Actually, they are and a lot have been for a long time share croppers to the bankers who own the land. Many lease the land they farm.
My grandfather had an old JD 12A pull behind combine that he pulled with an old JD model A tractor. He used it about one week out of the year and the rest of the time it sat under a shed. It seemed to break down as much as it ran, he finally got tired of fixing it and just hired someone with a modern combine to harvest his wheat and oats.
Very few farmers actually own combines today. It just doesnât make economic sense to own something that expensive that only gets used once a year. The people who own them make custom harvesting their business, many donât even farm.
I loved watching that old JD 12A in action, with all the external belts, pitmans, and pulleys it was a piece of kinetic art.
Old farmerâs joke:
âWhat would you do if you had a million dollars?â Farmer: âI guess Iâll keep farming until itâs all goneâ.
And the Amish are getting upset by GMOâs invading their seed purity, Cross or angry pollination, At least a horse and buggy does not have a cvt transmission.
I submit to you that a horse does indeed have a CVT. When it goes faster, it doesnât shift to another gear. The horse has a continuous variation of speeds that it can go between a flat out gallop and whoa.
One of the problems with those old pull behind a tractor combines was that many of them were powered by the tractorâs power take off shaft. You couldnât adjust ground speed by throttling the tractor down, its engine had to run full speed all the time to power the threshing machine. If you needed to travel slower because you hit an extra thick patch of wheat, you had to stop the tractor and shift to a different gear. Many pull behind tractor combines had their own engines to power the combineâs threshing machine just so the tractor could adjust ground speed continuously with the throttle.
One of the first CVTâs I ever saw was on a self propelled combine, allowing the operator to continuously adjust travel speed while keeping the engine and the thrashing machine at full speed. It was just a wide V-belt running in a hydraulically adjustable pulley, sort of like a snowmobile drive belt.
Todayâs farmers are choosing to enter into business agreements with GMO seed companies in which they explicitly agree not to save seed for next planting, and theyâre doing it because GMO crops give higher yields with less money spent on pesticides/etc, and make them more money. âI will give you access to this technology but you are not allowed to replicate it and use it for free foreverâ contractual language is pretty standard in multiple industries.
I wonder how GMOâs are tied into the ethanol game? I recall driving from St Louis to Seattle a couple of years ago and along the way there were fields of corn that ran for miles. The politics of gasohol has too much power and motorists are paying dearly for that trash.
Corn used to make ethanol is not the same kind of corn that appears on your dinner table. While ethanol corn can be GMO, the modification is different from GMO food corn. Ethanol-producing GMO corn has been modified to produce the enzyme that breaks starch down into sugar. Without the modification, ethanol plants have to add the enzyme at the beginning of the distillation process, so modified ethanol corn means cheaper ethanol production.
Generally food corn which is GMO is modified for better pesticide resistance (Roundup Ready) or to make its own pesticide (bt corn, which produces a protein that destroys insect digestive systems while being harmless to non-insects). Bt corn is especially nice because it means you need to apply much less pesticide than you otherwise would.
Regarding the ethanol corn, even with the modification that makes it cheaper and easier to make ethanol out of it, the energy equation is still lopsided, and corn-based ethanol is still a scam writ large on the public.
The real problem as Iâm sure most here know is that engines not specifically designed for ethanol donât do terribly well when fueled with it. Too much ethanol will wreck them, which is why itâs troubling when states like Minnesota keep flirting with a 20% ethanol mandate. 10% is bad enough but probably wonât do much physical harm. E20 would be bad for my lawn mower and my MR2.
Still, corn based ethanol is the least expensive way to get what we need for octane enhancement as a replacement for MTBE. The infrastructure already exists to grow it. I donât think we are quite ready to use cellulosic sources rather than food sources. Sugar cane isnât a viable alternative in the US as it is in Brazil because of climate differences. Whatever crop we end up using for ethanol, like switchgrass as a substitute, it will likely displace corn fields because it has to grow somewhere. I agree that excess ethanol is only good for corn state politicians and the businesses they serve. I donât like the idea of E20 or even E15, but E10 is OK.
Is it? Ethanolâs being used because it has to be used. Not obvious to me itâs the cheapest way to achieve octane. A better approach would be to set a 10% maximum, let the refiners use it if they want to, or use other hydrocarbons (no water soluble stuff like MTBE). That would ensure we donât pay too much.
I would think that enzyme would have to be there for the fermentation cycle. Thatâs when yeast turns sugar into alcohol, and CO2.
That enzyme that turns starch into sugar is found naturally in both malt and spit. Beer brewers and distillers add malt to the mash to convert the starch into sugar which is then converted to alcohol by the yeast.
Malt is nothing but grain that has been put in a wet environment, like a wet sack, and allowed to sprout. The sprouted grain is dried and ground up and added to the mash.
Sometimes, instead of adding yeast, the fermentation is started by adding a bit of a previous batch of distillerâs beer just like sourdough bread. This is called sour mash.
Youâre a true whiskey connoisseur if you can sample some whiskey and tell if itâs spelled âwhiskeyâ or âwhiskyâ.
If you want to build a home built airplane, most of the companies that sell blueprints for home built aircraft make you sign a contract where you agree to build only one airplane from that plan.
Even if you did ignore the contract on GMO seeds and planted a second generation of GMO plants, thereâs no telling what pollinated the seeds you are planting and the new plants may or may not have the desired traits.
We had a volunteer peach tree sprout in our front yard from peach pits that were thrown away. The fruit of that tree was hard and not very sweet, not at all like the peaches that the pits came from. Thatâs why farmers donât plant peach orchards using fruit pits but plant trees cloned from cuttings. A cloned tree will produce the same fruit that the tree that a cutting was taken from did.
Harley Davidson is another company that shows no mercy to people who use their brand name unlicensed on T-shirts etc.
Back to John Deere, John Deere is a lot like the âHarley Davidsonâ of farm tractors. It has an intense core of loyal âJohn Deere Peopleâ just like there are âFord menâ and âChevy menâ. But that loyalty can quickly evaporate if they insist on holding farmerâs tractors hostage for ransom when something malfunctions by withholding the info needed to fix the machine. This could make a lifelong John Deere man really consider going to Case/International Harvester or even some import brand for their next tractor.
Wasnât there a lawsuit not long ago to require car manufacturers to allow small shops to access the software in modern cars for the purposes of diagnosis and repair? I have no idea how that lawsuit was resolved, but it sounds like a similar problem exists with farm equipment, and perhaps statutory relief wouldnât be a bad idea?
Note that I admittedly did not keep track of the suit against car manufacturers, nor do I know a lot about farm equipment âproprietary softwareâ problems, but it was a thought. If this IS a problem, Iâm on the side of the farmers.
When the impulse coupling on the magneto of my grandfatherâs A model John Deere stopped working, it may just as well have been a computer software problem as far as he was concerned. It required a service call from the dealer to get it fixed.
Youâre thinking of Right to Repair. That lawsuit gained a little traction here and there but in my opinion was nothing but a waste of time and a load of carp. I can tell you for certain that with the exception of certain security-related items (like needing to be a licensed locksmith to copy and program keys) everything you could ever need to service and repair and update your car is readily available to you, your neighbor, the lady across the street, and anyone else with a laptop and internet access.
Spent a few days in South Dakota and talked with a farmer relative and boy did I get an earful on the one size fits all emissions requirements on farm equipment. He said Caterpillar refuses to even build diesel engines anymore in the US because the canât build decent engines that meet the requirements. Increased costs and poor performance so if you can avoid buying new that seems to be the case. He does about 2000 acres and a former legislator.
Not for Subaru since 2012. But for $13.95, you can get a three day access to their online repair manual and I suppose you could print it out during that time.
