I've got some family that run a dairy farm, similar scale to yours. I don't speak for them, but: They're getting older, and have trouble finding help with the labour: it's (obviously) in a rural area, which has been depopulating for decades. They can't get the high schoolers out during haying season nearly as easily as they used to do. They rely on 40 year old cousins come up for a weekend here and there to help load some bales/wrap some silage. Their farm will likely go one of two ways:
- Shut when they retire (the land is too marginal for a big dairy to want it)
- Be taken over by the one cousin with interest.
If the latter, the labor pool is still an issue. The only way it would work out is if advanced tech comes in like what you've described. So the issue will affect farms your size/type, just not for another decade or two. Ignoring it as "nope, doesn't affect me!" seems just a little... short sighted to me. Thoughts?
The challenge of getting documented farm labor in rural areas is massive and we face that ourselves, and tractor software lock-in is neither a potential exacerbating factor nor a potential future solution to this problem. Not sure if I understand your question?
I'm picturing self-driving tractors as a labour-saver during the busiest time of year (haying). It would be a relatively simple technical problem to solve, and I could see manufacturers going for the market (and locking down the system at the same time - same as Tesla and Deere).
Automated anything for farms tends to work a lot better on plots of land that are large and flat as a pancake. I'm no autonomous vehicle expert but if you're haying irregularly shaped fields with topographical variation and ideosyncratic hazards (e.g., soft ground, ruts, random trees in fields, etc) then building an automated solution is a lot harder than an autopilot for a combine that works a bunch of perfectly flat, mile-by-mile plots in Nebraska.
If you're haying a small factory farm, driving the tractor is a small fraction of the labor; you're also moving the hay from fields to barn in a trailer and then stacking hay with either humans, a tractor, or a skid-steer. All of this might eventually get automated a la the recent news on Amazon factories, but we're probably (at least) a few years away from that.
> building an automated solution is a lot harder than an autopilot for a combine that works a bunch of perfectly flat, mile-by-mile plots in Nebraska
Absolutely, and I don't expect it to be a thing for a decade(s) - until after it's a solved issue on roads and/or the large, flat plots out west.
> If you're haying a small factory farm, driving the tractor is a small fraction of the labor
I agree. However, it's also (in my limited experience) the most weather dependent part - there's usually a short weather window to get it cut, dried, and baled - and having an extra set of (self-driving wheels) would be beneficial.
> All of this might eventually get automated a la the recent news on Amazon factories, but we're probably (at least) a few years away from that.
I said that two or three times at work just today, where something technically trivial (set a Linux sysctl tunable or adjust some application parameter) would be at the end of a long bureaucratic adventure and difficult convincing of people who set those parameters incorrectly earlier, and thus would have to admit that they were wrong. :)
What are you going to do when you need to replace them and there are no such option available anymore? (that would be the time that they come for you) Anyways, enjoy it while you can.
Right, the point is I don't have or need the kind of tractors that this is affecting, so it's not really an "enjoy it while you can" type situation in my case
My point is that your kind of tractor won't exist anymore if you don't fight for the farmers that are affected now... The manufacturer will eventually upgrade their base model so that you will also get screwed.
This sounds like scare-mongering to me. It's like saying I need to worry that I won't be able to work on my own car pretty soon because I'm not fighting to make sure people can work on their Teslas (which are infamous for being impossible to work on without factory tools). Sorry, I don't buy it: these problems just don't exist on brand-new Japanese cars. Just because there's one manufacturer out there that sucks and abuses its customers doesn't mean they're all going to start doing that soon; there is such a thing as competition. Stop buying from the crappy manufacturer and then you won't have to complain so much.
I've seen lots of these "farmers can't fix their tractors" articles, and without exception, they're ALL about John Deere. There are other farm equipment makers out there: Kubota and New Holland come to mind.
Here's another example: the political leadership in North Korea is really bad. There's huge human-rights violations there. I don't think I need to go into any great detail about just how awful North Korea is.
Do I need to stock up on firearms and start a militia, and then travel to NK to overthrow the leadership there, because there's a real chance of Kim Jong Un taking over the world?
