Are there any open source or open source hardware efforts to create or replace tractor software and electronics? I know of the Global Village Construction Set [1] but are there any others that exist that are gaining any sort of traction?
Are there any forums, GitHub (or other) repositories or other resources for folks to see what's going on and/or to help out? I'd love to see what's available and, if possible, help out myself but I don't even know where to start (I'm not a farmer and live in an "urban/city" environment).
It seems like this industry is "ripe for disruption" but I'm woefully ignorant. What stops farmers from slapping a Raspberry Pi and an Arduino with an array of sensors, GPS, modems and other electronics to "DIY" their tractors and other electronic/automated farm equipment?
I also know of FarmBot [2] but that project looks to be targeted at a different market. I also see OpenFarm [3] but that seems like it's more about knowledge sharing of crop growing rather than the mechanics/electronics/software aspect of farming.
The solution is a legal one, force the companies to provide the software required for you to use your hardware. It is stupid as a user you can only see a red light and only an "authorized dealer" can plug a laptop and see the exact problem and detailed diagnostics.
Without the law your open source software would be blocked by DRM and I am sure the companies would attempt to void your warranty if they can find you modified anything.
It's also about serial number encoded parts. The computer will only accept licensed ones it recognizes. Apple plays the same shitty game to keep you from replacing easy components yourself.
Louis Rossman has testified to Congress on the matter.
These companies are also actively pushing "Renting" as a business model where the farmer only rents the tractor for the season. Any maintenance and repairs are done as part of the rental and at the end of the season, the tractor goes back. This completely cuts the farmer out of the equation in terms of ownership/repair.
Rent or buy, the issue is that if a harvester breaks down in the field
it could be 3 ~4 days before a technician gets to the field, diagnoses
and has to order a part, wait for said part and come back to your field to
replace it. That machine being down for two weeks during harvest could
mean the farmer losing a whole lot of money.
If you are someplace like rural Australia the closest tech might be 1000km away.. if they haven't installed the hacked firmware they can't even service them without a tech or the tractor shuts down.
Is there a specific piece of legislation to target? To get legal process need to have the people who’ve suffered damage be the claimants. I wonder if these farmers agree to arbitration instead of bringing a court case.
The anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA are the root cause as a special interest bill got abused even worse.
There is no sane reason to use government enforcement to stop people from tinkering with what they own. The only legitimate reason is an end state that is illegal for good reasons like removing a catalytic converter.
This again? The solution is almost never legislation.
If just 20% of prospective buyers devoted 1/2 their budgets to a common open solution, they could break out. If there were a tiny company offering an old school model with modern features at a competitive price, that would be enough. Then, if farmers choose to lock themselves in, it would be a real choice and their own fault.
BSD didn't need legislation. GNU didn't. Windows still thrives, but people have a choice. Just convince ADM and a few others to throw some pennies at a startup. Except that the new licensing greatly benefits those giants. So you'd have to convince 100s of little guys to throw big money your way.
They absolutely did. Both depend on copyright. GNU licenses in particular were created in reaction to copyright protection being extended to computer programs as if they were literary works. Today, all of free and open source software directly depends on copyright in order to even be recognized as such.
This is very biased for the giant companies, you have laws to protect companies with copyright and anti hacking laws but when is time for protecting the normal people we can't modify or add a new law. I would be fine with no protection law but then I should be able to crack, pirate and reverse engineer software and hardware.
I think there's even a theory that one of the reasons BSD is a small niche OS and Linux powers the world is because BSD was tied up in litigation for a while.
I don't know if it's a theory as so much as it actually happened. I remember the SCO lawsuits and it scared a lot of people away from BSD, the user base was a decent portion on free *nix at the time and it was virtually overnight Linux became the uncontested dominate force when that happened. SCO had a huge chilling effect on BSD which was it's intention all along.
If just 20% of prospective buyers devoted half their budgets, 20% more farmers and construction companies would be out of business.
Right to Repair legislation goes 90% of the way to stopping the lockdown of the machine internals and codifies for everyone that once a machine is sold and in use, the manufacturer no longer has control over that machine.
> What stops farmers from slapping a Raspberry Pi and an Arduino with an array of sensors, GPS, modems and other electronics to "DIY" their tractors and other electronic/automated farm equipment?
There are a handful of farmers doing exactly that. Cost is a major hurdle though. Not so much the cost of the actual hardware (although sufficiently accurate and precise GPS units have only recently started to come down in price), but the opportunity cost of developing such systems. Time spent working on them is time spent away from the farm business. Spending time on improving agronomy and marketing could yield hundreds of thousands of dollars of additional revenue vs. saving $50,000 on a commercial solution that will retain much of its value and can be resold later. It just doesn't make sense from a business perspective. Only those who see it as an exciting hobby will venture down that road.
There is known demand among farmers for repairable tractors, but it costs a moderate amount (more than an individual farmer has) to develop one. So you go raise some investment money to develop the software and then make it back by selling repairable tractors at a profit.
Maybe if you succeed you'll get copycats using your software on their own tractors, but by that point you've already succeeded. It may even help you by growing your ecosystem and making you more competitive against the closed incumbents.
In practice though, how easy is it to find an investment for an expensive venture you don't intend to directly profit from? Investors will want their returns, and they'll likely push for the same means the project was started to circumvent in the first place.
If you just start out selling tractors that are only equivalent to the incumbents and with all the same restrictions, who is going to buy them? The reason people want to buy from you instead of them is that it's possible to repair your tractors. And if people are buying from you, you're making money.
Maybe a few years later the investors decide they might like to make even more by closing things up, but by that point the software is already published for free on the internet (which was what got customers interested to begin with). So if they do all that happens is that someone else starts making repairable tractors, which people still prefer, using the software which is by then free and already exists.
Have people not noticed how much money Amazon makes out of "your margin is my opportunity"? Taking market share from the old guard by making less (but still some) profit per unit is a great way to make money.
For me the most interesting disruption is the low cost L1/L2 GPS such as Ardusimple combined with OpenAgGPS (https://github.com/farmerbriantee/AgOpenGPS) offers an alternative autosteer solutions that are currently add ons offered by manufacturers for $20 to 60k.
When working in large fields, most tractors aren't hand steered any more but still have an operator in the cab to keep an eye on the implement.
The libertarian tech monoculture is the problem, not the solution. If you knew the history of the industry or Kansas over the past 30 years you'd realize you're exactly backwards.
Deere and similar companies got the idea to create this "perfect walled garden monopoly tractor" from Steve Case. AOL was the first to really lay out the pattern so many other industries (and Google and Amazon and Apple and other monopolists) have now emulated.
This isn't about innovation or disruption, it's about consolidation, power and monopoly. There are lots of smart people trying to innovate in Kansas right now, for the most part they are getting absolutely crushed by massive corporate concentration.
What exactly is stopping these farmers from just buying from another vendor like New Holland or Kubota? Every time I read this stuff, it's all about John Deere being the Apple of farm equipment, and there's almost nothing said about their competitors, almost as if they don't exist.
I feel like I see the same thing when people I know complain about Apple: if I try to suggest they switch to Android because it doesn't have those problems, they look at me like I have a 3rd arm. I really wonder how much of this problem with farmers being unable to repair their own equipment is self-inflicted, by absolutely refusing to buy from a different vendor.
To my knowledge, Kubota doesn't produce harvesting equipment. And their largest agricultural tractor does have a lot of software (I assume it's closed source, haven't found anything to indicate otherwise).
As for running RPi or some other open-source or replacement control software, that's not a trivial thing to implement. Even if an entrepreneur releases a replacement control system, it's risky to install it (down time is expensive). Will they support the farmer? Will they be around in a year or two? Etc.
Did you ever notice that as you drive through farm country, you will see long stretches where everyone is using one brand, and then a long stretch where everyone is using another? Dollars-to-donuts it is driven by proximity to a regional parts depot. If you are down during planting or harvesting, and the mechanic can get you running today if you send your kid to a town 20 minutes away to pick up a part, or wait for tomorrows parts delivery, versus parts are two days away, it is an easy choice.
Ok, that made sense decades ago, but today there's two problems with that:
1) Overnight delivery
2) From everything I've read, you cannot go send your kid to town 20 minutes away to pick up a part for a John Deere machine. You have to call and set up an appointment for a service technician to come to your farm to repair the equipment on-site. After all, that's what all this right-to-repair stuff is complaining about: they aren't allowed to repair things themselves any more. And then the big problem here is: what if it's Saturday, and the service technician is off for the weekend, or is booked up all week long? How do you afford to have your operation down all that time because of a failed tractor?
So I don't see how having regional parts depots is useful any more.
There's probably some level of acknowledgement that there will always be a subset of repairs requiring the dealer's expertise and tooling. Especially as the machines keep getting more complex.
So you will still buy the locally supported brand.
It's only because Deere is the biggest most well known face of the problem, and because they've been most aggressive baout locking things down.
It's not just their tactic, but stopping them sets the precedent.
Also most news outlets don't have bandwidth for multiple articles about all the other companies doing the same thing, so they are the placeholder for the topic.
Even if one of the other manufacturers in the space doesn't permit an easy self-repair path at the moment, it would seem to be a golden opportunity to expand their market by doing so.
Given the way capitalism works in the US now, though, if someone like Kubota broke out of the pack by doing something like this, something tells me that Deere would find the money to buy them out, and spike the idea.
IMO, the government should be putting a stop to this sort of thing. If you're on this site, then you've seen this happen scores of times in the tech space. But, again, a lot of people on this site are specifically hoping for a buyout like this to make their first couple hundred million, so this is a weird place to complain about a tech monopoly in tractors.
>if someone like Kubota broke out of the pack by doing something like this, something tells me that Deere would find the money to buy them out, and spike the idea.
Kubota is a Japanese company; Deere can't just buy them out on a whim. The Japanese government would most likely block it.
The perverse incentives that nobody spell out: this is good for monopolies.
from soy farmers in brazil to local contractors bidding on government road work in new york. Everywhere the bigger company, that can have several more machines than it need for the daily operation, all leased with warranty, will destroy the competition that can't lease because of bad credit etc and so will have downtime/missed deadlines/lost harvests because they cannot get repairs on time.
Some big pockets benefit a LOT from all this, not just the dealers.
Also, the root cause for this was when car dealerships start doing this with cars and nobody cared.
That market is exclusively vintage vehicles. The new tractor market is dominated by large companies using DRM. The scale of these vehicles is probably greater than you think.
Sure, and that's a valid question that is probably an amazing line of inquiry. Is it cost, quality, patriotism, or some other factor? Maybe an Indian tractor is for a totally different farming style or terrain?
Even me just naively unpacking the question brings up several factors that could be real problems.
If your question includes the word "just", you should automatically be suspicious of it.
Yeah I'm not sure I understand the problem; the US is a free market, there are a lot of investors and a lot of engineers out there, why aren't there competitors putting John Deere out of business with products that the farmers do want?
Or are JD tractors so far ahead of any competition that their customers just suck it up? There has to be some anti-competitive lock-in for that to be a thing.
My guess it patents are that system. Not tractors, but I did listen to a podcast about how one of the main toothbrush manufacturers used patents to crush a group of dentist trying to make a better toothbrush for cheap. The patent holders waited until the last minute so that the dentist already had sunk their money into product about to hit the market to get the courts to stop it.
We are now at the point patents hamper innovation.
Building tractors efficiently at scale is not an easy task and requires lots of investment and experience. John Deere has decades of experience in production, building supplier networks and dealer networks and making tractors reliable. This is very hard to build up quickly and very expensive.
Big hardware is much more difficult than for example software or small consumer devices.
That’s why we barely see any new car manufacturers either. Tesla may make it but it has taken them a very long time and very hard work.
Decades? John Deere has been in business for 183 years. That said, I think most of their products today are overpriced and under-reliable, and they richly deserve to be disrupted.
Firstly because JD is the biggest manufacturer, and is also american.
Secondly because the JD dealer network in the US. Waiting 2 weeks to get a part shipped from Europe/Japan while you are in the middle of the harvest season is a real show stopper.
It will take a huge effort to gain market share for a newcomer, and JD can always update their SW to remove DRM if they loose too much to a competitor.
I fully support Right to Repair movements. John Deere/Apple et. al doing this is pure unchecked corporate avarice.
With that said, I have a hard time feeling sympathetic for midwestern farmers. They most likely vote straight Republican every election, and I'm pretty sure fixing this problem is something their Congress reps don't care about too much.
If, as you say, millions of people with similar professions, lifestyles, and home environments tend to vote and identify a certain way, perhaps these factors cause them to have different priorities than you? Perhaps Republican policies help farmers better than Democrats?
Perhaps its possible to value-judge people based on different factors than what your chosen political side would have you judge them on.
Your side wants you to hate and fear the Other because thats what gets people to the polls.
Whats good for farms is good for America, and sometimes that means prioritizing things like taxes, land use, and commodities trading over niche technology needs.
Despising them because they vote differently from you is in this case literally biting the hand that feeds you.
> The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a 1998 United States copyright law that implements two 1996 treaties of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). ... Passed on October 12, 1998, by a unanimous vote in the United States Senate and signed into law by President Bill Clinton on October 28, 1998
The political blame lies with both popular teams, as they both carry out the will of big business. They divide us over issues of taste, to push their dressed-up authoritarian agendas. Don't fall for it.
That may be true, but Democrats will at least be more ostensibly receptive of the issue. Bernie Sanders makes it an explicit point on his campaign website. I'm guessing other candidates have as well.
> That may be true, but Democrats will at least be more ostensibly receptive of the issue. Bernie Sanders makes it an explicit point on his campaign website. I'm guessing other candidates have as well.
As someone that grew up in a pure Red state for decades and grew up on a farm/ranch, there is zero chance of them voting Democrats for the reasons you think they should.
Want to know at least one reason why? Know those farm "subsidies" democrats love to hate? Also known as: the government pays for farmers to keep fields fallow so we don't get another dust bowl. Farmers like those subsidies, they're a good thing. City people hate them, think they're a bad thing "we spend taxes for farm states". Yes I'm overgeneralizing but i've real work to do today so I can't get super complex.
Get to know a few farmers and understand that your perspective on Democrats is highly skewed on their policies towards places with population centers. You can argue Republicans are worse in as many ways as you want, but until you understand why none of those ways matter to farmers, you'll forever lack an understanding of why things are the way they are.
No, from the farmers I grew up with. They hated Democrats for wanting to remove those specific subsidies because it was good for the environment. But to do it it means you have to have land be otherwise "unproductive".
So they get rather angry at being forced to farm every acre of land knowing it will spite themselves later. Its a bit more complex than anyone makes it out to be. But easier to just call farmers dumb and that they vote against their interests. Which is ultimately self defeating and ignores the realities of modern farming and the history of how we got here.
Relax, I know there's zero chance of said farmers voting Democrat, that's why I have no sympathy for them on this particular issue; they'll continue to vote for representatives that largely don't give a shit about this issue.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9414211
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13925994
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13802969
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13990266
Edit -- and some more:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10897309
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19900022
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14074894
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13925994
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16386012