Never Sir… I actually have an education.
We can tell. Threads like this show we’re not a bunch of bozos on the bus.
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You eat bagels?
I’ve been reading about this for a few years. As a long-time open-sourcer and DIYer I’m on the farmers’ side. On the other hand, John Deere is a private company that can make anything it wants. If nobody buys their tractors (etc.), they go out of business. Farmers buy their tractors (I suspect the competitors are doing the same thing.) because the tractors allow them to do enough more work to make farming more profitable.
A group in Netherlands (?) makes an open-source 'smart’phone. Some group needs to make an open-source tractor.
JD probably doesn’t really care who does the tractor repairs. They sell parts either way and do not directly repair equipment. They are protecting their dealer network which has likely put a LOT of pressure on them to make it a captive revenue stream for them. The same thing goes on with cars to some extent and car makers have tried to make things more difficult outside of their dealer networks but due to the broader customer base, has met with a lot of resistance from consumer protection groups and lawmakers protecting constituents. The farm implement market is much smaller and therefore doesn’t get the same amount of attention and help…
That’s true, it not my point. The point is about efficiency. They need modern equipment to be efficient so that they can be profitable. Pricing isn’t set by the least efficient farmer so that they can survive. It’s set by the average cost to produce. The cost of everything continues to go up. You won;t be in the black long if you continue to do business the same way year after year. Eventually, you need to upgrade your tools and equipment to remain competitive. Now that 20 year old easy to maintain tractor is replaced by a very expensive tractor you’re struggling to pay the note on. This isn’t news, smaller farm operations have been failing for many years in favor of the large conglomerates. It’s not because they made bad decisions. It’s because they can’t compete. Same thing happening all over the country with small, family owned businesses. It’s the nature of the beast…
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Well, my point was more along the lines of the farmers as a whole having screwed themselves by buying the more efficient things in the first place, but I do understand the corporate farm problem.
But that leads to another rabbithole, namely that everyone who wants to work should be able to, but you are not entitled to a specific job. If you can’t make it as a farmer, then you should probably stop being a farmer and do something you can earn a living at. Even if that’s just renting out your land (I have farming relatives who make far more renting out their land than they ever did working it themselves).
And I know, you’ll probably fire back with “if all the farms go corporate, we’re screwed, because they’ll raise prices and we’ll all go broke trying to feed ourselves,” and you’d be absolutely right about that.
That’s why we really do need to come to terms as a society with the idea that unfettered capitalism is eventually only good for the few at the top of the pyramid, and a disaster for everyone else, and so we need to reign it in so that the majority of us aren’t left out in the cold. But that’s definitely a discussion for another day and another forum. 
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This has been going on for a long, long time. My grandfather used a horse drawn wagon and handpicked his corn. My dad had a tractor and two row corn picker. We left farming in 1960.
Ten to 15 year old John Deere tractors bring a good price these days so there must be quite a few farmers who prefer the Luddite models.
I’m amazed some company hasn’t come in and offer retro-fit products for tractors. GPS for crop navigation is a simple product to add. Buy a basic tractor then buy the aftermarket product. There are several competing products sold today that competes directly with GM’s On-Star.
@TwinTurbo. I grew up in the era and in an area of family owned farms. Many of my classmates came from these family farms. Even though my family didn’t live on a farm and weren’t farmers, I had to take agriculture in 7th and 8th grade. On one field trip in agriculture, we visited a dairy farm in our community. The owner of the farm employed a couple full time farm hands. The dairy farm no longer exists. The house and barn are still there, but a lot of the land has been sold off for a housing development. We visited a large chicken farm. It’s now gone. Even 65 years ago, the handwriting was on the wall for the smaller family farms. Many of these farmers had day jobs in the factories. Our bus drivers were owner/operators who farmed. Today the school I attended was consolidated with another school and no longer offers agriculture classes. The consolidated school corporation owns the buses and hires the drivers.
The small family businesses have gone the same way as the farms. Forty years ago, I did business with a family owned appliance store. The store had a great service department. I could go in, pick out a refrigerator or washing machine and it would be delivered by the next day. Just before Christmas, our 29 year old dishwasher had to be replaced. I went to two big box stores. I looked at what was on display, but these were not for sale. The store would order the machine and it would be about a week to be delivered. At one store, the salesperson didn’t even seem interested in helping us. We did find the machine that was acceptable at the third store. The store had a list of private contractors whom I could call to install the dishwasher. I said I would handle it myself. Had this store not had the dishwasher I wanted available, I would have ordered the machine through Amazon.
Everything from the farms to retail businesses have gone big. Many car dealers are owned by a larger companies and are called “automotive groups”. I miss the old days where the service manager at the DeSoto/Plymouth dealer who was also the head mechanic would explain to me how I could save my dad money and tell me how to fix the problem. Sometimes when I would go in, he would tell me about a strange problem they had encountered with another car and how he figured it out. I remember one time he showed me an engine they had pulled from a 1958 Plymouth that was only two years old. The engine was on an engine stand and had a broken crankshaft. A couple of years later, I was at the dealership with my Dad. My Dad was talking to the owner. I was looking over the used cars as I had graduated from college and needed to buy a car. I was drooling over a Porsche on the lot. The owner of the dealership came over and told me that was the last car I needed to consider. I was on my way to graduate school and had accepted an assistantship that paid $200 a month. The owner of the dealership told me it would take my monthly pay check and then some to keep the Porsche running and the Porsche wasn’t a very comfortable car to live out of. In those days, I rented a room in a house for $8 a week and bought a $14 weekly meal ticket at the student union which included 3 meals a day. I could live on $200 a month and maintain a car.
The small businesses back then were interested in the welfare of their customers. The small farmers back then could repair and maintain their equipment. I hate going past where the farms once were and seeing apartment complexes, big car dealers and big box stores.
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Twin turbo- John Deere absolutely does service their own equipment. I have a former employee who drives around in a big service truck doing just that. JD also sells quite a bit of heavy machinery in addition to the farming equipment. Or they did anyway. Have not shopped them for equipment lately. I’m not sure if the proprietary components are in the other equipment. But probably so.
Shadow fax - saying farmers are to blame for buying higher efficiency (new) equipment to produce more crop / profit is about the same as saying car buyers are to blame for buying a newer, more complex car to get better gas mileage. Then blaming car buyers when valves coke due to direct injection, for example. You can’t really not buy something modern and complicated eventually. Farmers couldn’t boycott modern complex machinery any more than I could boycott a new truck with fuel saving gadgetry and a backup camera. I’ll have to buy new (or newer) at some point if I keep driving. You eventually have to upgrade equipment if you continue farming. Farmers using old equipment would be like me buying a 99 Tacoma with 200k miles for my next vehicle. Reliable and relatively simple in its day, but about worn out now.
I won’t comment much on the “evil” capitalism. But anyone who’s working is in it for the money. And we all want more. So you find ways to produce more. Like more modern equipment.
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They would have to tie into the computerized controls which is likely highly proprietary and not documented. These new tractors pretty much run themselves almost like a computerized milling machine. You download the crop pattern and it does the work. That’s how they do those very complex corn mazes now…
If so, it certainly isn’t their preferred avenue. Perhaps he is their factory rep handling special cases or something? Here’s a snip from their website-
Note the final bullet item.
I ran into this with other equipment support. Contacted the manufacturer and they kept pointing me back to a dealer. The dealer didn’t know the answer and so it went in circles…
I dunno. He’s not a “factory rep”. He’s come out and done work for me on different brand (not JD) equipment fairly recently. He does work out of a dealership. Stribling Equipment. They sell and service several brands, including JD. I guess he doesn’t work directly for JD, he works for a JD dealer, technically. Which is the same to me as a tech at the Toyota dealer working on my car. They don’t work directly for Toyota either, I suppose.
Those are assumptions, and they’re especially untrue in the public and nonprofit sectors. In terms of motivation, pay is more of a hygiene factor* than a motivator for a lot of workers.
For many workers, the nature of the work is a bigger motivator than money, and knowing this is the difference between having read research on employee motivation and assuming everyone is personally motivated by what motivates you.
*(something that will make one leave one’s job if they’re unsatisfied with it, but not something that motivates one to do a good job)
OK, that makes sense. I was pretty sure they didn’t run their own servicing business. Had a friend that worked for JD as a sales rep. He ran interference on warranty issues between the dealerships and corporate…
Yeah, I can agree with that. Although I don’t generally blame the car buyer for the valves coking. I do blame the car buyer for not doing the proper research which would have told him that the valves would coke, and then being surprised and angry that his valves coked. It’s not the car maker’s fault that he couldn’t be bothered to gather information about the very expensive thing he chose to buy. It’s like a horse buyer getting himself a Clydesdale and then being angry that he didn’t win the Kentucky Derby with it. He probably should have found out something about horses and why draft horses aren’t good race horses before he plunked down his money.
I suppose I have low tolerance for that right now because I’ve been listening to my elderly mother complain about her BMW’s lack of reliability for 3 years now even though it would have taken her 10 minutes before purchase to find out that BMWs aren’t known for reliability (not to mention the fact that I told her as much multiple times, and she wouldn’t listen because she wanted that “prestigious” logo).
And now I’m listening to her complain about how the features on the Acura she bought to replace it don’t work the way she wants them to, when it would have taken 10 minutes on the test drive that she refused to take to find out that she didn’t like them.
I do expect people to inform themselves before making a decision, whether it’s buying a car or voting for President, and I don’t have a whole lot of sympathy when people make a decision and dislike the results when the results were very easy to predict if they’d just bothered to do a few minutes worth of reading.
Of course you do, but in the case of the farmers, when the “you can’t repair it yourself” tractors were first coming out, they had a choice between buying those, or buying ones from some other brand that hadn’t gone that route yet. They chose to buy the tractors they couldn’t repair, and now they’re upset even though it was their purchasing decisions that encouraged the industry shift to only tractors you can’t repair. That’s ridiculous.
I get the impression that you’re old enough to remember when VCRs came out. There were two formats. VHS and Beta. Beta was superior to VHS in just about every way, but consumers voted with their dollars and chose VHS. Beta died an early and undeserved death.
If consumers can kill off Beta, then they can kill off anything by simply not buying it. It might be nice if they killed off things that should be killed off once in awhile, but they consistently don’t. When the Pinto memo became public, Ford should never have sold another car. I’m certainly not going to buy a car from a company that made a conscious decision to let its customers get killed by its known design flaw. But Ford did just fine, and is still here today. It’s nonsensical.
You can’t buy into the technology and then whine that the technology is on the market. Of course it is. They’re making money off of it, and you helped.
You should probably know that you’re talking to a guy with an '88 Mitsubishi Mighty Max with over 200k on it, and it still runs like a top and does everything I need it to do. 
I specifically chose to get an old Japanese mini truck for my needs because I found it stupid to spend well into the 5 figures for a behemoth with a bunch of fancy crap I didn’t need, just to beat it up by hauling stuff for yard work. Trucks are supposed to be for doing work with, not limos with a rarely-used box on the back.
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What I’m saying is buy one of these tractors without all the computerized control. Then a third-party would add the controls. Maybe not big enough market. But it’s doable.
Yes, I used a generalization. Some people love their job, pay is less important. Understood.
Once I stop getting paid, I’m going to the house, myself.
Agreee with what you’re saying too. My point is, most all new equipment is complex. Not just JD. I don’t know if others have proprietary software, but I imagine they do or soon will.
The car example, yes you can avoid DI. But you can’t avoid every complexity no matter how much you research. Someday all new cars may be DI. Then you don’t have a choice.
I drive an older, less complicated truck too. And it’s fine for what I use it for. But I wouldn’t buy it for a commercial application. If my 150k mike truck breaks, I drive my 160k mile car to work and vice versa. But when they both eventually go down, I’d be foolish to buy an old, high mileage vehicle as a daily driver.
We’ve got equipment at work that has been reliable, but now has 20k hours. When it goes down, production suffers. Eventually, we’ll have to buy new or newer equipment that will no doubt be more complex. But we’d be silly to buy an old, once reliable cable crane and hope it would keep up.
I would actually love a King Ranch / Limited / whatever truck. It occurred to me the other day when I was watching an old car auction that trucks are the new large luxury vehicles. There’s really not many big, luxurious cars left. Trucks have kind of taken their place.
That being said, I’m more of an XLT means kinda guy with King Ranch dreams 
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