New High-Tech Farm Equipment Is a Nightmare for Farmers
February 5th, 2015Via: Wired:
Aside from using it, there’s not much you can do with modern ag equipment. When it breaks or needs maintenance, farmers are dependent on dealers and manufacturer technicians—a hard pill to swallow for farmers, who have been maintaining their own equipment since the plow.
“[DIY repair] is cheaper than calling out the technician. But that information is just not out there,” Dave explained to me.
The cost and hassle of repairing modern tractors has soured a lot of farmers on computerized systems altogether. In a September issue of Farm Journal, farm auction expert Greg Peterson noted that demand for newer tractors was falling. Tellingly, the price of and demand for older tractors (without all the digital bells and whistles) has picked up. “As for the simplicity, you’ve all heard the chatter,” Machinery Pete wrote. “There’s an increasing number of farmers placing greater value on acquiring older simpler machines that don’t require a computer to fix.”
The problem is that farmers are essentially driving around a giant black box outfitted with harvesting blades. Only manufacturers have the keys to those boxes. Different connectors are needed from brand to brand, sometimes even from model to model—just to talk to the tECU. Modifications and troubleshooting require diagnostic software that farmers can’t have. Even if a farmer managed to get the right software, calibrations to the tECU sometimes require a factory password. No password, no changes—not without the permission of the manufacturer.
John Deere, in particular, has been incredibly effective at limiting access to its diagnostic software. Which is why I wouldn’t have been able to tweak the programming on Dave’s tractor, even if I had been able to hack together the right interface. John Deere doesn’t want me to. The dealer-repair game is just too lucrative for manufacturers to cede any control back to farmers.
Build your own. Cheap. Works fine for 95% of necessary jobs. Easily repairable. However, no air conditioning. 😉
http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Category:Farm_equipment
I grew up on a small family farm in the midwest. This hits really close to home.
I hated farm machinery. I still don’t trust any of it. My father spent more of his time being mechanic to the clattering old tractors and combines and etc. which filled up the barns than he did anything else. And this was the old, simple, durable stuff.
You can hardly find parts for most of these nowadays. The members of my family still farming keep donor equipment around because they are literally the only sources for replacement bits.
New farm machinery is amazingly expensive. No one who isn’t independently wealthy can simply ‘break in’ to farming without incurring debt that is pretty much impossible to pay off.
The john deere repair trip was a common childhood memory, for those times when something broke that couldn’t reasonably be fixed even with a barn stuffed with tools and purpose-built jigs, gadgets and full welding kits. Often it was cheaper to simply buy another 2nd-hand tractor in reasonable shape than to fix something well and truly broken.
I understand why this equipment is ending up computerized. Once you apply the industrial factory model to farming and flatten the world economy and markets, this is where you inevitably end up.
Price competition drives production efficiency to the cost of all other considerations. Any artificial supports in the system (oil company subsidies, corn production subsidies, environmental costs absorbed by the state (the population)) will be exploited under these conditions unless expressly prohibited by law.
But food production built on top of this kind of technology is incredibly fragile.
I am still stuck in server-farm IT-land, and as anyone who works IT knows, it’s not if a system breaks, it’s when.
When all this collapses we’ll be fighting over roasted rats and dandelions because we’ve taken every step of the mass food production chain and redesigned it to be as fragile, technologically-complicated, and unsustainable as possible. We won’t be able to replace a few overly complicated steps with simpler alternatives. There simply won’t be any saving the system.
Throw it away and start over. If it wasn’t for petroleum dependence, we could revert to methods of the early-mid 20th century. Possibly we still
could if we were willing to practice crop rotation and tolerate lower yields. Not sure we could feed 7+ billion people, but…
zeke