Once John Deere starting DRM’ing their tractors it just screams entrenched monopoly.
But where’s the barrier to entry? AI is going to dramatically alter this competitive landscape and John Deere’s DRM is not going to to stop it.
Honestly, I love watching these companies drive nails into their own coffins.
I was on the Google homepage today on my iPhone and was getting popups advertising Chrome (on the homepage!) and then again in the search results advertising the Google app. I changed my default to DDG right then and there.
Don’t support these shitty companies and just watch them burn themselves to the ground. It might take 10 years but consumers ultimately will be the arbiter.
Barrier to entry in Ag is the dealerships. Deere has the best US dealership network for heavy equipment outside of CAT. It is Ok if your Tesla is in the shop for a few weeks getting fixed, but for Ag equipment, even a few hours at the wrong time is super painful. Deere has parts for 20yr old equipment and their own freight trucks, don't overlook this advantage.
Its definitely a factor, most people I know out here who bale run multiple tractors so they can handle one or two in the shop if it's during a critical time.
We've got a Kubota CUT, when rats chewed out the writing harness we were 4 weeks before we had it up and running even with insurance + dealership.
Personally I'd love to see someone come in and clean house. Weight and torque are the two things you want in a tractor and electric has both in spades. I think tractors in the CUT space where hydrostatic transmission are common would make a really good fit since you can basically eliminate the HST.
I doubt anyone will come in and "clean house" - especially not from a VC-funded startup. The (oft-subsidized) money is just too good to "leave on the table". The best we can hope for, are solid Right-to-repair laws that make DRM illegal/possible to bypass to at least allow custom firmware
I dunno, in the CUT space you've got the 3-point hitch, SSQA, hydraulic remotes and a bunch of other standards that make implements pretty interchangeable. Makes brand lock-in pretty difficult.
If I had the option for either a pure-electric or diesel-electric I would have seriously considered it. At least in our case the workload is a lot of hauling, intermittent groundwork and field mowing(<10ac) all of which would have fit really well.
Also all the JD DRM stuff only applies in the larger 100hp+ market. In the SCUT/CUT/Utility Tractor market there's a fairly robust set of companies(Kubota, LS, JD, Mahindra, Yanmar, etc).
CUT and SCUT in this context mean compact utility tractor and subcompact utility tractor. This article [0] has pictures and discusses differences between the two.
> I was on the Google homepage today on my iPhone and was getting popups advertising Chrome (on the homepage!) and then again in the search results advertising the Google app. I changed my default to DDG right then and there.
I just switched my search engine from DDG to StartPage because I was on a DDG results page and there was a pop-up advertising their app. Why does a search engine need a phone app? Seriously!
It’s a privacy focused browser. Considering all iOS browsers use the same rendering engine and most people are on DDG for privacy reasons, it might be worth considering.
Honestly, if you’re concerned about being tracked then you should ignore adds directly related to the webpage your on. Advertising yoga mats on a yoga website don’t take insight into you. Advertising yoga mats on a personal finance site after you visited the yoga webpage is another story.
Aside from using an ad blocker another thing I do to combat that is not re-using browser sessions. If I'm visiting a yoga website, I'll quit the browser and relaunch before I visit the personal finance website (especially then). My browser is configured to clear all history and site data when I quit, so I start with a clean blank slate. I quit/relaunch my browser dozens of times a day.
That’s both inefficient and ineffective vs browser fingerprinting, so you might want to just use a privacy focused browser behind a VPN to hide your IP address.
> AI is going to dramatically alter this competitive landscape and John Deere’s DRM is not going to to stop it.
I would love this state, but getting there is not simple. DRM is just one facet of it: companies selling machinery have worked on hardware for decades, making their systems physically robust and able to take lots of abuse. This raises the barrier to entry a lot. My 2c.
Startups with this mindset need not apply. The market for agricultural technology will always exist, and there's no reason a new player needs to "exit" instead of growing and sustaining the business.
See the comments about repair parts. These aren't cheap toys like smartphones and eyepads that are only meant to last a few years. Ag machinery are capital assets that should function for decades. The people buying this equipment are in it for the long haul, and anyone financing such a venture should be also.
If SV VC prefers scale-and-exit schemes, then it's not a good fit, but SV VC isn't the only source of capital.
> AI is going to dramatically alter this competitive landscape and John Deere’s DRM is not going to to stop it.
> Honestly, I love watching these companies drive nails into their own coffins.
There's trillions to be made before AI is needed. There's no AI problem
AI isn't magic beans, it's only sold that way. AI will have DRM. Can you use GPT-3?
John Deere can at any time remove the DRM so not sure why they will get nails in their coffins. They have the lead and can pivot at any time. If DRM is a killer...
It does seem though that the subscription economy and DRM was invented by Tech Companies and then copied by companies in other sectors. It seems highly likely the Electric Monarch will not be have right to repair support and will probably be acquired by one of the existing companies if the tech works, no?
The embedded promo video specifically mentioned they support the right to repair which was nice to see, and they include the service manual with the tractor for self repair purposes.
Of course, having that at launch is one thing, but future decisions could always be made by the bean counters leading to a locked down platform.
I use DDG as my default search engine, but I often have to go to google, because DDG isn't very good. It also doesn't help that searching for a local company will turn up their italian site because DDG doesn't use my location by default. Forget searching for local Danish news at all.
These threads have convinced me that how a person uses search is the biggest factor in whether they find DDG useful. By that I mean what type of things they search, how they craft their queries, and what they intend to do with the results.
There is a Mahindra dealership in Cumming, GA (exurb north of Atlanta). I noticed it over Thanksgiving on a drive up to the mountains. I've eyed their jeep in the past.
That said, lots of Kubota around these parts with KMA and KIE in the greater metro area.
Yes they are. I was told by a dealer that they are iterations of the old International Harvester tractors.
They look solid, like cast iron old style tractors.
Also they are relatively inexpensive compared to like John Deere.
All that being said comparing them to big John Deere tractors is like comparing a golf cart to pickup truck. They don't make the massive sized ones that are responsible for the bulk of production field activity.
I’ve tried to replace Google with both DDG and Bing. Both of their results are frankly terrible compared to Google’s. Google’s transition to its current hybrid Ask-Jeeves-style question/traditional query search engine, along with its inline answers above the result list both blow its competitors out of the water. Google also does a much better job of letting the user know the freshness or up-to-dateness of results with its inline last-modified/updated time stamps.
Both of those things have made it impossible for me to switch off of Google without immediately having problems quickly finding relevant, up-to-date information on the web. I do desperately want to switch, though.
I also especially despise AMP. It constantly breaks websites and itself, especially on iOS.
Personally I need to switch from ddg to Google maybe 0.1% of my searches, but at least for you you've managed to avoid Google 70% of the time, and it's not like adding a !g to do so takes more a milisecond.
How long ago did you try DDG? Years ago I had a similar experience to you, and switched back, but now DDG is much better for me, and I only try !g < 5% of the time, often with no luck there either.
DDG is fine for many types of queries. It also doesn't have many of (what I consider) the drawbacks of google's search: hostile ad positioning, AMP, autoscraped meta crap. Pretending you can't compare them is ridiculous.
This is a nice accomplishment, a step forward. But to some extends it's a step forward in a backwards system. It's a bit like the 'if cannibals start eating with forks, is it progress'-question.
Agriculture has become a industry of scale, but that might be it's undoing. It might be better to have an electric tractor doing the ploughing, but wouldn't it be even better to do less ploughing? With the invention of fertilizers (which isn't bad in itself) we where able to scale, but we needed more fertilizer, the soil became more barren and devoid of soil life with every iteration.
With heavier tractors we needed to lower the water level to not get stuck in the soft soils, the heavier tractors compacted the soils even more, so we needed heavier tractors to till en plough the soil again. Otherwise we couldn't force the same crop out of the soil year after year.
When we're only looking at the economic outcomes of the agronomic industry, we're forgetting a few things. I work in IT, I work at an environmental NGO, I have an interest in agroecology, organic farming and such but I often feel it's an 'either/or' kind of thing.
It's either locally sourced, community supported agriculture with a huge focus on soil restoration, resilience, crop rotation, diversity (polyculture? as opposite of monoculture) land access which attracts a specific crowd of people. Think leftist, anarchistic, community-oriented, spiritual-religious (which group I really like) but with a lot of menial/manual labor, a aversion of technology. Which can be explained by the centralistic nature of a lot of technology, and it often being focused on ‘vertical scaling’.
Or it’s hip startups with sensor tech, drones, AI-platforms predicting where you’ll have te best results and use for example ‘variable-rate seeding’ and program your fleet of heavy tractors to automate it all. We’ve automated quite a lot in ‘beef production’, but maybe we should do less of that and focus more on finding solutions to scale horizontally? (Like we might need less humongous farms producing one specific product but more smaller farms producing various products).
Minimum till and zero till agriculture is already a thing. There is still a great need for tractors. Having grown up on a farm, I continually see people with an idea of agriculture that is massively out of date. Technology and techniques advance as they do in any industry. It's not perfect, and some farms are better than others, but farmers are continually striving to improve both for economic and for environmental reasons.
" Think leftist, anarchistic, community-oriented, spiritual-religious (which group I really like) but with a lot of menial/manual labor, a aversion of technology"
I've seen quite some of that community supported agriculture.
Basically, machines were invented and put to work for a reason.
Farming a field used to be backbreaking and still is, if you work a big field. Most of the communities I've been, struggle a lot with even a small vegetable garden.
In other words: big words, but low outcome, with the result of having to buy the food in the end.
"Like we might need less humongous farms producing one specific product but more smaller farms producing various products"
So I agree on that, but also on a smaller, diverse farm, I would use at least a small tractor.
But here I see the advantage of autonomous electric tractors: they could be made quite small and rather have more of them.
But I would really not go back to horse or human drawn wheat harvesting. It is not efficient. Those who like to do so as a hobby, have plenty of opportunity, but don't expect to feed the world with this approach.
(Just a reminder that scaling is very important. A lot of people have problems procuring food, probably most people, actually. Solutions that work for rich people are just skipping the problem entirely.)
Next up: A semi-autonomous backhoe and dozer that can intelligently dig a level bottomed hole to specific cubic dimensions with equipment accessible ramp and all the waste material piled neatly on the sides in safe and sane manner and then can also load that same material into a waiting dump truck. Can also work in a swarm of two or three machines for more effective material handling. All controlled by a remote operator whose sole job is to hit the stop button if he spots anything on the camera that shouldn't be there, e.g. an underground power line that wasn't mapped. Was a fun project to work on.
Sounds like a task out of 'Surviving Mars' (and the kind of tech I expect to see up there for real in a decade or so, if a crewed expedition is ever to actually take place).
I invited the CEO to my farm and we had a chat about their plans. I am impressed that they launched exactly what he said that they would...it seems to me that they are the only ones in the Agrobotics market(and I know/have spoken to 15-17 of them worldwide) who can scale because they have a solid plan and can ramp up. And they will be affordable. They have ticked all the boxes that create the (manufacturing) bottlenecks for every other Agbot start up/company out there.
Granted it's not one of the behemoth's that I see in the Midwest. But I would see a 10 hour run time as a limitation. My friends who raise corn & beans have described their work as being like flying a small plane: Hours of boredom capped off at the ends by a few moments of sheer terror. The opportunities to plant and harvest are dictated by the weather, and when it's good, they want to be running their machines around the clock if possible. Bad weather is a mess -- it multiplies effort and breakdowns exponentially.
It's 40HP, this is a small farm or utility tractor. The big harvesters and monster tractors they use for tilling 100s of acres at a time are a whole other league.
+ Really good idea to make use of the electricity in other ways than just driving. (generators, lamps, etc.)
+ 10 hours covers up a good day in field.
- a lot of farms are away from electricity sources to charge and sometimes internet connection is non-existent. It is risky to leave a 50k machine on its own to do its job. And what to do if battery runs out on the field?
- how long does it take to recharge? A lot of farmers will not have fast charges on their farm.
> a lot of farms are away from electricity sources to charge
In the US? Not true. The vast majority of US farms have power for one simple reason, they irrigate. It'd be far too expensive to irrigate using a gas pump.
The exception MIGHT be dry farms, but those aren't as common as you might think. Further, most farms have shops for repairs which almost always have power for lights (and heat sometimes).
> And what to do if battery runs out on the field?
Simple, grab a gas generator, run to the tractor, and charge it up enough to hobble it to the shop and to a full charge. You might waste an hour running your generator, but that's really not that big of a deal. Many farmers already have those generators (welding is a big reason why).
A particularly ecologically focused farmer might buy some solar panels to do the same thing :).
> how long does it take to recharge? A lot of farmers will not have fast charges on their farm.
Doesn't really matter, it can charge overnight slowly. So long as the farm has access to 240V they likely can get it charge up in the 14 hours of downtime.
At $50k, this is a particularly cheap tractor as well. I'd suspect that farmers would buy 2 and completely sidestep the charging problem if they wanted to run for more than 10 hours.
Around Saskatchewan at least, a lot of farms only have a single phase provided by a single wire (!). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-wire_earth_return That gets converted by a pole transformer into the normal split-phase residential setup.
I just looked on Google Earth and measured it out; we're only about 1.1 miles from a 3-phase line, so it would be feasible, but likely pretty expensive, to get that run to us.
> - a lot of farms are away from electricity sources to charge
It's actually quite common for farms to have 3 phase power at the least. Modern farming is heavily industrialized. There's all sorts of dryers or blowers or other processing equipment to be run depending on the crop or livestock. Renewables, either self owned or leased land access are a big growth thing too. This means you can be in the boonies of western Kansas and yet be proximate to truly staggering amounts of intermittent generation.
> and sometimes internet connection is non-existent.
It's not great service, but sat internet is pervasive (and yes before the mob shows up starlink is likely to vastly improve this). The main thing this needs is connectivity between the unit and farmer, which is just local wireless.
> It is risky to leave a 50k machine on its own to do its job.
The price isn't a factor in any way I can think of. Any farm bigger than trivial will have several 100 thousand dollars if not millions worth of machinery parked out in the open, and tractor automation has been a big deal for a while now including examples of self driving for simple tasks.
> And what to do if battery runs out on the field?
Probably use the farm truck to haul the portable generator up to it to charge enough to get er back to the barn. Or call the neighbor and ask for a tow. Traditional tractors get stuck all the time. On the scale of problems farmers solve routinely this is very easy.
I think it's probably easy for the audience here to misunderstand what modern farming is like due to unfamiliarity. Farming is high tech now, and farmers are amazing problem solvers. But even historically that was true. Your idealized turn of the century farmer in the US knew how to operate and fix steam engines, pumps, do basic metalwork among many other things. Modern farmers are often skilled builders and fabricators as well.
I grew up on a farm so it was kind of funny reading "A lot of farms don't have access to electricity"
It's weird to read something like that. Every farm in my farming hometown had power nearby. Heck, you'll see power lines all across Idaho primarily for farmers running pumps. You simply don't get more rural than Idaho.
To put things into perspective, this house has power.
Also, farms tend to have three phase HV close by just because that is what is used by the transmission system. And 150v is not suitable for connecting remote properties due to voltage drp from resistance. So there is probably a transformer on a pole close by.
Not covered in the article, but in another demo the company says that they’re going to have a cart for bringing out new batteries and that you can change them out in the field. So if you need more than 10 hours, you can get 2 batteries and have it working 24/7 with minimal downtime.
Hi whizzkid - great questions! Our tractor provides real time alerts and can notify farm operators when the battery is low, if human or obstacle halts operation. Like jmtulloss mentioned, we do have a battery swap cart so you can swap out a battery with one person in under 10 minutes. Standard charge time at 220v is 4-5 hr.
You can find all the specs at monarchtractor.com
>and sometimes internet connection is non-existent.
Starlink might offer a bit of disruption there, particularly once its approved for mobile usage. They might ultimately have an opportunity to offer plans/terminals specifically for situations like this too, dedicated application devices that need small amounts of bandwidth in isolated areas.
I could see farm equipment as a great use case for swappable battery packs. There are loaders readily available for lifting them into place and they could be made easy to access as the equipment does not need to be compact.
Charging overnight + installing solar panels near the fields will solve problem. Of course it’s easier said than done, but changing processes will lead to the solution.
I’ve seen lawn mowers that do that. No solar charging, but it does cut grass in the dark. It’s actually pretty creepy to see the head light pop out from behind a corner.
That sounds awful from a noise perspective. I live across the street from a shopping center, and they tend to do all of their cleaning late at night, to avoid disturbing customers. No care at all for the sleep of neighbors when running leaf blowers at 11 PM.
Wow, and that is really impressive. I'm guessing that means the noise I typically associate with lawnmowers is more the engine than the blades/vacuum. Maybe that means it's time to find my finest nimby-hat and try to get a ban on two-stroke engines implemented here.
I have a 60-volt electric mower, and it's much quieter than the small engine powered mowers I grew up with. Most of the noise is definitely the engine.
It won't. This isn't a problem with autonomy technology, humidity goes up over night. Crops don't harvest as well, ttires lleave bbigger tracks, and other such things mean that farmers check moisture levels before doing any work.
I hope you didn't forget that electric tractors have batteries. You can do amazing things like charge the tractors during the day and then let them run until midnight because they are autonomous. However, it would be far more sensible to just install some wind turbines nearby.
Hey Glen, our tractor has an optional front end loader and has 2x the torque of tractors in our class. Would love to give you more details feel free to connect at info@monarchtractor.com
Nice! Are they going to spread out into other areas? Drilling rigs? Muckers? Something to replace the Sandvik rigs and fully automate drilling and blasting would be cool. They are already partially automated (pattern, depth) but require a human to operate. I think getting humans out of mines should reduce insurance costs and health risks.
They are actively testing self-driving combine harvesters in Russia, which makes perfect sense: large fields without too many random objects and mind numbing work for a human pilot.
We know electric drive trains are smaller and have more torque and allow very different architectures. But thinking about powered accessories I can see even more potential as placing an additional motor is way less material intensive than transmitting mechanical power.
This is quite an impressive machine coming out of a startup. I'm surprised by all the comments that expect them to go head to head with John Deere right out of the gate. This autonomous tractor is their entrance into the foyer of this Ag space. Sure it's not the Midwest behemoth that we have working the fields here in Ohio, but give them some years to get their tech in order to produce that. Bringing products to market is an expensive endeavor in time, money and resources. Personally, I've only dealt with software so I cannot imagine something of this nature. Good work with the Monarch and I'll be watching this space to see what you turn out.
This is fascinating but I'm surprised by how little progress we've made in automating farm work. There have been articles about how complicated it is for a computer to pick vegetables and fruits, and how nothing compares to the human hand. How long will it be before we see robots take over the field, displacing seasonal workers?
Between 1970 and 2013, the % of Americans working in agriculture dropped from 4.4 to 1.5. I’d say we have continued to make excellent progress, it’s just not as sexy as robot fruit pickers.
Yes. Almost everything in farming of major crops has been mechanized for years, if not decades. Fruit picking is still a problem, but it's slowly being cracked.
In the more advanced countries, cow milking and meat cutting is done by robots. The US is starting to catch up.[1] Advanced technology from New Zealand is finally reaching the US. The countries that don't have a supply of low-wage illegal immigrants are ahead in advanced ag technology.
Our farm purchased several New Zealand asparagus sorting machines back in the 90s and they were quite excellent. They would size the spears by laser, and could do color analysis as well. There was still a significant manual component, but half the workers could manage the same throughput. Sadly we no longer use these machines, as there is no market for growing asparagus in the US these days. Labor costs have caused all the acreage to move into Mexico.
I’m not sure I’d agree the US is overall behind in automation compared to other countries, but I think we probably do have automation in different places. Farm labor is certainly not cheap in California. Our blueberry pickers averaged about $23 an hour this year. I admit I have no context for what would be an acceptable rate in New Zealand or Europe, but I can’t imagine it’s much more than that.
It seems like a farm could increase their productivity by letting these run autonomously at night and continuing to use human drivers with their old equipment during the day.
Most farmers depend on their tractors for their livelihood. I reckon it'll be difficult to convince them to shift to electric ones that costs more and haven't got any long term reliability or efficiency reports. If anything, battery powered cars lose a lot of value as their battery capacities tend to decline over time. Also, unless their farm has heavily invested in solar power, they'd still have to use electricity from the grid. In a country like Australia most electricity is generated from coal. So that's not really helping the environment. The EV industry will only last as long as we don't figure out efficient production and transportation of Hydrogen. This is impressive use of ML though.
>t'll be difficult to convince them to shift to electric ones that costs more
This electric tractor markets itself as having twice the torque of an ICE tractor of a similar size. This means you don't need a bigger more expensive tractor.
>If anything, battery powered cars lose a lot of value as their battery capacities tend to decline over time.
EVs lose in value because of government subsidies. The list price is $30k but you only have to pay $25k because of subsidies. Nobody is going go buy your used EV for more than $25k because they can get a new one instead.
I can understand why I got downvoted. I might have come across as an EV hater. I'm not one. I do appreciate the technology and acknowledge that it's the future. I was pointing out some of the flaws. I don't argue against the torque figures and everyone knows that EVs have more torque. Even the base model Teslas are faster off the line compared to some of the ICE super cars. I'm hopeful that we generate electricity from more renewable sources than burning coal or gas, which defeats the whole purpose. Long charging times, range anxiety and battery longevity are real issues for customers. I don't know if durability of electric motors for these sort of applications haven been proven yet. Hydrogen based EVs can fix most of these problem. But only if we can create Hydrogen more efficiently.
I downvoted you because you are stating things as a fact that are not true, and have not been true for several years.
Modern EV batteries don't loose much of their capacity over time. You probably have your information from old Leafs.
Most people that actually drive EVs I've heard from do not have problems with long charging times. In fact, it only takes a couple of seconds to do most charges (the time it takes to plug it in in your garage). When they are travelling, it does take longer, but for most people it just means a slightly longer coffee break.
Coal is on its way out, and even with coal on the grid, it doesn't actually defeat the purpose, as it is still more efficient than small fossil engines not running at their optimal revs. And it is on its way out!
Hydrogen for cars is not going to happen, outside a few compliance cars. And you'll probably be surprised to learn that you can't fill up a hydrogen car as fast as a gas car.
The main problems holding EV cars back right now are lack of production capacity and upfront cost.
I don't mind if you downvote my comment. That's perfectly acceptable if you don't like my opinion. I respect that. No harm done there. :) It's true that everything I know about EVs are from personal experience of people I know. Believe it or not I'm happy that coal is on its way out. I wish it happened sooner.
My sister owned a Tesla model 3 in California for 3 years. She had a lot of fun in it and used it as a daily commute. You're right that in most cases a regular person won't have any problems. They had problems with long waiting times at superchargers at charging stations during long weekends and public holidays. Once they literally had to wait for hours just to get a chance to charge it. She did lose some battery capacity and sold it.
Hydrogen takes 4 to 5 minutes to fill up as opposed to 30 to 40 minutes for EV with supercharging. There is no comparison there. Also using a fast charger all the times can damage batteries. I'm not saying Hydrogen cars are practical now. They could be in future. I hope it is.
> using a fast charger all the times can damage batteries.
Is this actually true?
A Google search suggests that there are lots of studies showing that 25 fast charging cycles wrecks the battery but I have driven my Model S from Norway to the UK and back three times which is about 12 k km altogether and I used Tesla chargers exclusively on the journey. The practical range is about 300 km so I must have charged much more than 40 times in addition to all the times I have charged on journeys from Oslo to Trondheim and back. I haven't noticed any significant degradation in range.
But who actually does it on ordinary days when not doing a road trip? I have had that 2015 Model S for three years and I only use the Superchargers when I know that I will travel more than a couple of hundred kilometre in a day; otherwise I can keep the car charged at home (usually just to 80% unless I plan a long trip and I usually charge again before I get to 20%. Plugging in to an ordinary domestic socket every couple of days is enough and takes seconds.
To be honest I have read it online as well. I don't know if it's true. I reckon if the battery is designed to take fast charging all the time, it should be okay. Another thing that affects batteries is weather. In colder climates like Europe you're probably okay. We have had reports of batteries losing half their capacity due to heat in Australia. Those were all Nissan Leafs, which didn't have any active cooling in place. We don't have an extensive supercharger network either. You'll probably be okay in East coast region. Forget about charging your car, in some remote areas you're probably not gonna get petrol either. You can only get diesel. Seems like EU is far ahead in EV adoption than AU.
Europe varies wildly in uptake of EVs because incentives and infrastructure vary so much. Here in Norway 50% of new car sales are pure EV and there are chargers all over the place. Ten percent of cars in the country are now electric. A lot of petrol stations, particularly Circle K, are installing chargers too.
But in the UK the story is very different, 10% of new car sales and a total of less than 2% of cars are EVs.
The difference is probably down to the taxes on cars. Here in Norway expensive cars are doubly expensive because of progressive taxation on them from which EVs are exempted but in the UK you just get paid back a few thousand pounds by the state when you buy an EV. So here EVs are comparable in cost to ICE cars especially at the expensive end of the price range.
I would love to see something like this in the 20HP range with a front end loader. I love our 26HP Kubota, but would jump on electric in a heartbeat to get away from diesel machines.
Bet on bigger. Soil compaction is not linear with weight, but a heavy tractor has less tire tracks over a field. Thus the bigger the tractor the better for the soil.
Progress yes, but at a peak of 70hp it won't be plowing much more than a hobby garden.
Autonomous operation is all well and good but expect resistance. Look at how many farmers are injured by tractor equipment. They will rightly fear driverless tractors.
Uhm.....I'm pretty sure my family has been plowing fields(and I do mean fields, not hobby gardens) with our trusty old Ursus C330[0], making a whole 30 horse power. Not sure why 70hp would be a problem.
Yes. I've got a 28HP Kubota L-series, and have been contemplating upgrading to an M-series, but even 46 would probably set us for a good while and lots of farmers around here still find use for tractors 50+ years old that are smaller than that. Yes there are huge JDs beyond that, and the M-series tops out at 168 HP, but 70 HP still seems way beyond "hobby" level and I'm honestly and genuinely surprised to see it called that way. I mean sure I understand that in the midwest there are ginormous scale farms which are very important and a backbone of certain parts of our agriculture, but there are still plenty of farms in New England and other areas which are doing a few hundred acres or less, and experimenting with different kinds of farming (like paddy farms for rice) and intensity which alter the need for sheer power.
I don't have the slightest disdain for the megafarms, but it seems a bit blinders to consider them to be the only thing in existence too. Not that there couldn't be other issues with this, but 70 HP would be plenty useful at the right price and running cost. Calling it "hobby level" seems dismissive. Something kind of roughly equivalent like the M4-071 is at least $50k, I'm not sure how many hobbyists are dropping that kind of capital on a whim in the country. At $50-100k most families are going to be thinking about commercial ROI aren't they?
I think it depends on the kind of crops grown. Combines, grain bins, harvesters etc are a whole diff ball game when it comes to grain or corn on 1000+ acres for commodity crop farms
Oh, absolutely. There are major farms operating on a completely different scale for mass staple crops, and bless them because it's an efficient backbone to a lot of our core foods. But I don't think the continued existence of small farms is that obscure either is it? This is now 3 year old (2017) data [0], and the last few years have been hard. But it's not that out of date yet nor did it shift that much from 2012 [1], the overwhelming majority of the few million farms in America are small family owned operations with <$100k annual income. Average size just 450 or so acres and even that is skewed up by the few percent of enormous farms.
I guess I'm just kind of fascinated the first few comments on something like this would be about it being "hobbyist". Anything that could lower operating costs and externalities for small farms also deserves a bit more positive attention.
I am in agreement with everything you said. That’s why I divide Agtech into Large commodity acreages(single harvest) and small acreage for food and cash crops(a 100-200 acre crops growing multiple perishable fruits/vegetables/flowers throughout the year for local fresh consumption.
Automation is a necessity for the latter. The former is already hyper optimized w/mechanization.
Do you have a picture of the plow? I can't imagine it has more than say... three bottoms, if we're being generous. American farmers need more than that. This summer I had to really crank a 90hp tractor to pull a fairly small set of discs. 30hp is a lawnmower.
American fields are larger, so American farmers can take advantage of larger plows for better efficiency; however, larger plows require more power from the tractor.
American farms rarely plow in the traditional sense of a plow. No till is cheaper and better for the soil. It is tricky to get into, but it is not new.
Tilling is plenty common in the midwest, but in any case there are many other implements for which the same principle applies—bigger fields => bigger implements => more power.
This thing isn't meant to pull your 8-bottom plow attachment. It isn't the tractor a large-scale wheat or corn farmer is going to use to work the fields. Those tractors generate hundreds of horsepower and cost $250k.
But there is plenty of market for a small utility tractor, and the people using those aren't all hobby farmers. You don't use your massive 500 hp John Deere 9630 to stack hay bales or cultivate your row crops or power your auger or post driver.
Even if you have a 500 hp monster you'll still want a utility tractor. Right tool for the right job.
Autonomy is the game changer here. For $250K you can buy 5 of these little tractors and draw 5 12ft cultivators rather than a single 60 footer. Drive one manually to mark the headland and let the other 4 fill it in.
Joking around a little bit, but I'm kind of curious if the autonomy function would let me summon it when I get my truck stuck. Way nicer than having to walk a few miles to go get the tractor...
Before electric motors, factories used to have a single giant coal engine that used pulleys and crankshafts to distribute that power all across the factory. When electric motors became available, they replaced that single giant coal engine with a single giant electric motor.
They got their lunch eaten by people who built new factories with electric motors at every station, distributing the power using wire.
These tractors are autonomous, you can have multiple tractors per operator. 5 50hp tractors are probably cheaper and more capable and easier to run by a single operator than a single 250hp diesel monster.
>50hp tractors are probably cheaper and more capable and easier to run by a single operator than a single 250hp diesel monster.
5 50hp tractors are in no way cheaper than one 250. Soooo many more duplicated systems and stuff to maintain and repair. With the fleet of small tractors you have like 4x the number of hours tied up in service.
And before anyone say "hurr durr muh electric" I would advice you to google up some small machine manuals, look at the service intervals and see what you'll be doing the most of. Electric motors don't mean you can throw out your grease gun. The bulk of the hours on heavy equipment maintenance are spend on the business ends of the machine that take the abuse, attachments and drive-train, not engine/trans.
Both tractors I use have around 68hp on the engine, ~65hp on the PTO. Both have front loaders, one of them has an excavator on the back. I run them in the fields (mowing, turning, baling, etc.) and in the forest (logging, skidding, forwarding, etc.). Tractors do not need huge engines to be useable on the farm, this is only needed for 3-swathe mowers, 10-row ploughs, high-speed baler/wrappers etc.
There are a lot of operations that use midsized utility tractors extensively. This certainly won't replace a large tractor in wheat, hay, corn, and soy (plowing, disc, mowing, bailing, etc.) but can definitely replace utility tractors in orchard/vineyard spraying, CSA and organic farm style mixed-crop cultivation, etc. Think more California than Nebraska.
That makes no sense. You can get torque with lower gearing, therefore, if tractors only needed torque, then even the largest tractors could get by with a tiny engine given enough gearing. The problem is, farmers need tractors to move faster than .1 MPH, so that is why they have large engines that generate serious HP.
Torque is certainly important, which is why I was a bit surprised that they haven't released torque figures for this. Just the ever nebulous "twice as much as similar sized competitors"
There's a difference between peak horsepower output and continuous horsepower output. A normal passenger car might be able to put out 300 hp, but only for a short period of time before blowing the headgasket (or destroying the drive train). Diesel engine with gobs of torque or electric is going to produce that power at a lower speed and more efficiently, so it will be able to do it longer. Being able to put out 70hp nonstop for hours on end is nothing to be ashamed of.
A modern engine will run at full hp for extended periods, hundreds of hours. In many ways, lower power settings at lower rpms can be harder on engines than running flat out. In a family car, the cooling system would drop the ball long before anything as substantial as a head gasket. It would overheat long before any actual damage.
Hundreds of hours, perhaps. But not for the entire life of the engine. If a modern passenger car engine could put out 200 hp nonstop for years on end, every semi-truck manufacturer would be putting a BMW engine in it, instead of a huge cast iron Cummins. But I'm pretty sure you'd spin a bearing, or wear out the cylinder liner, or burn a valve.
If you tuned a semi engine for peak power the way automotive engines are they wouldn't last 400k either.
You can get automotive engines with similar power to weight or power to displacement numbers as semi truck engines. They're just normal automotive engines sold for industrial use.
Those were my thoughts as well. Around the size of a hobby tractor and it will be interesting to see if they can scale it up without losing endurance.
I also feel that 10 hours of battery time isn't sufficient outside of the hobby space. Especially when considering that it probably isn't road legal in autonomous mode.
But where’s the barrier to entry? AI is going to dramatically alter this competitive landscape and John Deere’s DRM is not going to to stop it.
Honestly, I love watching these companies drive nails into their own coffins.
I was on the Google homepage today on my iPhone and was getting popups advertising Chrome (on the homepage!) and then again in the search results advertising the Google app. I changed my default to DDG right then and there.
Seriously, it’s like 4 taps. Settings > Safari > Search Engine > DDG.
Don’t support these shitty companies and just watch them burn themselves to the ground. It might take 10 years but consumers ultimately will be the arbiter.