on HN. Farm-all H owner checking in :)
My father was a Farm-all partisan. Even though I never took up farming, it's one of the things I remember him for.
Easy to maintain, great engine, just a bit rough to use on a larger field.
the 5-speed is nice, good consistent pull, had it power plumeing in a seldge pull contest, its rare that i call on it to do that much work.
And how many acres are you farming on it? Today's world of agriculture is much higher tech-based (for many good reasons, primarily yield) than back in the horse and buggy days of farming.
5.75; 7.5; and 42.6.
I know of a forklift that's pushing 80 and still used in a lumber yard (i.e. a material handling centric workplace)
Other than ~30min it takes to teach an employee to drive manual it doesn't do anything worse than the modern ones it works alongside and it does a handful of minor things much better by virtue of predating OSHA.
This is what a "bobcat" has become for UGV startups. It's a low tech proven platform that you can basically modify with attachments to do a lot of UGV work.
UGV?
From AI
> A UGV (Unmanned Ground Vehicle) is a robotic vehicle that operates on the ground without a human driver onboard.
I was assuming the same. This might be fine for a small setup but I'd imagine all the digitization shenanigans was done so efficiency could increase. I imagine for large scale operations this would be like replacing your steam engine with a horse.
Could even nationalise the base tractor factory...
Whoops, I hope you are not a naturalized citizen of the US.
Whoa there, M{r,s}. Socialist! Can’t have any of our democratic infrastructure near that crazy idea! (/s)
I'm not totally sure I understand. I expected these to be selling for twice the price, not half price.
I thought the whole idea of so much of the tech is to be able to lock you in and make profit that way, through servicing and features and subscriptions and whatever else.
If they're giving up that entire profit stream, they have to make money somewhere else. So how are they selling these for so much less and still making a profit? What am I missing?
They're using an absolutely ancient engine from Cummins that has probably paid off its r&d and assembly line costs at least 10x over. It has virtually no pollution controls on it like DEF or DPF. That alone is saving a fair amount of money.
/woosh
But I could be wrong. I can't know but I'm pretty sure the GP was writing tongue in cheek. As in mocking the business strategies that have been eroding the engines of our economy.
You are seeing the price cuts of simplicity.
There’s very little R&D cost. Possibly little cap-ex as the infra to build exists.
Wouldn’t a “no-tech tractor “ be a mule? They are selling tractors based on internal combustion technology.
Mules are hybrids of donkey and horse. This was an important technological advancement some 3000 years ago, providing benefits of both breeds in one animal. The donkey and horse themselves of course are products of one of the most important technologies in human history - domestication!
I think it may have been here, where there was a story about a Toyota factory that only makes one car: a barebones, white SUV.
It’s brought by all the NPOs in the world.
It’s simple, rugged, easy to repair, and cheap. You see them, all the time, on TV.
That's how you deal with vendor lock in.
These farmers have more balls than most Apple users.
Huh? Aren't the tractors using a loophole to avoid emissions regulations?
You can do a lot of things if you don't care about the spirit of the law and your negative externalities.
Which loophole? Using a remanufacture engine?
Yes, they're engines that you wouldn't be allowed to build and put in a new tractor.
Like, the signals seem pretty clear to me. The spirit of the regulations is that these shouldn't be produced and put into operation anymore. The company is doing it anyway.
> The 150-horsepower model starts at $129,900 CAD, about $95,000 USD. The range-topping 260-hp version runs $199,900 CAD, around $146,000.
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the MTZ Belarus 82.3 can be had for the equivalent of $50k.
It's a simple machine for a simpler time, so obviously doesn't meet any emissions regulations. But at least in my region farmers went to great lengths to acquire them - even illegally. By the time the tractors are confiscated, they'll more than pay for themselves.
It's also got half the power output.
I’m genuinely confused. Why not buy an entry level kubota?
I guess the startup is selling low tech stuff in the 100-200hp range, but you start getting computers and stuff at that point with the conventional manufacturers?
They certainly sell sub 100 hp / $100K tractors that are reliable and low tech, so I’m struggling to see any differentiator except the engine size.
Also, half price is an odd claim. The Kubota M6 looks comparable to the $130K option from the startup, but starts at $100K.
I can’t read the article because cloudflare is blocking iOS now, apparently.
Also, for the small-medium range, a BEV or plugin / serial hybrid powertrain would be a game changer. Lots of low end weight, infinite torque at low speeds, and no hearing protection required to operate it. Also, it wouldn’t get as wicked hot in the summer for the operator, nor would it dump diesel exhaust everywhere.
A low tech version of that would be compelling (similar to slate).
Edit: they could even use standard mounts electrical for the generator and common battery packs, so if either powerplant blew up, it’d be a bolt-in replacement. The actual electric motors probably would never blow out.
You’re rounding down the Kibota price (starts at 109k) and mixing in Canadian $.. You get a cummins 12v with more power than an m6 (and bigger more capable chassis) for ~10k less than the kubota.
I want a half-price no-tech electric car.
You can buy a used car and get it converted to electric.
I bought a chinese mini excavator. It is super simple and I am sure things will break on it (I already had a qc issue with the fuel gauge) but I don't fear things breaking. With the competitors the dealer had to service everything. With the chinese one I text someone on whatsapp, diagnose remotely, and they send me a part. Honestly I like this model more. If you have a lot of money the dealer is great.
Mine comes in tomorrow. When researching, I was amazed at the simplicity of these machines. The engine is essentially available at Harbor Freight, then it’s basically just a hydraulic pump and valves. When things break, I’m sure I can find a replacement part or hack something together.
Which one did you buy?
AGT dm12x-plus.
I liked that it had the dual speed walk mode. Don't want to be creeping around the yard.
I think the trend we are seeing with tractors and cars is a circular one that the industry isn't ready for: we moved from pure mechanical machines to "mechanical + some electronics," and we are currently in the "some mechanical + more electronics" phase. But the next logical step for longevity is a return to "mostly mechanical" interfaces powered by open standards.
The problem isn't the presence of electronics. It's the use of electronics as a proprietary layer to gatekeep physical hardware. When a tractor becomes a "software platform," the farmer loses the ability to perform basic maintenance because of DRM and encrypted ECU handshakes.
We need to treat the electronics as a component of the tool, not the owner of the tool. If the software is the only thing preventing a mechanical machine from functioning, that's not a feature but a defect
This but for cars
This but for TVs
This but for robot vacuums
This but for security cameras
This but for baby monitors
This but for washing machines
This but for fridges
Anyone else got any requests?
There was a blender that uses a printed or CNC case and basic repair parts for all the mechanicals… Open Funk re:Mix blender https://www.openfunk.co/pages/re-mix
Maybe for "motorcycles" like Aptera.
Large car manufactures will lobby to avoid competition of barebones, cheap cars.
"From whence this barbarous animus?" tweeted the technologist from the cauldron in which he boiled.
Similar opportunities exist in fridge and TV space
If the original article is of interest to you, this project might be too:
https://www.opensourceecology.org/
https://wiki.opensourceecology.org/wiki/Open_Source_Ecology
That's what I always want -- all of my appliances should look like the ones we got in the 90s/2000s. Some Chinese companies should take this niche or maybe not-niche field, sell at a premium, which hopefully is still cheaper than smart ones.
Using my friends Speed Queen washer/dryer was such a revelation. I hate my Samsung washer/dryer.
I bought a LG one back in 2018 and so far it's working fine. I hope it can last more than 10 years.
> Some Chinese companies should take this niche or maybe not-niche field, sell at a premium
A friends dad sold his existing business and has been making $$$ in semi-rural texas importing and selling Chinese skid loaders. This market already exists.
Yeah but I don’t see many dumb appliances nowadays TBH.
Hopefully this gains traction
Very punny :P
Part of the story why we can‘t feel the hypothetical productivity gains of the last century is that certain goods became 1. more expensive and 2. last shorter. This movement (as mentioned in the tractor example) might be the result of people realizing this: what drives GDP (expensive throw away crap) might not always drive wealth.
Is part of the appeal due to the fact that being remanufactured engines they don't need modern emissions control, aka Diesel Exhaust Fluid (DEF)? Farmers hate DEF.
That's most of it. It gets lost in the right to repair conversation, I think because many of the same individuals who care about that also tend to be very pro-environmental-regulation, but one has to take a step back and acknowledge the fact that the EPA made it illegal to build this tractor new instead of with a rebuilt truck engine from the 90s. You literally cannot build a legal diesel tractor in the US that doesn't involve an ECU, sensors, DEF, and all the proprietary electronics to go along with those systems.
If it was legal to build these at industrial scale, we'd already have it in the US because there's blatant market demand for it. This is functionally no different from the shops putting 30 year old diesel engines in modern pickup trucks for the same reasons.
The emissions are so unreliable that the only legal market for vehicles without them in the US is... the federal government.
The decision to lock down the ecu is quite another thing.
It could easily have been done with a basic ecu that was readable by a $20 cable to your laptop.
That being said, the DPF is the destroyer of modern engine reliability.
Anyone who actually has to use their equipment to get shit done dislikes DPF/regen. It's like Windows Update --- you might be in the middle of a serious task but screech "time for a scheduled update! we dgaf what kind of critical task you were just doing, you want updates!"
Modern diesel systems equipped with DPF tech (which consumes DEF, the fluid) require a regen cycle which is kinda like an oven cleaning itself - they get super hot and burn away particulate before they can be used again. Farmers are more frustrated by the system than the fluid. In fact, DEF is really just piss (urea) which is the same kind of product that they use for fertilizer. Although the prices for urea have skyrocketed recently so perhaps they truly do hate DEF too.
The awesome thing about these 'older' Cummins engines is yes they lack DEF systems and also have mechanical fuel injection. As is commonplace with diesel, there are no spark/glow plugs either. So ostensibly once you have the engine started, it requires zero electricity or computer systems to operate. The RPM of the engine dictates everything else mechanically through gearing. This is a big win for equipment that needs to "just work". Of course they still have sensors and all kinds of systems that are kinda layered on top... but they're not strictly required. This is also why the "runaway diesel" problem exists. You cannot stop an engine like this without starving it of air or fuel.
DPF (Diesel Particulate Filter) and SCR (Selective Catalytic Reduction, which uses DEF, Diesel Exhaust Fluid) are two mostly different systems. DPF traps soot in a filter which then burns the soot off into gas later (regen). SCR reduces NOx using urea.
This is important to know in the context of tractors because in the US, 25-74hp tractors generally need only DPF without SCR (there are basically three bins depending on horsepower level). This makes these midsized tractors a bit of a sweet spot for a lot of tasks; of course, you still have to deal with regen (which is where the DPF gets heated up to convert trapped soot into gas), which is annoying, but you at least don't have to fill up with DEF or risk the DEF injection system failing.
That’s exactly what I was thinking. And it makes me wonder if the future is manufactures repurposing older engines in new shells to bypass the increasingly more regulatory environments they operate in. Kind of a funny thing to think about.
Love a Cummins. The Bosch plunger pump is like a mini-me engine on the side of the block!
This is a great initiative. However, I feel that "no-tech" shouldn't be a target and that isn't necessarily good. Ex. Precision tech helps reduce operator fatigue and increases efficiency with respect to equipment operation time and material used.
This isn't to say that tech can't be shoved in every other panel on the tractor - but hope this drives Big companies towards considering where tech is necessary and where it's not.
> Precision tech helps reduce operator fatigue and increases efficiency with respect to equipment operation time and material used
That’s the kind of MBA speak a giant corporate food production facility loves to hear, but not a farmer.
That's untrue. I know a farmer, who buys a John Deere combine before harvest. It stays unused until his harvests are done, and returns it by end of harvest season incurring $30k on this entire transaction. Why does he do that? Because he has two weeks to finish up harvesting or start incurring losses on his harvest. Farmer does care about saving costs/losses AND getting the job done in time.
That's interesting, why don't farmers run some sort of common reserve pools of vehicles, as a form of insurance?
There are farmers who join agricultural co-ops to do similar things. I've seen few operate differently - the co-op owns the machines and maintains a bunch of operators. These are requested by farmers who want work done - spraying, tilling, harvesting, etc.
The trouble is they all need them at the same time. In the UK you will see farmers in a break in the weather, all out testing the moisture in the wheat. As soon as it is right it is all hands to get it in on every farm before it rains again!
Ha - “Wilson saw the gap and drove a tractor through it.”
Sounds like a big gap. Figures.
Good, I wish them every success.
I hope this sets the trend for cars too.
I would happily buy a new car with a 2000s Japanese engine and no tech.
Reduce, reuse, recycle.
Before buying new, aren't there enough tractors from the 60s, 70s, 80s that are still salvageable?
The general aviation world has Cessna 172s from the 50s still going strong; why buy new?
Cessna 172s are great if you are learning to fly. But most people using these things for actually getting from A to B will be looking for something with a bit more range, speed, etc. That still might be sixty year old plane but one with a bigger engine; or two of them even. And if you want to go really fast you get something with a turbo prop or even jet engines. The newer ones are a bit more efficient with the fuel but also more in demand and therefore more expensive. You get what you pay for.
My understanding of the aviation market is that there are some bargains to be had with planes that are old but still very servicable. But if you are flying longer distances regularly, you kind of gravitate towards the more expensive ones. Because they go faster, use less fuel, are more comfortable, have more useful load, etc.
The point of a tractor is that is used to do useful work by farmers who earn their living working these things hard. If they break down, work stops until that can be fixed. The value of being able to fix these machines yourself is that you get them back in action quickly. But the value of a newer one is that it presumably wouldn't need a lot of fixing to begin with. And maximizing power while minimizing fuel usage means the job gets done quicker and at a lower cost. And that's what modern manufacturers sell of course.
IMHO, electric is going to revolutionize farming. Diesel is expensive (a lot more lately). And farmers burn a lot of it. Electric motors are small, reliable, quiet, etc. They have loads of torque. And if you are a farmer, you have plenty of space to harvest your own electricity with solar panels and maybe a wind mill and some batteries. There is a growing amount of high end stuff available in this space but also very affordable low end stuff. And this technology can be very simple and tinker friendly. Buy some old EV batteries wire them up and you can make anything with wheels move. Including really old tractors, pickup trucks, etc. Anything from the largest mining trucks to the smallest lawn mower can already be powered by batteries. And everything in between. With battery cost dropping, there are very few obstacles that prevent adoption left. Mostly import tariffs in the US.
> IMHO, electric is going to revolutionize farming. Diesel is expensive (a lot more lately). And farmers burn a lot of it. Electric motors are small, reliable, quiet, etc. They have loads of torque. And if you are a farmer, you have plenty of space to harvest your own electricity with solar panels and maybe a wind mill and some batteries. There is a growing amount of high end stuff available in this space but also very affordable low end stuff. And this technology can be very simple and tinker friendly. Buy some old EV batteries wire them up and you can make anything with wheels move. Including really old tractors, pickup trucks, etc. Anything from the largest mining trucks to the smallest lawn mower can already be powered by batteries. And everything in between. With battery cost dropping, there are very few obstacles that prevent adoption left. Mostly import tariffs in the US.
Yes. But maybe not a 1:1 of current petroleum-powered equipment with an equivalent electric one? Say, crop dusting aircraft are not being replaced by electric powered crop dusting aircraft, but by (electric powered) crop dusting drones.
Could something similar happen for, say, tractors? A tractor is of course an extremely versatile tool, and as long as there's a human driving it there's a tendency towards ever bigger tractors in order to minimize labor/ha. But big tractors are already a bit too big and expensive for many not-huge farms, ground compaction is a problem with large weight etc. Could we see these replaced by a fleet of electrical drones (drones as in autonomous, not necessarily flying) rather than "just" an electrical tractor? Of course, there's a certain minimum power required to pull a plow etc., so maybe not? Of course, autonomous fleets etc. goes a bit against the idea of DIY-fixable. Or does it? A different skill-set than wrenching on an old tractor, sure.
>Buy some old EV batteries wire them up and you can make anything with wheels move. Including really old tractors, pickup trucks, etc. Anything from the largest mining trucks to the smallest lawn mower can already be powered by batteries. And everything in between. With battery cost dropping, there are very few obstacles that prevent adoption left. Mostly import tariffs in the US.
It's not even close to that easy though is it? I've wanted to convert a car to an EV and it seems really complex.
What car? It probably depends on what you want the end result to be. You won't be able to DIY a Porsche Taycan, but basically if you can do an engine swap on an ICE car, you should be able to do a semi-ghetto EV conversion (i.e no fast charging or advanced thermal management, but safe and robust enough to run daily for years). Tons of people are doing it on YouTube.
Of course, there is a bit of skill involved and I don't claim to be able to do this. But then, putting together a combustion engine would also require a bit of skill. Lots of parts that need to be fitted together. Hoses, pumps, wires, and a lot of electronics as well with more modern cars.
EVs have less parts. There are some challenges with diagnostics for things like battery management systems. And given the high voltages, it helps if you know what you are doing with electrical systems.
These tractors are not new, they are rebuilt.
No, only the engines are remanufactured - the tractors are new.
And a remanufactured engine can easily be better than it was when it left the original factory.
Love to see repairability prioritized.
The HN crowd would enjoy the Global Village Construction Kit's work on an open-source tractor
https://www.opensourceecology.org/gvcs/
https://www.opensourceecology.org/portfolio/tractor/
https://www.opensourceecology.org/microtractor-workshop/
And their other open source machines they deemed "critical for civilization"
https://www.opensourceecology.org/gvcs/gvcs-machine-index/
Does this project go anywhere? Looks like it's at the same stage it was 10 years ago.
Their internet things are quite terrible but they do workshops and build things.
Can I invest? I have no need for a no-tech tractor but I would love to support a real challenger to John Deere’s near complete monopoly.
In Queensland, Australia SwarmFarm might be worth a look - they're already deep into driverless automated agriculture .. making a non John Deere tech stack.
https://www.swarmfarm.com/technology/
- West Australian grain farmer (4,500 hectares, barley, grains) reviews a fully automated driverless swarm bot in boom spray configuration:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljEKN7CsjnM
Shows the attractiveness of “right to repair.” People want to own their stuff and not be forever beholden to the manufacturer.
I love that the 5.9 lives on
ursa-ag.com For (a little bit) more info
Ah, this is the tractor that Jermey Clarkson needs!
Related: "Deere settles US right-to-repair lawsuit with $99 million fund, repair commitments"
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...
This is great, if there is some real competition, then we can see John Deere will have to figure out how to compete. Either with lower prices or less lock in.
> if there is some real competition
They can't scale this model up because they legally have to use rebuilt engines from the 90s to do it to get around modern diesel emissions regulations. It's illegal to build this kind of engine in the US new, there's no way to compete with Deere's scale.
This feels like a great opportunity for Canada. We have tremendous need for tractors. The skillset for automotive/machinery and farming. A need for domestic industry development. Offers another non-American option. These don’t suffer as much from tech supply chain pains by not being full of electronics.
This is the way. The number one metric for any tool is how much you care TRUST it, and the number two metric for any tool is how quickly you can fix it when it breaks, and number three is how easy it is to understand and modify for your particular purpose.
I’ve always thought if we met super advanced aliens they would be… no more advanced than needed. In each domain they would use only the most complex thing needed to accomplish a task and no more.
100 years ago I might cook in a cast iron pan and use a slide rule to compute.
Now I cook in a cast iron pan and use a 5nm scale multi core CPU to compute.
In 100 years I might cook in a cast iron pan and use a topological quantum computer to compute. In my home in a spinning city at a Lunar LaGrange point.
We are in the try everything with everything phase of early technological development.
Sounds like Gliders (truck) though those are usually to avoid emissions requirements.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glider_%28automobiles%29#Glide...
A friend is an organic farmer in Saskatchewan who has been buying specifically older mechanical only tractors; after a heart attack that will require him to sell off his farm, he’s finding lots of potential buyers.
"old" tractors from 10+ years ago and new tractors are really ... not different at all. mechanically and structurally they are all the same. you can get a 20 year old deere/kubota tractor that might even be better than a new one because of the decline in manufacturing, cost cutting across materials etc. if well maintained they last forever, and the older gear is easier to work on.
Wait? No electric tractors yet? Swappable batteries would be perfect.
The energy balance just does not work with current agricultural paradigm. For example, plowing is really energy intensive and electric tractors just can't carry the required amount of batteries. Too heavy tractors compact the earth and sink in bad weather conditions.
For electrification to really proceed in ag, we need a revolution in the paradigm, something that removes most of the energy heavy processes.
JCB came to the conclusion there was no future in EV tractors and earth movers and went all-in on hydrogen ICE instead. We will shortly see if they were correct.
Electric excavators are there, as they are low duty cycle, see sibling comments for details, but high load percent for long time is a killer for battery tech.
I could imagine tethered tractors with power line tensioned in the air, but the grid building cost will be quite high for intermittent usage. Only some land usages and plot shapes would work economically.
the battery in a tesla would run a medium tractor for less than an hour. The tesla can produce more power - but soon it is up to speed and so making a lot less. Tractors are expected to produce their full rated power for 10 hours without stopping.
Maybe a row crop tractor, but a utility tractor is not running continuously for 10 hours. Just running around doing chores and a lot of that time is sitting idling a diesel engine.
Depends on the farmer. The utility tractor is commonly used by farmers for 12 hours a day every day. these are however farmers in poor countries with a much worse economy than anyone who has time for discussions here lives in and so we don't think of them - but they are the an important customer for the utility tractor.
Any farmer who is buying these tractors already has a kawasaki mule for that stuff.
A tractor does actual work like pulling an implement like a plow or spinning the PTO to power a machine like a wood splitter or well drill.
Airplane engines are rebuilt every 5,000ish miles because they’re constantly running at like 50% load, it’s much harder on the engine than moving a car, a tractor is very similar.
Car engines do very little work once you’re up to speed, it only takes a fraction of the max power available to keep the car moving. This is why EVs are possible.
Running a tractor engine under load requires a lot of energy, battery density isn’t quite there yet, diesel has around 50x more energy by weight than a battery.
Off by an order of magnitude. Average TBO (which airplane engines routinely exceed if they don’t rust out) is 2,000 hours assuming piston, or about 300,000 miles for a Piper Arrow at cruise speed.
For comparison, latest commercial turbofans approach 6000h (they don't have a strict TBO limit AFAIU, overhauls are decided based on various inspections and measurements). At a typical airliner speed that's something like 3,000,000 miles.
Thanks for clarifying, I thought that sounded wrong - otherwise aeroplane engines would have to be "rebuilt", each and every time, after more than half of all international flights in and out of Australia (5000 miles, aka 8000km, is just down the road to grab a sausage roll for us!).
My apologies, I forgot that airplane engines are tracked by running time and not miles!
There's been a few. The big manufacturers don't really want to make them, and for the last decade just show off expensive concepts at industry shows and that's it. The small companies only get investment by making a VC play for "autonomous" and "smart" agriculture; they soak up investment, make very expensive product, then go out of business.
I think Monarch tractor just folded up and sold their assets, for example. They were a nice looking product but did what I described above.
Innovation here will happen in Europe and China, not here in North America. "Tractor" here in North America means big giant machine that is owned in a fleet by a giant corporation that manages multiple properties, and works over a dozen fields in a few days.
Every time I've looked into it for my hobby farm, a compact utility tractor that is electric ends up either being vapourware or twice to three times the price and missing features.
I grew up in farm. and I can tell you. this is actually a good deal! I really good deal!!!
You don't really need that much tech in a tractor. you just want to make it work, and make it last long enough.
Absolutely love this! Cummins is a well established engine. Plenty of opportunity to disrupt without having to build out a boatload of tech.
Belarus makes tractors. I bet people could have had these kinds of tractors long ago if not for the sanctions.
dictatorship is anticompetitive practice(slaves work is cheap) and relying on its produce to produce essentials is national security issue.
There's no doubt that it's a dictatorship, but Belarusian citizens are not slaves.
Furthermore, when have sanctions achieved anything other than suffering for the people?
Plus, I'm pretty sure that some sanctions are very convenient for some parties on this side of the game.
They should really choose better words for the headline. There is no such thing as a "No-Tech Tractor".
That is honestly probably a bit too far. Going back to pre-ecu times is literally burning money for the owner in form of lower fuel efficiency.
Drove a no-tech tractor working on a farm in Tuscany in the early/mid-90s. Best driving experience ever.
I think this just shows how much distrust is in technology improving things nowadays.
I don't know if distrust is the right word, because it's right out there in the open: a significant amount of technology is objectively not used for improving your life. It's used for improving a CEO's bank account. Technology has been actively and intentionally weaponised against consumers to strip more and more of their rights away in the name of the almighty dollar, and anyone with eyes can see it.
Slap a few cheap cameras, a GPS receiver, and Comma.ai and you're fully automated.
You'd need steering, throttle and braking actuators as well as radar to get comma.ai working with it.
Tech will consume itself.
It is with glee that I will watch it burn.
Sadly it will also burn other stuff around. If it would only eat itself, I would watch with glee. But when it eats the life-sphere and our lifesupport before, I feel less gleeful
Life-sphere will learn a valuable lesson
I saw George Bush at a tractor factory. He asked what the most important tractor innovation was. No hesitation whatsoever ... air conditioning. AC and a radio, and backup cameras ... there is a place for reasonable electronics.
We need a 'Framework (as in laptop maker) for physical devices'. Basically most of this physical tech can be relatively easily recreated with current tech and 3D printing. In fact probably better done with electric motors and batteries. There is definitly a moat there to be disrupted.
So better and cheaper? I am no farmer but I'd like to have one
Nice. This is the kind of technology we need when we'll have to fight back against AI overlords.
this is a great move. Hoping the best for this company
Butlerian Jihad now.
This is pretty cool! Kinda similar to what Slate is doing with cars.
What Slate is hyping that they'll do with small trucks.
We'll see what, if anything, actually becomes available.
Agreed. Hopefully something materializes but who knows. These tractors actually exist.
Why not buy a used one?
The market for used tractors went through the roof years ago--20 to 40 year old tractors with tens of thousands of miles on them sell for not so far from new prices because farmers value being able to fix them without paying $$$
Why not having options?
What prevents these no tech tractors to be electric?
They get used in burst cycles -- like 10 days straight at harvest time, other times not started for months. Battery cost per kwh used is very low amortized over its full lifespan, but if you only use it to 1% of its capability your costs are now 100x higher.
Now, hang a high voltage wire down from a big-ass catenary, so you don't need batteries, and it'll be cheaper upfront and in use, but nobody does that because of 1. safety 2. if everybody did it the grid would need upgrades
October to April in Saskatchewan.
Almost certainly it's energy density for long running, high load usage.
If a family car energy usage is 1x, then a light duty truck is about 1.5x, and a heavy duty truck doing hauling or towing is about 4x. A medium sized farm tractor would probably be 20x or more.
In that light, it's not hard to see how cars and light trucks could fare well with today's battery energy density, while heavy duty trucks are at the limits. For a tractor, it's not even close.
I do think we'll see smaller tractors going electric in about 10-15 years.
For small tractors many only use them for an hour per day - often mowing the lawn once a week. I have used mine all day cutting wood - and only but 15 minutes on the engine (the rest was me running the chain saw of loading something by hand).
Which is to say an electric tractor would be great for me, but for most farmers useless.
farmers still need tech, they should try provide software (not too much). just the prefect amount and don't become evil like deere.
No-tech tractor seems to be a bit of an oxymoron.
I wonder if one can start a company selling repairable cars, for example, be it electric or gasoline.
I predict the next trend in technology will be low tech or analog whenever possible like SpeedQueen washer/dryers, etc. It's funny looking at antique appliances that actually have superior functionality and features to modern ones. There are old washing machines that have much faster rinse rotation speeds and can empty the water within seconds and almost always have replaceable parts. We need to somehow require machines and appliances be built like this and not this disposable trash we have become used to.
I feel this. I've been looking at ADV bikes and everything on the market has a cellular modem for always on cloud connectivity, and multiple vendors, including Zero (the electric internet darling) are offering paid feature unlocks via apps.
On top of this, I looked at Zero's job postings and they're desperately trying to hire a firmware lead to get the team to use Claude Code (precisely what I want managing a 100hp motor under my ass).
Not only are we in a world where everything is locked down with software, the software is about to get way worse and there's nothing you can do about it.
I wish someone would do something similar for TVs. Just a really fantastic panel with only the tech needed to decode HDMI or whatever and show it on the screen. No other tech whatsover: no telemetry, no smart anything, nothing.
Are you looking for a monitor? xD
No. Monitors are small, and suited for one person working close up. I am looking for a television without the "computer" inside of it.
Yes, of course, it needs to have a computer to decode and display images, but I don't want it to be running a stripped back version of Android, that shipped out of date and hasn't received any updates, with apps that are laggy and often not current relative to other "smart" providers, that also takes pictures of my screen once every thirty seconds to tell the manufacturer what I'm watching and for how long, to build a better marketing profile on me.
I want a big OLED panel with enough smarts to drive the screen. I will plug my own computer into the television, if the need should arise.
That's fair. We do have some fairly large monitor, but yeah, we still need a TV for 75 inches or larger.
Now let's do washing machines and refrigerators
You can get a kubota M5-111 with a closed cab for $70k-100k, cheaper than these. Plus zero percent financing though then for 5-7 years. Well built and a comparable class in terms of weight and horse power.
People aren’t buying them for price, but the first sentence discusses it as if it’s relevant.
My assumption are farmers are trying to skirt the eco rules for vehicles in some way. Which by the way is insanely annoying and has caused issues for all the farmers I know at one point or another. Worse, you can’t fix the ecosystems on your own so you have to get them serviced costing quite a bit and importantly putting your tractor out of commission for a while. It’s why older tractors have a premium
> My assumption are farmers are trying to skirt the eco rules for vehicles in some way.
They're using remanufactured 90s cummins for this reason. They're pre-DEF. Modern regulations have killed the diesel engine as a reliable workhorse. It's easy to write off the woes of this segment as corporate greed, but we've made it illegal to build a simple reliable tractor like this.
> The Kubota M5-111 is a 105.6 HP utility tractor that uses Diesel Exhaust Fluid (DEF) to meet Tier 4 emission standards, with common issues including Code 202A, DEF sensor failures, and clogged injectors. The system includes a dedicated tank and filter (Part #1J508-19660). Owners often report issues with the DEF system causing power derates, leading some to consider deletion or repair, though these issues can cause significant downtime
105hp va 150hp is not a “comparable class”…
Also, the ursa tractors have warranties too…
Next up, cars with no-tech! Bring them on.
A few years ago, during the initial stages of the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, John Deere was remotely bricking any tractors that were stolen by Russia.
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/05/01/europe/russia-farm-vehicl...
I'm sure this was meant to be a story about the bad guys being thwarted, but it only made my blood run cold. A single company can remotely destroy the agricultural sector of a country if they felt like it.
This is a welcome development.
A good ox is even cheaper
I think there is a market for cars as well.
15 years ago, Dacia used to make stripped sedans that sold for as cheap as 7.5k euros. It was a wild success. Now, they've pivoted to making modern cars, still on the cheap side, but the cheapest now is a compact car that sells for 13k.
The only reason is that those modern cars have higher margins and there is no competition for cheap cars. So why make cheap cars to kill the market of higher margins ones?
The free market, if it works at all, should produce companies like wheelfront that caters to that share of the population.
We need this for cars.
We badly need right to repair for everything from tractors to iphones.
One minor gotcha is they're currently dependent upon a limited supply of remanufactured and no longer available (NLA) parts. Some supplier(s) is going to have step up and make new ones to keep building and supporting tractors. It's not an unsolvable problem.
For anyone who likes rural shop repair videos of farm (mostly older), passenger, and commercial vehicles of all makes and ages from ancient to modern, they might appreciate Watch Wes Work.
https://www.youtube.com/c/WatchWesWork
Good. Simplicity should win out over enshittification in the end.
Do they do cars?
Can't, cars have mandatory emissions standards that pretty much need electronicially controlled fuel injection and a bunch of other crap to meet.
> Pre-war EIA forecasts projected U.S. diesel prices would average $3.47/gallon in 2026. As of late March, the national average hit $5.37/gallon, roughly 55% above where it was expected to be.
Diesel prices will continue to rise so it's not clear what these farmers are actually signing up for.
I would have thought would be 2x price
Good. There should be an option for a straightforward mechanical machine. This also has trickledown effect where hopefully regular town mechanics can fix things based on their historical knowledge of engines. Instead of not wanting to touch anything because of the all the electronics involved.
Also, I know this is a strange parallel, but it feels similar to what Dell and HP did to their servers. They made the BIO so complicated that it takes 5-10 minutes for their severs to boot up. Using an older Dell server with a straightforward BIOS that boots up in 30 seconds feels awesome.
What is it with American companies that eventually always try to sell crap and low moral products/services. As if the people are educated in luring people into traps to only benefit themselves.
this is what happens to every publicly traded company
That to me just seems like the inevitable result of capitalist market economy.
Its the result of MBAs and private equity. Capitalist market economies have existed since the dawn of civilization. Money literally predates writing and the first writings were often invoices. There is no inevitable result of capitalism as almost all of human history happened under some sort of capitalist system.
This makes me think of the new toyotas, the rav4s, 4runner, and land cruiser. Through government regulations, they were forced to create smaller more fuel efficient engines. To get the same power, they overstrain them, and put huge turbos on the engines. The outcome is a strictly worse engine, that essentially uses the same fuel as older engines.
The demand for older vehicles in certain segments is actually increasing
This seems almost completely untrue?
The new models have engines that are smaller turbos, that part is true — but they get >30% better fuel economy, and they output more power.
The reliability might become an issue down the road especially in hybrid engines but the data so far don’t seem to support your assertions. The one exception is maybe the Tundra 3.4L but that seems to still be ambiguous as to the root cause, and may just be mfg process error.
I wonder if this notion comes from the 80s, when engines with turbos had lower compression ratios for reliability. Today's turbocharged motors have higher compression ratios than in the malaise era, and the turbos have a lot less lag. Turbos no longer mean you have to sacrifice fuel economy for performance (unless you have a lead foot).
Nope, just engineering to do not much more for warranty. Turbo engines arent inherently unreliable (tho you might need to replace the turbo itself every 100-200k so still more expensive to maintain), just need to build extra strong block and components if you want it to run for a long time.
And why would company do that if that would put it far over warranty period?
>Turbos no longer mean you have to sacrifice fuel economy for performance (unless you have a lead foot).
That's incorrect. Virtually every turbo'd gas car runs slightly richer than stoich to use the unburnt fuel to manage temp/knock. Diesels, you actually get more efficiency out of with a turbo for free. With gas you're practically guaranteed to be throwing fuel out the pipe.
This is what toyota marketing says
Toyota marketing says that they're selling you a worse engine?
> overstrain them, and put huge turbos on the engines
This doesn't really mean anything. You can build an engine at any point of the spectrum from naturally aspirated to turbocharged, to turbo-compound, to actually not having any pistons at all (e.g. the "turbofans" that we put on airliners). What you want is to match the engine to the machine and build it out of the right materials.
Most people don't know shit about engineering and have weak intuition about materials, stress and physics in general. What the common person thinks about a random engineering topic literally does not matter, because they are 90% wrong about everything. Regarding cars, it's more like 99%. People still recite torque figures like they mean anything, ffs. That bad boy with 200 Nm at the crank? Cool, I make 150 Nm pedalling a bike.
My previous car before an EV had a 1-litre 3-cylinder engine, a 1.0 TSI. Pure gas, not a hybrid. That's an engine that's rated for 81kW (it actually delivers a bit more than that) and that can do 60 mpg on country roads (regularly). When it came out in 2015, "car enthusiasts" were laughing hysterically at the idiots who'd buy the car and have to replace the engine every 2-3 years. 11 years later, the cars are driving around just fine. The 1.0 TSI, just like the entire EA211 family, is a good engine with no major reliability issues.
tl;dr engines today are not the same as an early 2000s Subaru EJ25 with a massive turbo bolted on.
> they overstrain them
Debatable. Materials science and engine construction science have advanced significantly since the V6 and V8s of the 1980s and 1990s Toyotas. Almost every auto manufacturer on earth is capable of getting >100hp/L out of a gas engine reliably. Toyota is certainly not the only OEM doing this reliably at scale. This stuff is no longer exotic. Gas engines today are designed from the ground up to be turbocharged and direct injected (and in Toyota's case, both direct and port injected), and built with the cooling systems to match.
> The outcome is a strictly worse engine
No one makes or has made a perfect engine but there's a lot of romanticizing engines from the past. These newer engines make more peak torque, their torque curves start much lower in the RPM band and remain more useful through whole rev range, they burn significantly less fuel when not under load, and the hybrid electric drivetrain mean the gas engine spends less of its life idling or lugging at low speeds and high loads. Whether some of these tradeoffs are worth it is debatable, but in no way are these engines "strictly worse".
> No one makes or has made a perfect engine
1.9 TDI
what Toyota has a 'huge turbo'
Hell yeah 12V 5.9 Cummins. The one in my pickup has 250k hard miles on it, some blowby, and it starts right up at -10°F no problem.
Wish they sold something in the compact utility segment. 40-60hpish. I'd love an affordable Canadian made tractor for property maintenance / smaller farms.
(Though these days I've love something electric. I don't need long run time, I'm not doing row crops. Just market gardening and property maintenance stuff. All the electric stuff I see out there is aiming up at the high end and for autonomy / "smart" tractor stuff which I don't care about.)
If you're mechanically inclined, the compacts of yesterdecade are still out there. Popular brands like Ford or Massey Ferguson have amazingly good supply chain for 50 year old models. I run my hobby farm with a 1975 MF135, and I just sold a 1947 Massey Harris Pony that ran like a top doing pasture/arena dragging duties. I've put a ton of hours on the 135 and only done basic maintenance like replacing a few hydraulic lines and changing fluids.
Can you share more about your hobby farm? I would love to learn more about how you got into that? My family had a small farm growing up and my parents are still actively working on the farm everyday and I would like to take that up at some point. So curious to hear what you farm and how much involved you are in the process.
We're in the very early stages, but the short is that we're raising highland cattle and starting to board horses. We started after my wife bought a horse and we realized boarding costs in a HCOL area are pretty close to a rural mortgage in a LCOL area. So we moved and bought a farm property. Then we bought a couple highland heifers because they're very cute and fluffy. We're working towards growing that herd up to have a few calves to sell each year for pasture pets / meat. The property is also well suited for horse boarding with a sand arena and lots of trails accessible from the back woods. These first few years will be pretty scrappy. Mostly getting all the pasture acres fenced properly and rebuilding the forage quality, plus setting up all the other infrastructure to keep things running smoothly longer term. My wife handles the day-to-day on feeding and caring for the animals, she is a trained farrier and a licensed veterinary technician so we have a big advantage there. I step in for the project work and infrastructure planning. And anything that's an excuse to run the MF135 (snow plowing, moving manure and dirt, grading the driveway, post hole digging, dragging, mowing, etc...)
You may want to check out Siromer tractors depending where you are. Similar idea.
I have a Kubota L3010 HST (late '90s-early '00s) and it's fantastic. Fuel efficient, quiet, comfortable, minimal electronics, pretty easy to work on. It's a little underpowered (30hp/24 pto hp), but not egregiously. It'll run a 9" post auger or chip 6" logs if you feed them slowly enough. I'll have to split it this summer, unfortunately, it's developing a hydraulic leak from the clutch housing which almost certainly means the front driveshaft seal is failing.
Yeah though about the snow plow market in rural areas.
I wonder about a hybrid version of this though, maybe Edison motors should collab
Good. The John Deere monopoly is wild, but if you talk to a farmer they say they can’t handle the repairs. Sure, John Deere gets to make more expensive and complex machines and convince their customers that it’s “the future”.
Those buying new don't care about repairs. They were never going to do the warrantee work themselves anyway. Those buying on the used market have more reason to care about repairs, but used buyers are beholden to what new buyers purchased in the past.
> Those buying new don't care about repairs.
Yes because thy live in the John Deere future. This was not always the case, surely. You used to be able to take high school classes to learn how to fix a combustion engine, even a new one!
Keep in mind that tractors are also getting massive.
The economics of row-crop agriculture is "you gotta farm more land". That means spending as much time in the field as you can with as big a machine as you can.
So not only is time you spend fixing your tractor yourself time you're not spending on your primary job, it's also working on a machine that's just monstrously huge. Delegating that work to a specialist with specialized tools is a very reasonable way to live.
The issue is that the specialized employees is not someone you hire on payroll who has access to tools you purchase. They must be a John Deere employee who comes from out of state and costs you $$$$$$ to calibrate a sensor that could just be a simple menu button and a 20 second wait
JD techs are all over the Midwest. No one is coming from out of state to work on your combine.
I mean, sure, right to repair and all that, but to be clear, unless you have like 50+ tractors to maintain, it's not going to make economic sense to have a full time employee to repair them. You still want to call out, you just want the option of calling someone local with more competitive rates and a faster response time.
If John Deere is sending a tech, you've encountered something that could never be just a simple menu button. You've found a major flaw that they need to investigate in detail. John Deere would never send a tech for routine troubleshooting/repairs. That falls on the local dealership franchises. Their employees are not John Deere employees.
Exactly! The old image of a guy on a Deere 4020 pulling an eight row implement is just unsustainable in today's agricultural system. Whether that system is sustainable is a different question.
Incidentally, the 4020 is like the tractor to me.
One of these days I'm going to buy one to restore, the way other men but the cars of their youth.
Exactly. A 4020 is fun! It may not have as much torque and ground pressure may not be as good as a quad belt tractor, but for a lil farm where you just want to grow hay or screw around?
> The old image of a guy on a Deere 4020 pulling an eight row implement is just unsustainable in today's agricultural system.
That entirely depends on your business goals. If you want to leverage debt to amass wealth you need scale to eke out a living after the debt burden takes most of your potential profit. The 4020 is going to fall well short of what is required there. Those who see farming as an income source rather than a wealth generator, however, don't need scale and can do quite well with the venerable 4020. Eight rows is plenty when you don't have the bank breathing down your neck wondering if you are going to cover your six figure loan payment this month.
It's a lot like the business of tech, really. Some want to build the startup that never turns a profit but sells for billions years into the future, while others want to build the small "mom and pop" that offers a lifestyle, even if it never makes them rich. Both are valid and viable approaches. It depends on what you want out of it.
You still can. My 26-year-old took automotive shop when he was a Junior in HS. Of course, we live in a rural school district...
> Those buying new don't care about repairs.
huh, why not?
The existence of this startup and their early demand seems to refute your point.
If I was a farmer and wanted a low-tech tractor that would be reliable into the future, why would I gamble on a startup when I could buy a Kubota tractor from a company that has been in business for 136 years, with an established dealer and parts network? I would certainly opt for the Kubota.
I’m not a farmer, but sometimes I sell generators. Even today, some specs only allow CAT and Cummins, even though Generac and Kohler have been around for decades and are perfectly good options, they haven’t been around as long as CAT and Cummins.
When purchasing capital equipment, some customers want to buy from a company with some longevity instead of a random startup, even if it costs more.
I’m always highly skeptical of startups in mature industries like farming (~10,000 years old, or hundreds of years for mechanized agriculture) with many established players already operating. I saw an article in the last year or two about a small directional boring machine from a startup company that claimed to be advancing the industry, but multiple manufacturers like Ditch Witch already manufacture and sell the exact same piece of equipment, they’re just not claiming to be revolutionary to attract investor capital.
What early demand are you seeing, exactly? The article does indicate that they plan to ramp up production in 2026, but no mention of actual sales. It is quite possible that they are increasing production thinking that they need to roll them out to dealer lots to gain any traction.
In fact, their TractorHouse profile shows that they are still struggling to sell last year's models. If there was demand, why hasn't that demand already gobbled up the stock? "I guess it would be cool to own one if it was given to me for free" isn't demand.
They need to swing the pendulum back, the current problem is that there is now a whole generation about to take over from the previous and the new gen has never had to use a non-John Deere a tractor. If they could evangelize their product as the “smarter farmer that doesn’t need all that tech” then they might have success.
The problem with your argument is that the smarter farmer does indeed need all that tech if they're expecting high productivity.
You should know that there are alternatives to green machines; Case, Massey Ferguson, Fendt etc.
Oh hey, do you happen to know if there's any tool incompatibility in the modern electronics?
The other thing about tractors is that the three point hitches, PTOs, etc etc, have been standardized forever, so there's very little lock in in terms of, swap out your JD for and IH and away you go, so I'm curious if eg modern seed drills have any fancy tech which locks you in.
The short answer is yes... As you mentioned, the physical side is generally standardized to some degree, but everyone I know tends to just use branded gear that's known to fit. Now if you like to resurrect old gear, then you become a shade tree mechanic pretty quick. I don't think that any farmer will survive more than a few seasons without being pretty smart at just getting stuff to work...
> if there's any tool incompatibility in the modern electronics?
Technically there are standards, but you know how that goes in the real world... Funnily enough, a friend bought a new tractor and planter, both from John Deere, and they weren't even compatible with each other. The tractor needed to have the cab removed to install the necessary hardware (ethernet) to be compatible with the planter.
> have been standardized forever
Hydraulic hose couplers didn't find common adoption until the mid-80s/early-90s, which is surprisingly late.
Yeah, I hate when I go to connect something and have to dig around for a hydraulic adapter. If I was smart, I'd just spend the winter making sure everything was matching, but I'm cheap and there's always something else that seems more urgent.
I know but for the sake of timeliness I’m not writing out every tractor company. Further John Deere has led the way on the current state of tractors.
The farmer who doesn't want or need tech already buys from the likes of Versatile, Kubota, or maybe even Massey Ferguson if more towards the middle of the road. "Low tech" is already a serviced market. That's not to say there isn't room for another competitor, but there isn't much indication that Ursa is becoming one. When you can't even sell the product you produced last year... The bit in the article about them not wanting to really scale up is telling.
It is not like John Deere actually has a monopoly. There is just as much CNH (CaseIH, New Holland) seen out in the fields, and even when you want all the bells and whistles, Fendt is rapidly becoming understood to be the true king of tech. What John Deere does have going for it is that they generally do better than everyone else at keeping parts in stock where the parts are needed; local to the farmer. Ironically, repairability is where John Deere finds the win at the end of the day.
> The bit in the article about them not wanting to really scale up is telling.
In what way?
That's not true for commercial users the way it is for private cars.
Even if you have a service contract you're still gonna be pissed at the downtime cost of having a tech drag their ass out to wherever you are to initiate a forced regen or something.
You're pretty confident for someone who fundamentally does not understand the issue. During harvest season even hours of delay can be disastrous for farms that are barely solvent in the first place. When your only option is to call the dealer and hope and pray they deign to visit your farm in a timely fashion it doesn't matter how good the warranty is or is not. Farmers need to be self sufficient because time is money and money is survival.
It may be true that I do not understand whatever nondescript fundamental issue it is that you mention but don't elaborate on, but I most definitely understand the constraints of farming. Being a farmer, I live it each day.
And as a farmer who owns equipment from across all the major brands (and some unheard of brands to boot), you are right that John Deere is most reliable for having parts in stock. I've been burned by the others having to wait a week on parts to be delivered from who knows where. That is not a fun position to be in. Repairability is where John Deere has the clear advantage. That is, just as you point out, why they are most popular. Nothing else matters if your equipment doesn't work.
You pay a lot more for that luxury, but when the clock is ticking...
LOL. If you're a row cropper, you're running a big combine. Several grain trucks. Lots of expensive gear. Gear breaks down, that's why you buy something reliable, that has techs in your area who can fix things quickly, with a parts network that stocks stuff from decades back.
Farmers are self-sufficient in incredible ways, but maintaining a multi-million dollar combine is pushing it. They can do oil changes, filter changes, replace consumables on implements, and do basic trouble shooting, but there are limits.
And yes, time does matter. That's why farmers tend to help each other out a lot. Field catch fire because you didn't clean off your combine the previous day? It's going to be your neighbor coming out and helping firebreak your field so you lose 5 acres instead of 500. Can't afford to have your own sprayer for fertilizer, etc? You hit up the co-op.
And farmers have crop insurance. Doesn't make them whole, but the idea that they're going to be eating dirt if they harvest a day late is silly.
> but there are limits.
Even without limits, you're never going to be as efficient as someone who fixes the same failure every single day. I've certainly fallen into that trap before. Sure, I got it fixed myself in the end, but in hindsight I'd have been back in the field a lot sooner if I had simply brought in the expert. When time is of the essence, putzing around trying to fix it yourself is not the optimal choice.
And that's not even considering the need for parts. Driving all the way to the dealership and back to get the parts you need is much more time consuming than the dealership tech bringing the parts with him when he comes. He only has to travel half as far as you do.
John Deere gonna send fucking assassins after them. Or probably engage them in some endless lawsuit.
I don't think the issue is "smarts" in our cars/tractors/light-switches/etc but the lock-in and "authorized repair" bullshit.
On the topic of Smart Home stuff (which is the only topic I'm even slightly qualified to talk about) I've heard about people wanting "dumb houses" after initially people wanting "smart houses". It's my opinion that this desire is driven mainly due to bad experiences and doing smart homes the "wrong way".
What do I mean by that? Either they got burned by XYZ Smart company going under and all their cloud-dependant devices dying/bricking. they had a system like Control4 which required authorized resellers to make even basic changes [0], and/or they were overwhelmed with juggling 5 different apps/platforms that don't talk to each other. That doesn't mean smart homes are bad, just that the hardware/software was bad. I fully recognize that for the "normal" person the only options are currently "bad hardware/software" or "dumb house" but there _are_ better alternatives.
My philosophy for "Smart Home" is one of progressive enhancement (and graceful degradation). What that means is everything I "enhance" with "smarts" should still work the old way that people are accustomed to. Every light in the house can be controlled via "Alexa|Siri|Google turn off the Kitchen Light" but they can also be turned off/on by walking over to the wall and flipping a switch [1]. This means Smart Switches _not_ Smart Bulbs [2]. If my Home Assistant (yes, I'm one of those people) server goes offline, everything still works, the switches work, the door lock works with a key, the garage still opens. My "smart-ifying" of the house is not replacing the way to do something, it's only adding additional control.
In addition to that, and something that should come as no surprise, I refuse to use a cloud, or at least depend on a cloud for my smart home. For this reason I prefer Z-Wave/Zigbee devices. If the manufacturer goes out of business it doesn't matter (no pun intended [3]). While I can, and have, used cloud integrations with Home Assistant, I try to make sure that's just a stopgap to decide if I want to go all-in. I own a few Z-wave devices from companies that don't exist anymore and they have been chugging along without issue for years. I love that stability.
There is nothing in my house where you have to walk over to a wall tablet to control something or open an app on your phone, I would consider that a failure. Everything flows through Home Assistant, it's the brain, I don't want multiple apps fighting or different ecosystems that don't mesh (radio-wise or functionality-wise).
What does this have to do with tractors? Glad you asked! I see this as the same for tractors, they should absolutely be "dumb" with the ability to control/query parts of it and add the "smarts" through an external system. Whatever the equivalent of Z-wave would be for monitoring/controlling the device, not something built-in or required for functionality. A modular, non-locked-down system. I'm sure we are nowhere near that point but I write all this as a "don't throw the baby out with the bathwater", I think John Deere was wrong in how they went about adding "smarts" but I don't think the idea is without merit either. They went down the greedy, anti-right-to-repair route which is clearly wrong.
I'd love to see a combo of Ursa Ag's tractor as a base platform where smarts can be added to it without compromising it's repairability. A take on the "naked robotic core"-idea if you will.
[0] And each time you have a authorized reseller come out they try to sell you on an expensive upgrade because they make (most) their money on selling you stuff, not maintaining it. I really dislike Control4 and things like it.
[1] Point of clarification, I use Decora style paddles as is common on smart switches. The only downside (IMHO) to my system is they always "rest" in the middle orientation so they are "worse" than "dumb switches" in that you can't look at the switch and see the state it's in. That said, 3-way switches have already eroded this ability and I feel like this is an acceptable trade off. Maybe in the future people will care enough to make the switch represent the state correctly (with little servos flipping it) but I don't feel like I'm missing much. You may disagree.
[2] My exception to this rule is I will allow a Smart Bulb as long as there is also a Smart Switch. Maybe you can't change to color temperature via hardware on the wall but you can always still turn it on/off at the wall. Graceful degradation.
[3] My information might be out of date but I have very little interest in Thread/Matter, I don't want my smart devices to _ever_ talk to the cloud. Which is why I love Z-wave/Zigbee, they talk to my hub, my hub talks to whatever I want/approve. I never want my devices updating (or more likely, bricking) due to the cloud. I understand that Thread/Matter do not immediately mean "cloud" and in fact might even require local control but I'll believe it when I see it. So far Thread/Matter have been a massive nothing-burger IMHO. Maybe in a few years I'll be all-in on it but so far, I don't find it compelling at all.
> What that means is everything I "enhance" with "smarts" should still work the old way that people are accustomed to.
Also the easiest way to achieve high WAF. I added an internet-connected (but self-hosted) garage door controller. My wife instantly got defensive about things when I said I was going to do this until I said that nothing at all that works now would change. It would add a new feature, not subtract anything. The old remotes work. The wall buttons work. It's just that you can do it from your phone, too. Been very handy, actually.
> Also the easiest way to achieve high WAF.
> It would add a new feature, not subtract anything. The old remotes work. The wall buttons work. It's just that you can do it from your phone, too.
Exactly! If I'm doing my "job" correctly then I should be able to add "smarts" without anyone noticing at all. It's purely additive. It lowers my stress levels immensely as well since there is a never a "P1" emergency of "The lights won't turn on" or "I can't open the garage door" (unless something lower-level is broken, like the power is out or the garage opener burned out).
I want guests to be able to come to my house and not even notice it's "smart". They should be able to stay in the guest room and not think twice about it. Yes, there will be laminated sheet in the side table telling them what the lights/fan are called if they want to talk to the Echos to control it and there will be a labeled remote (Z-Wave) on the bedside table so they can toggle the fan/lights from the bed but none of that is required. They can control it all from the switches on the wall if they want.
Earlier thread on the same tractors but article with less focus on John Deere BS. [1]
The problem for farmers isn't actually just the idea of one company that's decided to make $$$$ on servicing even for unlocking a repair that's even been carried out for by a third party - it's just many newer tractors have not been suitably robust or farmers are finding the specialised parts come at premium prices or those in countries that are a bit remote to tractor production, international delivery times are not exactly thrilling. It's not just electrics, but electronics is the more notable short coming.
The biggest issue in an agricultural setting is robustness - wiring is one element that is prone to being pulled out transiting a rough paddock or pasture or chewed via mice and rats. After wiring is the quality of switches available for hostile environments - in my locale tractor owners had come to accept every so often they'd be replacing a switch every so often.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47842770
Danielle Smith never met a corporate shill she could say no to
I predict 6 months before John Deer gets the Alberta UCP on the line and gets a law passed that bans "unsafe tractors" (or the like)
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
Danielle Smith knows how to trample curiosity.
Foreseeing (plausible) political takedowns is useful.
Yep. She gonna sell out Albertan business interests so fast.
Then again, she probably loves the idea of tractors with poor fuel efficiency and no exhaust cleaning tech.
An anti-right to repair bill + a carbon tax (except this time it taxes you for not emitting).
Thank you Cloudflare for making it impossible to read news, and yes I am a human.
The other day they blocked me from accessing Kagi's web site because I was using Kagi's web browser.
Cloudflare is increasingly a problem in terms of blocking huge geographic regions, often without the website operators even being aware this is happening. All in the name of "security."
Well, at least you are not in Spain.
https://community.cloudflare.com/t/website-inaccessible-from...
The Spanish government no longer had to care about the consequences of their actions since they found a new voting block.
I'm not familiar with spanish politics, care to explain?
They just gave millions of foreigners the ability to vote for the government.
a quick search suggests that's just for municipal elections. As I understand the football internet blackouts are national government policy not municipal?
Regularization is a national policy. Soon to be followed by a shortened pathway to citizenship.
Do they not want to use the internet when football is on?
This person is annoyed because Spain is speaking out against Israeli warcrimes/genocide.
That's quite the leap. Not that it's relevant but I have no issue with european boycott or sanctions of Israel, though warcrimes accusations are pretty toothless. Almost no leaders past or present charged with war crimes were ever arrested.
I second this. Clownflare is agressively blocking: Fennec v149.0.2 - Germany
"The myth of consensual website use"
User: "I consent"
Website: "I consent"
Cloudflare: "I don't"
Isn't there someone you forgot to ask?
Here's an alternative source:
https://www.thedrive.com/news/new-tractor-with-12-valve-cumm...
Mobile Safari has been giving me a complete loop on these in the past couple months, I have to switch browsers to get through. Anyone else?
My guess is that this is a direct response to all the claw stuff running on macs. I used to never get cf captchas from a mac + home IP (while getting plenty on my linux ws + work vpn). Now i've gotten 2 sites in the past week that not only show the captcha, but also loop once I click the human thing. Most likely mac + resIP is not a good signal anymore...
Worked for me just now on mobile safari. You get the cloudflare human test but I just clicked the box and was in. This was despite accessing the site while vpn’d from home and using multiple adblockers.
Maybe it’s the blocking of 3rd party cookies, because I experience similar issues with Chrome on desktop from time to time.
I occasionally get those loop even on chrome.
Yeah, I also wanted to comment on this, though I think it’s technically against the rules.
I hit this first on my VPN, so I disconnected, then got asked again from my home wifi. I dunno why I look like a bot to Cloudflare. I hate these prompts and it’s too bad they’re all over the web.
On HN, I often see comments like this, complaining about Cloudflare blocking access to pages. It makes me wonder if it’s due to a particular setup that triggers bot detection – like Tor or no-JS – that HN readers often use, or if Cloudflare has too many false positives.
I think it's aggressive user profiling, so anyone with a hint of privacy is not welcomed. I can't imagine this getting any better with Chrome MCP and other tools.
Non-Chrome browsers constantly require Robot check
I don't have that _particular_ problem, but I often gripe about how no website seems to be able to remember that I've used this device before ...
... and only briefly pause to wonder if it's because of all the anti-cookie, anti-tracking stuff in Safari.
Those tests are funny in a way because we as humans have to prove that we’re human to a robot
Coming soon:
This article requires Age Verification. Please hold up your passport to the sensor on your device to continue.
Try a browser MCP and ask it to bypass the captcha. Works for me most of the time
This sounds good until you remember that we have all these electronics precisely to avoid the 1955 smog situation and climate change. Going back to 1990-era cars isn't solving anything. What we need is a patent and intellectual property reform. My personal opinion is that the same company shouldn't be allowed to sell both the hardware and the software. Open source ECU, anyone?
I wonder by what mechanism they plan to import these into the US. This seems like a emissions regulation end-run like glider trucks, but my understanding of the EPA import rules doesn't really leave any room for this type of game.
Yes, a lot of modern tractors are locked down due to predatory dealer service lock-in, but they're also complex and locked down due to emissions regulations, which are ostensibly a net societal gain. The classic HN "everything should be totally open and free" conversation really needs to happen through this lens IMO.