There are two kinds of optimum strategies for farmers, and there has been a long term shift from one to the other.
The older strategy is for a farm to be no bigger than a single family can handle, and to be as self-sufficient as possible. Here equipment is run as close to breaking down as it can be without actually being broken down. A tractor would be used <30 days a year (planting, fertilizing, weeding, harvest) and sit idle otherwise. It doesn't make sense to pay for a super-expensive machine to sit idle. The optimum is lowest cost to purchase, lowest cost to repair, cheapest option that can get the job done. A farmer builds a collection of nearly-broken down machines over years to have backup options if one isn't working when needed.
The other optimum is to have the largest, most effective, most efficient machines and use them enough to justify it. This makes sense at the industrial farming scale or as a contracting business where the equipment is owned by someone who does contract jobs for many smaller farmers. For this case the tractor needs to be running and making money as many days a year as it can; any down time is money lost.
The shift over years has been that the second strategy produces more crops with lower expenses than the first, and is taking over to the extent it is almost impossible to run a small farm without going bankrupt.
> The shift over years has been that the second strategy produces more crops with lower expenses
I read an interesting book recently (Seeing like a State) that makes the claim that large-scale monocrop industrial farming is only actually “optimal” if you don’t price in the heavy subsidy, and if you ignore the non-revenue contributions of small-hold agriculture (e.g. the land might provide fuel, crafting materials, and otherwise support the farmers in a way that doesn’t show up on the balance sheet). Not to mention that the larger farms tend to be extractive, in that they are using up water from the water table and nutrients from the soil, and so they will eventually degrade the land to the point where it cannot be productive any more.
I did some digging and the farm subsidies in the US are truly eye-watering, and particularly notable is that the biggest 10% of farms take 90% of the subsidy, so we are not even subsidizing “traditional working farmers” or anything like that, just shipping hundreds of billions to huge ag corps.
I wouldn’t claim to be an expert nor to be certain about those economic claims though, and would be interested in others’ thoughts here, particularly other books you found useful on the subject.
> I did some digging and the farm subsidies in the US are truly eye-watering, and particularly notable is that the biggest 10% of farms take 90% of the subsidy
Well, yeah. The 90th percentile farm makes $7665 in farm income per year [1] so how much subsidies could they possibly absorb?
"Farms" in the US are overwhelmingly used as a tax avoidance strategy. Only a numerical minority of farms are actually designed to grow food.
Most rural land is used in some sort of agricultural production. The most is probably timber. For most of those land for most years they don't make much profit if any, but loads of expenses can be deducted against that farm income and 4 out of 5 years, those expenses can go against any other income and the allowed expenses are very liberal.
I have heard of someone who has a regular job, but raises one or two head of livestock a year and sells them for slaughter. This way they get the ag tax benefits for income and their land.
There's a large plot of land along a highway outside Fort Worth that is definitely prime development land. The owner keeps a few cattle on the land, qualifying it for agricultural property taxes instead of the much-higher residential rates. Until the land is bid up high enough to make it worthwhile to sell, the ranching operation is enough to keep it inexpensive to hold onto and provide some deductions.
Open up Google Maps and switch to satellite mode and then look around the midwest. There are many states that appear to be 90% farmland, but nearly all states have a large percentile of farmland.
My general impression so far is that the subsidies are not being disbursed pro-rata to production rates, and larger farms (having more legal resources) are much more able to capture these subsidies; for example with exotic ownership structures of lots of subsidiaries, to maximize the capture of subsidies. These financial/legal engineering strategies simply aren't available to smallholders. It's the same sort of incentive structure that produces outcomes like the biggest companies paying the lowest tax rates.
Also, correction, I believe I have mis-quoted the stats off the top of my head -- the Cato article suggests it's more like 80% of subsidies to the top 10%. The general point still stands.
Large-scale family farms and industrial nonfamily farms account for only 4.8% of farms, but 57.4% of production (in $). Small-scale family farms represent nearly 90% of U.S. farms, but only 21.5% of production.
Source is USDA (2020) America’s Diverse Family Farms.
If farms got charged for their water use (a high enough price to reduce usage and prevent drought), I wonder if the small farms would still do a better job on that front, or would the more industrial farms do their optimizing thing and become more efficient? I suppose you could also price the impact on soil quality, but that sounds harder to administer.
> particularly notable is that the biggest 10% of farms take 90% of the subsidy
This is the real problem.
I wish somebody would come up with a simple mechanism to stop all subsidies to companies over a certain size. Yes, it will be gamed, but it's still better than the outright crony-capitalism we have today.
Subsidies are an alternative to having massive granary stores to supply an entire nation. If you don't guarantee overproduction, you will soon find yourself having shortages as crop yields can vary up to 30% each year. Without subsidies farms will optimize towards producing only barely enough to satisfy demand so they don't waste money on crops they can't sell, profit margins are usually 1% or less so there is very little room for overproduction. Once everyone is trying to thread that thin line, a single bad month of weather or a large wind or hail storm would turn you from a food exporting nation to a food importing nation overnight, and crop prices will swing wildly in either direction from it.
Subsidies certainly are poorly applied and could use some serious work fixing them, but just getting rid of them outright is foolish.
Subsidies can be about ensuring crops are produced in-country instead of imported from cheaper countries. This is not the same as saying there is no market for the produce.
And as much as I'll criticize the way we run farm subsidy programs, I have to say I'm glad that my food isn't stuck on a ship off the coast of California right now.
If the demand is unelastic, stopping subsidies or introducing tariffs will increase prices ending up with the consumer and most probably hitting the poorest people worse. From that perspective, billions shopped to mega corps could be an ironically capitalist way to socialist means. Better ways perhaps to achieve the same but don’t know if they would align with a capitalist worldview, e.g. socialise the production, or cap profitability etc.
You are right that we do provide food assistance but benefits are not always enough to last a month: ". . . most SNAP beneficiaries run out of food after the second or third week of the month; some of them cope by turning to local food pantries like the ones Community FoodBank of New Jersey runs." [1]
In addition, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has written, "many low-income households that receive benefits still have trouble affording an adequate diet. An Institute of Medicine report identified several shortcomings with the current SNAP benefit allotment and noted that most household benefit levels are based on unrealistic assumptions about the cost of food, preparation time, and access to grocery stores. Many families face stark choices between purchasing food and paying for rent and other necessities. If they manage this shortfall by buying lower-cost but less nutritious foods, it can adversely affect their health." [2]
Directing farm subsidies or any other money to current and future SNAP beneficiaries would benefit millions, including working Americans: "The number of SNAP households that have earnings while participating in SNAP has more than tripled — from about 2 million in 2000 to 6.5 million in 2017. The share of all SNAP households that have earnings while participating in SNAP has also increased — from about 27 percent in 2000 to about 31 percent in 2017." [3]
Regardless of dealing with the very problematic farm subsidies, the president and congress must do something about food insecurity.
Unless that also includes raising the maximum income threshold for SNAP recipients, that would just move the burden from the absolute poorest to the marginally poor.
One is long-term food security - even if global trade is mostly fine right now despite the current hiccups, there's no telling how it's going to be in a decade or two, and it's hard to ramp up production (due to lack of skillset, machinery and infrastructure) if you suddenly need it; so it makes all sense to pay some fraction of a percent of your GDP to ensure long-term strategic security of your food supply, especially if it looks like global tensions will eventually rise due to climate change.
The second aspect is that even in the current circumstances we're seeing rapid urbanization and depopulation of the countryside, which is generally seen as a problem for many areas. In a "natural" regime without rural subsidies this would happen even faster.
So many reasons why this is bad, but the most obvious reason right now is the supply chain crisis. It’s one thing if you can’t get a new car. It’s another if you can’t get new food.
Relying on imports for food makes your country a sitting duck in times of war. All the enemy needs to do is blockade you and then you can be starved into submission.
The problem is that the whole farming industry is proped up on subsidies and if you ended it tomorrow almost every small to medium farm would fold and get bought by a large farm or sold to build a housing development.
That isn't consistent with 10% of the farms taking 90% of the subsidy.
The subsidy argument is a scam anyway. It's a commodity market. The margins will be razor thin, the end. If you subsidize production, prices go down. It will eat the whole subsidy and leave the margins razor thin.
The only way the subsidy helps you is if you get more of it than your competitors. Now who do you think that applies to, the family farm or the huge corporation with lots of lobbyists?
> If 10% of them grow 90% of the food then it's completely consistent.
The claim implied that the small farms get more of the subsidy, i.e. that they would be the ones wiped out without it.
> The reason should be pretty obvious, without the subsidies they would be no US farms.
Why would there be no US farms? Real estate in San Francisco is much more expensive than it is in Mexico City or the like, but farmland in Oklahoma is not uncompetitive with farmland outside of the US.
If this was the real reason then the subsidies wouldn't be suspiciously concentrated at the location of Iowa caucuses.
>If this was the real reason then the subsidies wouldn't be suspiciously concentrated at the location of Iowa caucuses.
Politicians are crafty buggers who will repurpose anything they can to provide themselves with an edge, so that doesn't necessarily say anything about the theory behind the subsidies.
I get the general point you're making, but in a progressive tax regime like the US, the poor (who benefit most from lower food prices) are paying proportionately less of their income as tax than the rich, so this is helping them. Many US families paid no tax in 2020 due to tax credits, so they won't pay for the subsidies.
I would definitely argue that there are simpler ways of helping low-income families to afford food though, if that is your goal... just lower their taxes further, or give them negative tax / UBI if they are already paying no taxes, rather than adding lots of complex gears to distort the economy to try and affect the same outcome. Or more food stamps if you don't like the idea of poor people spending their tax rebate dollars on non-food items that they prefer.
Income tax may be progressive (before deductions, of course). But payroll taxes definitely are not, and if you earn under 50, 60k or so, your payroll tax burden is going to be higher than income tax. Sales tax and gasoline taxes aren't progressive either.
> I get the general point you're making, but in a progressive tax regime like the US, the poor (who benefit most from lower food prices) are paying proportionately less of their income as tax than the rich, so this is helping them.
That's assuming that you would lower taxes uniformly instead of e.g. lowering them for the lowest tax bracket, which is in no way required.
Start with removing corn subsidy. There is so much corn ovrrproduction that it gets processed into a bit of sweet and blended in to packaged foods like ketchup. And blended into gasoline. Corn subsidy is massive economic distortion which leads to monocrop farming and lack of diversity.
Given the choice between a free market plus bread riots every time there's a bad growing year, versus subsidies and no bread riots, I'm going to have to swing towards subsidies.
As I understand it, during a bread riot, free marketeers get eaten first.
I'm not sure our economy could handle that. Industry depends on the products coming from those farms. It's always more nuanced than "stop that crazy thing we're doing!"
I live on my family farm. We have a 50yr old tractor and your basic premise seems correct. All of my neighbors follow the same route.
I would add that small farmers are typically not mono culture. We used to have various fruit varieties. One neighbor is mixed veggies, another cattle and flowers.
Our farm has been forced out of fruit because of corporate mono farms who inevitably cause gluts in the market due to over supply. In my local experience, corporate farms are typically 5-10 bigger as a minimum than their surrounding neighbors.
When a small farmer loses any percentage income, he must quickly change income stream. Hence, our fruit trees are gone, and we're now raising sheep, and are forced to be double income. Our tractor & other super reliable (but very clunky) machines remain.
If it would be OK can you try contacting me directly through my profile? I'd like to find somebody in the US who is dealing with sheep and what they are doing with them. I have a product we would like to export to the US but I am really struggling to get a handle on the market there, it's very different to Australia/NZ etc.
It’s the story of humanity moving on from “I am my own industrial island” to inclusive effort at scale to automate away and normalize often dangerous logistical work (I am 41 and have limbless, digit less peers who had to work on family farms as teens.)
Family farms are, to me, simply a legacy social and technical effort.
The problem is old politics refusing to take reality seriously. Americans who carry on about their legacy of revolution, moving history forward, disruption!, exporting that mentality to the world, are all sad their lives are disrupted by others wanting the same agency.
Moral relativism worked for Americans while we bombed the world, impeding other nations progress, but they caught up anyway.
“There’s a warning sign on the road ahead; a lot of people saying we’d be better off dead. Don’t feel like Satan; but I am to them; so I try and forget it any way I can.”
If you didn’t sign a contract to be a family farmer for life, oh well. America.
This is absolutely true. A related trend is that many family-owned farms are no longer operated by the family: they own the land and lease the farming rights to an industrial-scale operation. The difference in efficiency means that the large operator can pay almost as much for the lease as the individual farming family would realize in profit if they worked the land themselves and still have a viable business.
> The shift over years has been that the second strategy produces more crops with lower expenses than the first, and is taking over to the extent it is almost impossible to run a small farm without going bankrupt.
In the Netherlands there's renewed attention to stimulate small-scale farming and agriculture for various reasons.
For many years large supermarkets have been increasing pressure on the entire supply chain to produce as cheap as possible. It has its effect on all products, where more processed foods gradually replace 'genuine' produce. The larger margins are at the supermarket top of the chain, while farmers are the ones getting squeezed the most. To the extent that they are almost forced to scale up, but even then may find it hard to earn a decent living.
Now Netherlands farm industry is producing an insane amount of meat and vegetables. A tiny country and one of the larger exporters in the world. All this has had very detrimental effects on the environment. Our 'Green Heart' (the region circled by Dutch big cities) is basically a wasteland with little insects or birds, soil compaction. Only fertilizer and pesticides keep it all going. And we have a nitrate problem, caused by both farming and traffic, that is threatening the sparse natural reserves that are patched between argicultural lands.
All this is entirely unsustainable. It is also dangerous. A new pandemic may well find its source in the intensive livestock sector with its mega-stables.
As a result there's now a lot of political attention to doing things differently, scaling down farms, re-introducing old farming practices and experimenting with new ones. Small-scale farming is beginning to look more attractive again, and there's a growing consumer-base ready to pay a somewhat higher price for that as well.
There is a third option, often called "Market Gardener", where a tractor is not used because it is a waste of space and resources. Tractors require a lot of extra turn around space, and area for the wheels to travel that can be utilized for planting. Instead rows are built at 3 ft wide and perhaps 60 ft long to utilize human scale planting and weeding techniques. In this case the soil is not tilled, but instead allowed to build up. Covers are used to suppress weeds when the row is not in use. Rows are more easily rotated with cover crops or nitrogen fixating plants to improve the soil nutrients. These are of course smaller family farms 1-10 acres.
Well observed. My experiences include a lot of farms that operated with big yards of scrap iron; were always repairing / rebuilding something, and did contract construction work to keep the machines running when they weren't using them for their own concerns.
There's very few operations running that way anymore, the "odd construction contract" market for them dried up before and faster than the farming side of those operations. USDA Soil Conservation flood control projects used to be a large source of work there.
It's not impossible, you are thinking from the wrong paradigm. The industry is already shifting if you pay attention to the proper news sources. The chemical agriculture war on pests and nature is coming to an end. These chemicals are making us sick, these monoculture are collapsing the ecosystem globally.
The good news is nature abhors a vacuum and will heal if we let it. The wu Wei. Small farms will rise, food is just too important for the economy and with rapid inflation there is no way around it. We are all going to have to become farmers or know our farmers.
Isn’t this generally true in other industries too? Small cafes can’t compete with Starbucks, there are no mom and pop pharmacies, small grocery stores can’t compete with huge/ugly chains…
At this rate, the entire planet will be ruled by a few dozen mega corporations. This sucks, but I don’t know what can be done to mitigate the situation.
Why do you say this? I don't randomly change pharmacies for my prescriptions, so I can't think of a "mom and pop pharmacy" off hand, but non-Starbucks coffee shops are everywhere. This has been my experience everywhere I've been in eastern states in the US from Virginia to New York.
My perception is that Starbucks is primarily a place to get milkshakes, and their coffee is undrinkable, and their food is worse.
Most other coffee shops do much better in those two categories. Some are also chains, but many aren't.
Starbucks will set up shop next to small cafes and offer lower prices until they've driven the other shop to close up. Once this is done, they will raise the prices back to standard.
Starbucks is a great case study because they can even afford to give away free coffee long enough to shut down any small business - they have an unbeatable advantage. Many small cafes will simply shut down and not even fight when a Starbucks pops up nearby.
It's the same with Walmart, Amazon, Google, etc - once a company becomes big enough, it's literally impossible for small business to compete. Quality suffers, and consumers don't get fair prices that come from healthy market competition. Everything is standardized at the largest scale at which the monopoly operates, so Starbucks in bumfuck, Arkansas charges the same as Manhattan or Beverly Hills. This creates vulnerabilities in the ecosystem of markets that are similar to the dangers of monocrop cultivation, with complex failure modes that endanger entire market segments.
If Starbucks fails, coffee everywhere suffers. If Microsoft fails, the long tail effects endanger western civilization. Monopolies aren't just a matter of paychecks and fairness for the little people, but are threats to the well-being of civilizations as systems and supply chains have single points of failure.
It may be desirable to cap the wealth and/or market share of a given company. Once a company achieves its legal limit, it can no longer advertise or market existing products, or something like that. This could force markets to create interoperability standards to achieve maximum roi, diversifying competition in all markets, and create better incentives for long term supply chain security. It also removes many opportunities for graft and corruption.
>once a company becomes big enough, it's literally impossible for small business to compete
I understand that storytelling is a basic human thing, and repeating a good story is something virtually everybody does, including me, constantly and compulsively.
But a story that is false can't provide useful guidance, can it? What is the attraction in repeating it in the face of incompatible facts?
>Many small cafes will simply shut down and not even fight when a Starbucks pops up nearby.
I literally used to work in the downtown of a small city, diagonally across an intersection from a Starbucks, and it was, for a time, an almost daily ritual for my office to go there.
But there was another coffee shop basically the same straight-line distance to the west.
And there was a donuts & coffee place a few meters to the north.
Some people (well, a lot) only go to Starbucks. But that's a choice, or peer pressure, or a mental trap, not some kind of economic hegemony. Or for all I know people actually like the coffee.
Why do similar businesses locate near each other? Many people have noticed this pattern besides me; I bet you can find more by searching the internet, if you will accept that it happens in the first place.
Another instance: I can think of two places in my area right offhand where there is a Rite-Aid and a CVS as close as possible to each other.
> Starbucks will set up shop next to small cafes and offer lower prices until they've driven the other shop to close up. Once this is done, they will raise the prices back to standard.
There is a style of argumentation on the Internet that I find really bewildering.
Someone asserts a fact, someone else counters with incompatible (asserted) facts, and then the first person comes up with more things in support of their original claim.
How is that supposed to work, in the abstract?
If I say swans are white, and you say "there are black swans everywhere where I live", what is the relevance of me countering with evidence (of whatever quality) of swans being white?
For most of my life, I've separated this sort of behavior from "real life" and kind of assumed that there were "internet people" who always will be inscrutable to me.
But disturbingly I've run into a few people IRL in recent years who do it too.
I think everybody sells a slightly different product. I see, and other people have also noticed, that similar businesses often cluster together. How could this be explained, except by them adjusting their offerings on a bunch of dimensions so that they sort customers between them and avoid direct competition?
(Most of) us don't have to work for them and (most of) us don't have to buy from them. If we mindfully shop looking at the big picture, we can support smaller operations.
When I lived in NY (upper east side) there were multiple pharmacies within walking distance. Nearly every corner had Starbucks (I used to give directions using Starbucks - not making this up).
Number of small cafes or pharmacies within walking distance? Big fat zero. This situation will happen first in big cities, then proceed to smaller areas too (as long as there is profit).
I was looking for an apartment. Guess what? Multiple buildings in the area I looked at, owned by the same company.
Consolidation is not new. But the scale at which it is happening is, and it is terrifying.
Just 4 companies control 80% of American meat supply, for example.
> The shift over years has been that the second strategy produces more crops with lower expenses than the first, and is taking over to the extent it is almost impossible to run a small farm without going bankrupt.
While true, you can lease the land making a decent income without effort. Which is the best case scenario as many older farmers retire and leave the land to family.
On the other hand, if people still are looking to make a living, it's more focused on livestock such as cattle, chickens, pigs, etc often niche animals.
Large-scale family farms and industrial nonfamily farms account for only 4.8% of farms, but 57.4% of production (in $). Small-scale family farms represent nearly 90% of U.S. farms, but only 21.5% of production.
Source is USDA (2020) America’s Diverse Family Farms.
> The shift over years has been that the second strategy produces more crops with lower expenses than the first, and is taking over to the extent it is almost impossible to run a small farm without going bankrupt.
There is value in small-scale farming. If there is one thing urban hipsters love to pay for, it's artisanal, high quality organic food. There are farms where you can see pictures and datasheets of all the animals living there and you can pre-order certain cuts of the specific animal once it is slaughtered and processed.
Interesting; I remember reading something similar on ACOUP about plow teams/etc. in the ancient world. According to ACOUP having access to plow teams and other expensive stuff due to trade/specialization moves the whole system into a better, richer equilibrium. Would the same apply to tractors? Not for individual farmers but for farming "system" as a whole?
> The older strategy is for a farm to be no bigger than a single family can handle
The problem with this is it works because it's socially acceptable unpaid child labor. I do think that there's value to the work ethic it can build, but I also worry about overwork, how it sacrifices education, and how it encourages larger families where all the kids end up being disadvantaged as adults.
Excepting unusual conditions, most nearby farmers needing the same equipment will need it at similar times. You can get around this by transporting machinery long distances as migrant workers do to hit multiple harvests in various parts of the country, but that gets expensive.
Well big ag was supposedly able to solve it right? Vertical integration helps coordinate I suppose, but I don't see how it should be impossible without.
So there's generally an optimum time of year for each step, and being a couple weeks early or late can definitely lower yield a bit. Big agriculture can stagger planting so that a smaller number of machines can be used per acre, if that's more profitable overall, even accounting for the slight reduced productivity. A group of families can't do the same thing nearly as easily if it means that one family makes a large profit (they hit the optimal time), another family makes a small profit (a week or two late), and the unlucky family possibly makes no profit at all (even later/earlier). In order for this to work, they'd also have to share profits, and at that point they've basically just merged.
I think there could be other solutions than outright sharing profits. I'm thinking something like higher tractor-rent during more desirable weeks. I don't know a lot about farming but I think there is also a risk management thing that needs to be dealt with: Planting earlier or harvesting later than optimal means higher risk of crop failure. This could be handled with insurance.
In Germany you can rent equipment and operators for this equipment. A lot of farmers do it for crops they don't usually harvest but are required to to keep the land fertile or to collect subsidies.
The problem with this model is that, as the sibling comment already pointed out, harvest is done typically within one or two weeks or even in two days, depending on the weather. Harvesting too late can make the crop go bad. So renting the equipment and getting it to the field can be a hassle. It's still being done a lot but it's not risk free.
This situation has interesting second-order effects as well. Most "custom harvesters" require farmers to schedule their combine/truck well ahead of time, giving them little leeway in which specific dates they can harvest their crop. So instead of for instance letting the corn dry out in the sun, they'll spray an assload of glyphosate on it to cause it to dessicate to ensure it'll be at the right moisture level right when their custom harvester shows up.
Old iron is better built, less "electronic", and far easier to understand the designs and fabricate parts yourself. As well as cheaper to purchase.
Folks I worked with in the 80s were using Michigan dirt moving equipment from the 60s [1], and a quick look shows there's still similar machines being traded [2].
The market for tractors is far bigger than specialized construction equipment, but all the same factors apply. The bigger units, say 75HP and up, counted as "construction equipment" for us, certainly. Today's farms are bigger and today's farmers have little need for smaller machines.
Hmm, early 90s "we" already had about 180hp... Nowadays more like 300 to 400 for a tractor, and more for caterpillar like stuff... With the electronics obviously being a double edged sword... You kinda need them to efficiently use those big machines...
The smaller stuff is still around, but from my experience mostly for "hobby" farmers in Germany :-)
>Old iron is better built, less "electronic", and far easier to understand the designs and fabricate parts yourself. As well as cheaper to purchase.
I thought that big farms take advantage of newer tech on tractors using GPS RTK for sub-inch accuracy and increased productivity? Therefore, depending on the workload, the decades-old "cheaper" tractor can turn out to be more costly because the farm's yield isn't keeping up with competitors. It seems like a tradeoff between old & new.
At least on construction equipment (agricolture may be different) the point is not only about costs (and frequence) of repairs, but rather on machinery down time or production loss.
I have managed in the past some high production sites (road tunnels) with a specific sequence of operations and having a jumbo or a wheel loader or an excavator down meant severe delays not only in excavation, but on all the following works (concrete pouring, impermeabilization) and on all the "ancillary" works (ventilation, electric cabins moving, etc.).
One of the machine at the excavation front broken for more than a few hours would have meant literally days of delays, complex scheduling modifications, etc., a total mess.
>the argument is that these new tractors are not repairable by yourself, leading to expensive repair
Correct, but the tradeoff calculation includes offsetting the expensive repair costs with potential increased productivity. Or likewise with the other option, the "savings" from cheap low-tech tractors may be negated by lower productivity.
That might be justifiable if the service network is basically as fast as a DIY repair, however from what I read it is still treated to be a week-long turnover which might be fine for a low-stake consumer device but a downtime here means that net productivity will be lower than having less efficient but easily repairable machines.
Things will break. Costs isn't everything, time to fix matters. An older tractor can usually be repaired on the same day on-site, causing a few hours of downtime; a newer tractor that will be returned from service in a week causes a huge loss of productivity.
Anyplace you use for service will have a fix it in two hours or you get a loaner policy. The two hours starts when you call, even it the mechanic is an hour away on a different farm. When it is busy season they maintain extra hours
Seems like it would be easily addressed the way car repairs are: insurance pays for a rental while yours is in the shop. So long as peoples equipment isn't all breaking down at the same time, a service with just a few pieces of equipment could probably service a large area. That way you can also get proper repairs done, rather than having to do a quick hack that gets you back up and running by whatever deadline you have but causes long term problems.
So it seems like retrofitting for "precision ag" also depends on what commercial "RTK network" is offered in the farmer's local area. I think regular GPS is only ~10 ft accuracy so not sure of farmers are retrofitting tractor steering for that lower resolution.
This has not been true for quite a while. The equipment used on surveying, farming, and construction equipment is much more accurate thanks to the availability of multiple GNSSs (e.g., GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, BeiDou) and terrestrial base stations to remove error (WAAS, DGPS).
Yeah but you don't need commercial services to get down to the inch anymore. Running your own base station has gotten cheap and easy; witness Sparkfun selling their RTK Express kit like hotcakes.
Integrating it into the vehicle is a fun second ROS project for someone who already built a toy robot car. There's a substantial population of highschoolers building the necessary skills, the trick is just to connect them to the jobs.
The kit is the GPS and the steering adaptor that reads the signal. GPS isn't encrypted. The protocol is proprietary, but if you can't reverse engineer it in a day you are a poor engineer. (I wrote the decode for one sub inch GPS, I don't know about our competitors, but I don't see why they would encrypt GPS)
What is encrypted is the steering algorithm to steering controllers. That is about safety, tractors have technically been level 4 self driving for 30 years - not even marketing says that though because the sprit of level 4 self driving is about safety and tractors are just as unready for self driving as any other car on safety grounds. By encrypting the steering control lawyers can ensure the safety warning is displayed. (Sometimes a university is given the encryption keys after legally verifying they won't be unsafe)
Looking again, you seem to be about Rtk. I'm not sure about that. Probably encrypted, but mostly for those who want to charge, you can buy your own base station.
New 'dual-band' GPS systems have 30cm / 1ft accuracy without any basestation requirements. The chips cost $250 instead of $10, and they require different antennas, but 1ft is at a point where dropping further IMO has limited gains.
well that sounds like marketing, which sometimes marketing can be correct, and sometimes it can be a bunch of BS. I don't know which is the case here but my hunch would be that if it were correct then old iron wouldn't be worth more than new to the people who would be best suited to know if it were BS or not.
There at any rate seems to be a discrepancy between what is supposed to be the case, and what people who should know seem to believe is the case.
>sometimes marketing can be correct, and sometimes it can be a bunch of BS. I don't know which is the case here but my hunch would be that if it were correct then old iron wouldn't be worth more than new to the people who would be best suited to know if it were BS or not.
I don't know if the auctions bidding wars are driven up by homeowners managing their small homestead farm or by bigger commercial operations. Homeowners don't need to compete so buying 30-year old tractors is an easier decision.
I agree that using old tech can be an counterintuitive cost-saving strategy -- like FedEx deliberately using a fleet of very old planes that are gas guzzlers instead of buying the latest jets that are more fuel-efficient. Maybe some big commercial farms deliberately buy used low-tech tractors. When I drive around, all the big operations seem to use the newest tractors. They seem to always trade up instead of down. But maybe the latest John Deere "lock in" and repair costs will make them reverse that buying pattern.
The big farmers are putting the equivalent of 75000 miles per year on their tractor. They are wearing their tractors out and can't afford for it to break.
From the heavy equipment operators I watch, a lot of them have an extreme dislike for DEF and the regen cycles that all modern diesels over 25hp (iirc) require.
In my (post-Soviet) country it's still quite common to see Kamaz construction equipment (actual construction, e.g. light-weight cranes) from the 80s and 90s being used.
It's not that new equipment is not affordable (if something needs a 100t Liebherr crane, it'll come), but all the emissions equipment on new vehicles is a lot more expensive to maintain, so it's simpler and cheaper to keep old vehicles running.
The old ones are about as open source as you can get haha.
I can see everything on my Mom and Dad’s old Massey Ferguson tractors and every single part is available online from a plethora of vendors since there really aren’t that many parts.
Have a look at the plans for USSR tractors. Those were fairly well-documented. An acquaintance of mine working at a kolchoz - a USSR collective farm - told me whenever new rolling equipment came in, they usually took it apart and rebuilt it from scratch.
The Belarus (MTZ) tractor factory [0] still produces a popular super maintainable model that hasn't changed much since the 1970's.
Potentially, but there are a number of issues to overcome, such as:
More weight on each wheel compresses the soil more. This is possibly alleviated by the 3rd wheel not being in line with the other two, or that might make the problem worse, I'm not sure.
Steering, handling, tipping. With a triangular wheel base, the tractor will seem more top heavy for any given size. This is less of a problem than it would be for eg. an SUV, but it is still a problem. Widening the footprint overcomes this but introduces transportation and parking problems, not to mention having to reconsider spacing of row crops etc. Overcoming that is possible by making the whole thing an articulated tripod that can adjust the wheelbase at need (and incidentally maneuver in any direction), but the flexibility gained comes at the cost of quite a bit more complexity that is unlikely to be worth it for farming equipment (construction equipment might be a different matter, but I wouldn't bet on it).
Buy tractors from Belarus. They are nearly completely analog.
What few plastic parts there are haven't been minimized. And if it's anything like it used to be in the Soviet Union, you get instructions on how to make the replacement parts yourself in the manual.
I talked to people who emigrated to Cuba for around a decade. And it's not comfortable equipment, like it's lacking all kinds of "features" that American equipment has, and that are actually nice, but that never got incorporated into the design. So I'm reading up about it but remote controls were never a big thing, it was not like in America where they were an obvious part of the television, in the Bloc you had to manipulate the knobs mounted on the device, and that meant getting up every time. It was all about the basic bottom line functionality.
So I hear that in Cuba the Soviet air conditioning is basic and brutal, for better and for worse. Apparently most Soviet electronics sacrifice efficiency (energy efficiency, and light weight, and economizing materials) for effectiveness. There is a reason for this: under Socialism, capital goods were always short, but they had to be available. Demanding an air conditioning was basically done as a political favor, and the economics weren't good. Therefore what the factory wanted, really really wanted, was for the customer to take his air conditioning or tractor and never come back. No planned obsolescence, repeat customers were the bane of their existence. So they made them last.
Remote controls were a niche novelty until the 80's. Everyone got up to change the channel unless you had an expensive set using chimes or a wired control box.
I got tapped by 4H to judge a computers/electronics design event a few years ago. My background is in hackerspaces and OSHW, and the overlap with what the kids were building was staggering.
It's been a while and I'm curious what they're up to lately.
problem is that many of the corporate farms are owned by hedge funds who are also invested in BigAg companies, so they don't really care about right to repair. Hedge funds are also jacking up land prices because they have access to near zero interest loans for land
where I farm our (60 miles from DC and Baltimore) not very productive red clay is going for top dollar and not to farmers. Not necessarily hedge funds, but high income earners buying up property for investment.
I am familiar with this area and soil type and I am always shocked farming is viable at all. Most grass doesn’t even seem to grow well unless you put a heavy layer of topsoil down.
They were writing the same story in 2008-2013. Commodity prices are back to 2008-2013 levels, so people are spending their money like they did back then. That's farming.
They do! They make parts for old tractors (really, old tractor chassis once everything else has been replaced a few times).
As far as why doesn't a new tractor manufacturer start up, they have to compete with a few things: first, the market for old tractors and parts (if they are repairable basically forever and the amount of land used by agriculture isn't changing, this is not a growth market). Worse, it's much more difficult to design a small engine for sale that is both reliable and will pass current environmental regulations. This is a major barrier to entry that didn't exist decades ago.
So if you're a startup in the ag space, it makes eminently more sense to make small parts for someone else's platform, which is why you see companies doing things like deploying GPS, cameras, lidar, datalogging systems. There, the market opportunity is "all tractors could benefit from this", the competition is initially "other small companies", the exit strategy is "get purchased by a large manufacturer who would rather buy than develop the tech themselves", and the regulatory environment is much more friendly.
> Worse, it's much more difficult to design a small engine for sale that is both reliable and will pass current environmental regulations. This is a major barrier to entry that didn't exist decades ago.
Do all the major farm equipment manufacturers design and build their own engines?
No. Modern engines with Tier IV compliance are very expensive and it is hard for even large companies to develop, tool and manufacture a wide variety of engines required by diverse product lines.
Depends on where you live. In the US farm equipment needs to pass tier 4 laws (as others have said ). Other countries have different laws. (I think tier 4 covers Europe, there has been a push to unify though that.isn't always successful)
Do you have an actual citation for this? Because as I remember there are cutouts, like if you make your own car.
A workaround may be selling it as a kit. If it's a kit and not intended for road use you could probably sell whatever you want, similar to selling radio kits that are illegal to assemble.
This doesn't mean it runs dirty, it just didn't pass inspection.
I'm not really a fan of skirting all EPA regulations, but passing them is a huge ordeal and probably not something a startup could do without lots of VC that would tell them to just emulate John Deere. It also covers exactly one engine setup.
There might be cutouts for small guys. I work for John Deere, and was involved with tier 4 engines. There are not cutouts for modifying something though, and the EPA is cracking down one it.
Yes they do. In a related area, California Phased in Tier 4 emission standards starting in 2008 for well drilling, and the market hasn't recovered in many rural areas.
All of the small family owned operators simply went out of business, and the large corporate drillers have little interest in small rural markets.
That's neither necessary or sufficient -- farm equipment is given passes for most car requirements and I know does not strictly meet existing EPA regs, but I am unsure if it has absolutely no regs or not.
Belarus has problems right now, but US farmers on the side of R2R have been buying old John Deere tractors as in the article and modern ones from more repairable vendors like Minsk Tractor Works.
There will be a lot of demand for less electronic cars too. Once the mandatory intoxication and automatic braking takes effect in 2026, demand for older cars will go up.
