How Big Tech Ruined Farming
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- Опубліковано 28 вер 2024
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Writing by Sam Denby and Tristan Purdy
Editing by Alexander Williard
Animation led by Max Moser
Sound by Graham Haerther
Thumbnail by Simon Buckmaster
References
[1] www.cabidigita...
[2] prospect.org/p...
[3] spectrum.ieee....
[4] www.waps.net.a...
[5] careers.deere.... States&pid=137461981889&domain=johndeere.com&sort_by=relevance
Companies like John Deere are the reason we have to pass Right to Repair ASAP. Not being able to repair your smartphone, laptop or TV is one thing. Not being able to repair the machine that your livelihood depends on another.
reminder that it also happened for entire trains in poland
Not being able to repair your laptop IS many people’s livelihood. Large corporations might just buy new equipment and backup from the cloud/intranet, but not the little guy making it off his one laptop. individual people need to be able to fix at a time & cost that is feasible for them, no matter what equipment they need fixing.
Not just /your/ livelyhood. If enough of these "unrepairable" things fail at once, it could be devastating. And all just for a little more profits for the shareholders.
Reminds me of a story on hfy. Where humankind in the future has colonized the solar system but something went wrong and servers went down. I think earth went dark. The problems was certain machines did't work if it could't authenticate itself soo a lot of machines stopped working if not all of them. Try living on a asteroid without a oxygen system or food system... It's scary how far this will go without regulation. ( also humanity died)
I completely agree with @yeehawanarchist that we need the right to repair everything that we own. If we don't have that right, then it's not really ours, and we can get charged exorbitant amounts by the real owners of that item to get it fixed (if they allow it to be fixed at all).
DRM ruined farming. Not allowing a farmer to fix the equipment they "own".
This comment needs to be pinned.
and now BIG TECH know every inch of your land, you will own nothing and be happy!
Don't read my name
DRM is going to lead to disaster if there's a major supply chain disruption to replacement parts. Large amounts of the US's food supply will disappear and there's going to be a lot of hungry people.
Fuck John Deer, broken bearing caused by a known design fault? oops there goes $15,000. What's a warranty?
I've seen a huge uptick in the popularity of Kubota in North America over the last few years, particularly with small and medium sized farms, and it's obvious to see why.
The extremely obvious is the ability to repair your "own" equipment. Kubota is international, so they are not set on the "America ONLY" mindset like JD has been for a century
There also damn good machines that work when you need them to, good engineering still means something. And you can actually fix them yourself.
Kubota and Mahindra both: companies which sell to international markets where farms are smaller and farmers need to be able to repair their equipment in the field, quickly, with little outside help
Not to mention because the machines are gigantic, it's best to manufacture the machines in the USA
Was just on one for the first time today, they’re great man run so smooth and they’re so much simpler to figure out how to operate
John Deere: We're a tech company.
Everyone: No you're not.
John Deere: Our tractors require several subscriptions to run.
Everyone: Oh you ARE a tech company.
When it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and shits like a duck it must be a duck
You don’t need a single subscription to run the machine, just to use the precision ag technology. You’re a sheep
@@OFTENUSER Well they call it a deere, but it sure looks more like green shite than anything else.
All those Captchas we're solving every day, well that's how the See and Spray works, we solve it in real time, and they spray. lol jk
Sad thing is, from the large scale farmers I talked to, this tech is actually very useful and helpful to productivity. But JD ruined it.
You seriously underestimated the cost of the see and spray system. As a farm that just ordered a 612r with the camera spraying system I can tell you there isn't much change out of $1.2m
They're pretty far out of their depth already, so it's not surprising to see them be off by an order of magnitude here or there.
I am surprised that there's people who still bleed green out there though... John Deere absolutely hates their customers.
I am making foundry patterns for a tractor show....and we have many restrictions on what we can do with John Deere's likeness.
I also have worked at a company that built cabs for the construction side of John Deere.
I have learned so much, and I never was a farmer or came from a farm family. I now have my own welding/small manufacturing business and working on getting my ISO 9001 cert, because I will be working with big companies like JD.
I have grown to despise JD. As a capitalist business, they are genius. As a business owner with dignity, I see John Deere as part of the destruction of our economy.
@@Chihirolee3 So what's so genius about them? They are killing their own business. Being praised by your customers is how you keep your business going. If your customers hate you, you will lose your business.
Are you saying that the see and spray costs 1.2 million plus the tractor to install it on?
@@bhubbard6573 see and spray is only put onto John Deere sprayers, and to buy a new machine with it pre installed (120 foot boom) is just shy of 1.2
As a farmer whose family has ran Deere for 100+ years I must say this was very well done. We love Deere for their quality, reliability and resale value. We hate Deere because they are out of touch with the backbone of their customer base. Our local Deere dealer is empty of customers while full of tractors and combines. Their business model serves the biggest of customers first, almost cutting the medium to small farmers out completely. The profit first approach has alienated almost everybody, big farmers included. Instead of the dealer approaching the customer relationship as a relationship, they stab us in the back with overpriced parts, overpriced service and conflict as soon as an issue arises. They are also famous for poorly treating employee’s, which are our neighbours and friends. In the profit first attitude, they fired the trained staff then rehired new staff, trained them but cut the pay by 1/3. Not a good situation.
Beautifully said. My stance on John Deer has definitely moved to great products, horrible company. It's a real shame.
That's capitalism for you.
Also if "Ranch" implies you are raising animals for slaughter, you're committing slavery and mass murder for profit which is objectively ethically abhorrent. You must stop immediately.
The goal of John Deere is to destroy family farms and usher in corporate control of farming.
This is exactly what we've seen as our local dealers have been bought out by United Ag. Locations that used to have long tenured parts and sales guys now have a new crop of poorly trained employees who have no investment in the customer base. Especially for farms like us who run nothing but Sound Gard and New Gen era tractors
And yet you're still buying from them.
Buy from another manufacturer who doesn't take farmers for a ride.
John Deere has effectively turned their own products into the same servicing model as the ice cream machines at McD's. Key diff being that McD's franchises generally don't have to go out of business and close entirely whenever they have to wait literal weeks for the ice cream machine repair tech to finally show up and fix it.
You seen that episode too huh, you're right and I completely agree and remarked that same example in my comment.
Alot of companies do that BS McDs just being the most recognizable of the companies.
i have literally never heard of that happening. the stores just dont bother fixing those machines.
@@matthewbarabas3052 cause they don't own the machines, they rent them and they have to be serviced by a tech.
@@BobbyBrotworst No, they own the machines, its just the intentionally obfuscated error codes that make it impossible to diagnose. Then McD corporate pulled the scare tactic to torpedo the company that made the diagnostic tool.
@@matthewbarabas3052 They can't. Hidden menus, obfuscated error codes, and 100% of the manual that isn't "Is it plugged into the wall?" lists the 'fix' as "Call the support number, $500 for the call + $250/hour."
It's easy to understand why Kubota's appeal has skyrocketed in North America in recent years, especially among small and medium-sized farms.
Yup. We bought a Kubota, although we didn't know all that much about them at the time. Turns out, about 70% of ranchers around here run Kubota. Super reliable, easy to repair, good documentation and manuals, good parts availability. Why buy a John Deere?
@@paulmaxwell8851Deere is a fucking scam Ive never been a deere fan. I think theyre the mostly popular because they make the most merchandise, clowns.
Former Deere engineer. I left the company in 2021 when May became CEO and all this "Tech" company stuff really took off, as I felt there was no longer a place for me. I enjoyed my time with Deere &Company and I made a lot of money there, but there was no longer a place for me as an old-school gear, beam, truss, lever-loving mechanical engineer. Many of my peer group have left the company as well. While I have no ill will towards Deere as a company, I'm not a software or AI guy, I'm a internal combustion engine and hydraulic cylinder guy. I feel like, going forward Deere will outsource more and more of the mechanical aspects of their equipment, as they focus on "solutions".
Once you've practically monopolized an industry, selling intangible solutions rather than clever engineering/innovation is pretty much the most effective way to get income. There's no need to compete with anything other than refining and re-pitching an intangible process.
@@arizvisa John Deere has not monopolized ag tech; not at least for now. I think that ag tech needs all kinds of skills. Some things can be outsourced but there is a balancing act to it. If all understanding is outsourced, that is not good for the company. Suppose the company hires a consultant to help with a problem or just to review a design. The consultant does that and delivers a report of his findings but nobody in the company understands the findings because too much has been outsourced.
Maybe I should go work as an engineer for them and accidentally let schematics and code into the wild.
0:40 really is a competition of "how many corporate slogans can you fit into one sentence". It literally checks all the boxes: AI, vision, solutions, compute, machine learning, analytics etc...
I am suprised they didn't say nano machines to boot..
That will be next, but when?
Nano machines instead of pesticide! Tiny hunters that seek, and hunt pests! 5$ for an acre worth at AI, integrated, GPS, solutions!
Nano machines in the plants to stimulate growth, cure disease, and repair damaged cells!
Nano machines that create nano machines!
Buy your own robotic nano machines dispersal unit now!
No, but seriously. John Deere humanoid robots to replace immigrants will be a thing sooner than later.
So true. In college classes, many teachers and even the academic articles are searching for the latest leading terms. Its why keywords are placed in the synopsis. Although its valuable, sometimes they should reason or explain their use of those terms. I remember companies withholding profit information, that meant that shareholders could trust their previous gains but realize there was a decline incoming. So similar to these throwaway terms, it could apply as simply that they reply to customer complaints with AI or automated messages.
Insert Weird Al singing "Synergy"
As an engineer of 35 years, trendy buzzwords are a major red flag. Just tell us what it does FFS.
"AI Vision Solutions computed with machine learning and analytics."
How much investment money do you think I could get with that phrase alone?
The family lost their warranty because we made repairs on our tractor. If we waited for the technician it would have taken three weeks. The alternator had to be programmed to the tractor so we still had to wait.
Time to make a service expectation contract before buying another machine. If they won’t honor right to repair, the next step is liable for loss.
The alternator... had to be programmed... to the tractor!? How the unholy F does that shite even work. I'm starting to think the video didn't paint a dark enough picture of JD, that's insane.
@@mnxs the systems run on tight function margins, so the system needs to learn the specific variations of the part. It doesn’t need to be a cost add service, the onboard computer could just do it itself, but JD made it one because why not.
Funny how older tractors never had this issue. Almost like regulating alternator output is something that has been done for over a century
@@mnxs just remember it’s not only John Deere that does this. All the major manufacturers make repairs difficult
Deere has pushed small farmers almost completely out of the scene. Costs get unreasonable very quickly. Have watched many of my childhood friends have to bag the farming life in one way or another. Some end up working for the big neighbor that buys them out, some lease out to the big guy, but the story repeats itself all too often.
I don’t think that’s John Deere’s fault but shifts in the market and the rising costs of everything making farming more expensive rather than the rising costs in tractors and parts
And the quality of life and birth rates plumet. The big company owners will be remembered by history more hatedly that the traders of the triangle trade.
John Deere's policies have driven the prices of used older machinery way up.
Capitalism is pretty cool, huh?
That's not Deeres fault, it's simply the reality of economy of scale.
Food production is a solved issue and relatively easy.
Small farmers are simply inefficient in mass production.
You want to survive as a farmer? Find your niche.
(High quality/a product only a minority is interested in/try to become the supplier for local restaurants/...)
At my agricultural engineering faculty a company got to introduce us to their new software before the prof began his lecture. It was about tractor and driver management and seeing when and where the driver stops, when and where fertilizer or pesticide is sprayed etc, all on your phone.
This real life ad had been presented to us the year prior as well, with mostly quiet disgruntlement from us students. But this time one student got so pissed off that he stood up and actually yelled into the huge lecture hall about how we do not need companies to help us breath down a tractor drivers neck about the piss breaks he takes and that was all it took for every other student to let lose their frustration. The prof and the company reps looked seriously intimidated and concerned and in the end the company reps got (quite literally) yelled out of the lecture hall.
Didn't even manage to finish their talk, just took their stuff, a quick bye to the prof, and fled.
Afterwards we kept talking about it and how we didn't like precision farming and how pissed off we were about the repair bans, the dying out of small farms (particularly 2018, in Germany we had a drought and so many small farmers had to sell everything, still a tear jerker topic) etc.
Agriculture is very frustrating when you are in it. I could talk for hours about it, about how my indigenous home village thousands of km away is dying out, about the water shortages, the big ag companies outpricing everyone, produce rotting in the fields bc it is too expensive too harvest it and people do not come out to collect it. So many miseries, so many stories, and in the end city folk wont know a lick about it, but get to complain about everything. It's complicated to say the least, but there are so many good farmers out there doing their best.
John Deere are becoming the new Boeing....and that is going to be an unmitigated disaster.
John Deere had genius marketing at CES because they got the press without having to bring anything new to the table. A couple coworkers and I went to CES this year and were laughing. We work for a GNSS (GPS) company and have been automating tractors and construction equipment for about two decades. So, this is nothing new. Deere was just brilliant enough to take it to CES. CAT was also there the last couple of years showing off their tech.
The Apple of framing.
But why? "Consumer" Electronics Expo. Wonder what their marketing dept thought they would get out of that.
@@curtisbme It was all over mainstream news. It brought huge publicity. People thought they had incredible new technology. No one cares about farmers or construction workers. There are huge conventions all over the world dedicated to precision agriculture and machine control (agritechnica, ConExpo, Bauma, etc.) and no one cares. Go into a mainstream show with very influential people who have never seen this, and it makes national news. It was brilliant.
@@curtisbme to add to the last, John Deere isn’t the only company that does this. Basically every tractor company (and basically every construction equipment company) has an OEM solution and then there are tons of aftermarket solutions for people who don’t want the OEM solution. So, Deere really looked like they innovated a lot more than they did.
And that recent sensationalism gave us this video, while largely accurate, a bit ill-informed about how long this transition has been happening. I’m from one of those family farms. We run some Deere, some Case, and a lot of smaller implement manufacturers and their own 3rd party “solutions.” The key to success has never been to put all your eggs in one basket. Deere is trying to make that happen in some cases, but we're not gonna take it unless there's a clear advantage (across all operations and costs) to do so. As another note, the B roll in this video is hilariously inaccurate. For most of talking about overlap they were showing a combine (harvester), which is not one of the metrics they later mentioned when talking about overlap. Harvest by far has the least overlap because it's clearly visible where you have & haven't been. They really need to run these videos by some actual experts & farmers before publishing.
A big concern for farmers is that if JD can see your crop yields, they can change the cost or loan terms on the equipment. They also can apply leverage on farmers that already have loans with JD.
John Deere feels like a franchiser with the farms as the franchisees. The farmer pays their royalties to John Deere, is restricted to approved equipment and supplies, and regardless of whether they profit or loss, JD wins.
I worked for JD for several years, and I worked on the see-and-spray platform. I feel like the tech is solid and it seems like it provides value. I do not like how JD runs the business side though. I think they abuse the DMCA to prevent loading modified software on hardware that the user ostensibly owns (copyright and voiding warranties should be sufficient). I think they should contribute back much more to open source projects that they use. And they're definitely trying to be a Microsoft (e.g. locking in users) in the ag world.
What you’re referencing is not a Microsoft, at least Microsoft makes their software compatible with other companies hardware, it is an Apple. They limit your right to repair, they make it incredibly hard to use with other companies software AND HARDWARE, and they do everything in their path to make it so you need to go completely JD or there’s no point having any of their stuff. They make a monopolized ecosystem, not just a monopolized product.
The biggest problem is that big tech is a monopolistic system. There are no competitors to JD offering good programs; any time some competitor starts looking promising, JD simply buys them, and if anybody complains they say it'll be a net benefit to the consumer, the only antitrust test still standing thanks to the neoliberal shift of the 80s. (It used to be that trusts were regarded as inherently destructive, not just to the consumer, but to the workers, innovation and society at large, but the only test that courts and the FTC will apply now is whether there seems to be an immediate, short-term harm directly to consumers.)
Could antitrust laws prevent John Deere from further abusing its monopoly position?
@@zanewolf2509 Microsoft wishes it could.
@@zanewolf2509 Re: MS and compatibility, I'm thinking in the 90s when they became the de facto standard for a lot of things, and had "compatibility" but EEEed their way to functional incompatibility. Apple is worse but it's functionally the same.
In the end, the goal is to be a non-optional piece of the supply chain, then you can build a monopoly.
The original john deere: "farming is too fuckin hard"
2024 john deere: "farming is too fuckin easy"
2024 Farming is to frickin expensive.
THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR TALKING ABOUT RIGHT TO REPAIR!
This is so important. The industrial revolution is the most important thing to happen to humanity. . . And the very nature of it was studying other people's inventions and improving upon them. The nature of these founding companies keeping this technology proprietary is a hindrance to the scientific goal of improving society that all these inventors are supposed to have. Of course they're entitled to compensation, but at what specific cost compared to the handicap it creates?
There's a reason patents were severely time limited. The point was to give you a chance to be the _first_ to profit from your invention... not the _last_ . And even then, it's hilarious how almost completely that failed anyway.
@@LuaanTi So true!
I worked for a John Deere dealer in service back in 2018. The technology then was fascinating but also crippling, one sensor malfunction and your machine was going nowhere and dealer diagnostics were about the only way you could find out what was actually wrong. A dealer is almost guaranteed required for sure now on any high end equipment from Deere
50k new sprayer? Sign me up!
John Deere might have been the first tractor company to produce a GPS guidance system, but they certainly were certainly not the first to do it. In 1999 I started working for an Australian company that was steering tractors with 2cm accuracy and had already been doing so for several years using Canadian made GPS receivers.
They say solution because that is how B2B sales go. You don't sell products in B2B you sell solutions. Find a problem and sell a solution to that problem double points if that solution is also a subscription.
So its a worthless place one should never go to.
Subscription aka maintenance contract. You all are way behind on your trends. Businesses run on a different model than consumers hence why renting is nothing unusual.
@@brodriguez11000 And we consumers should boycont renting unless its something where renting doesnt harm us.
Triple points if you create the problem in the first place to sell that solution subscription for!
And this is why Open Source is so important. The company here is actually limiting your potential to be what they have devised.
Open Source isn't the answer. It's great, but it's always behind the major companies once they get moving. Subscription services, despite being fraught with problems, fixed the problem Open Source was meant to solve.
True, but OS and FOSS do have their pitfalls as well...
Open source is always the answer. That isn't even a debate. The amount of shared knowledge, security benefits, stability and overall quality of product is always better. The problem here is greed. Yes Linux has "flavors" but at its core it is all the same and a true sense of what it means to act as a group of people for the better of the people instead of fattening investors pockets with bs ware.
This is the exact same thing Apple and the right to repair are going through. If I don't have the right to repair then it is a lease of equipment.
A company's team of developers isn't any match for the entire world.
@@bOOmbOOmProd Open Source is ruled by the major companies.
You can claim it's out of their grip all you want, but the most popular open source products outside of Linux started as projects in Big Tech.
Most subscription services are fine. Unreal, Microsoft, and Google all offer decent services that outpace open source almost by decades.
Firefox started as a company project. OpenGL, Vulkan, and anything by Khronos started as a collaboration between major companies.
Linux and small development frameworks are the only exception, and Linux only survives in the business world due to its easy-to-manage low-latency on embedded devices. Guess what, your Android phone is Linux also run by a major company.
Perhaps it depends on how you define Open Source, but Open Source in the traditional sense really isn't the answer. A bad company will inevitably shoot themselves in the foot on the free market.
@@poetryflynn3712 what? The subscription services wouldn't exist without open source software.
Deere squeezed the consumer product division dealers years ago. Deere promised consumer product dealers to never sell products in Lowe’s and Home Depot’s across the country, I know I was there when President of the company said so at their corporate headquarters. What Deere says and what they really intend to do is two different things. A company in which has lost integrity and consumer trust, driven by only profit.
I worked for an electro - mechanical company and we sold a lot of electronics to farm equipment manufacturers. This was 2015-2020. I was surprised how advanced farming equipment had become. The use of gps, automated driving, apps, etc really made me realize farm equipment manufacturers were becoming (hybrid) tech companies
This is nonsensical.
Equipment is tech.
These distinctions only exist as a means of exploiting a disengaged investment class that buys/sells on sentiment.
Same with construction equipment. It's wild.
@@crackasaurus_rox9740yes, ur comment is nonsensical. By your logic, the equipment today is the same as it was 50 years ago and 150 years ago. Oh wait, today’s best equipment utilize computers, apps, gps, self driving mechanisms, etc. the modern equipment is full of tech
@@crackasaurus_rox9740 And more and more tech is what has lead to increase yields which means we can feed more people with less land. We (global) now produce more food than what people need - starvation is down tremendously and is mostly only occurring in places of war or where infrastructure is lacking and preventing food from arriving at affordable prices
@@swissfreekyup! Company I worked for did 90% of business in agricultural and construction equipment. I’m actually surprised there aren’t more major players doing both in high volumes. The insides (cabins) look very similar with similar equipment inside them. The major differences are the attachments but often those still have lots of similarities that it shouldn’t be a problem for one manufacturer to jump from one to the other industry. I’m guessing it’s mostly a history of marketing and name recognition in those industries that is a barrier to some from jumping to the other industry
When I was living in a small German town you could see how tractors were important to the farmers, there was lots of small old tractors, very well maintained, and they used them for everything, from farm work to towing, and with different modules to mount on the axle, I saw them with small sawmills connected to the engine to cut wood then just discconect it and drive away, very fascinating, and I didn't see a single modern tractor, just real old tractors that were real clean and well maintained :)
I work in the industry, while not a farmer but in the spare parts, accessories and other gear for farming industry. It's not just technology, it's also regulations and a side effect of reducing impact of farming on the environment. We see this across the western world. More regulation on pesticides etc. that force farmers to use high-tech solutions and GPS to ensure they comply. While this is beneficial for the environment it of course means the farmer needs better tools to comply. The problem is not the technology in itself, but the closed eco-systems of Deere and others. The closed eco-systems these companies create force farmers to stick with one brand, just like apple does. It also affects their ability to fix their machinery themselves increasing costs, that we the consumers ultimately pay for at the grocery stores. And the extra you pay for your food does not go to the farmers but to Deere etc.
All my tractors are old, I mean from the 60s and 70s the implements 80s and 90s and I'm kinda glad because it's good well built stuff and I can fix it myself. People complain about finding parts sometimes but if you look you can find almost anything. Then again I'm small and only plant around 40 acres of corn for silage so it's not a big deal. The rest of it is putting up hay.
I so miss those July days in the combine cab, listening to the Rockies on KOA, loading on the go, and making lines laser straight.
This isn’t just about the right to repair, is it. It’s also about the right to innovate and build and to choose our suppliers in the first place.
"Competitive gamers with their meta builds, minmaxing, and pay-to-win items take all the fun out of gaming."
Deere: 🥴
Farming is quickly going the way of all other industries; The big ones are taking over making it very hard for smaller farms to sustain themselves. Increasingly strict regulations and less affordable equipment on the market doesn't help either.
So what your saying is we are moving back to Tenant Farmers working for huge land barons, just like 100 years ago
Feudalism
Yep. Poultry production has pretty much been that way for quite a while now.
Excellent observation.
In the UK that is actually the case and many farmers, especially in the SW, are tenant farmers renting their farms over several generations. I've worked for a few and there's very little money in it.
Share croppers
As someone that grew up with a wheat field right behind my house, a John Deere dealership just down the road, and now works as a software engineer, this video hit me hard.
(The field was literally right there, there wasn’t even a fence between it and our yard.)
I grew up in one of the towns that he said is dying. I see it when I go back to visit. The next town over, where I went to school, has gone from about 650 people to about 550 in about ten years.
When I was in high school there were about 64 students. Off the top of my head I can think of about 10 where were farmer’s kids. Many would miss most of the first couple weeks of class to help during wheat harvest.
Knowing that the industry I work in and I find so fascinating (tech) is crushing the community I grew up in is devastating.
What happens when we automate farming to the point where the farmers have nothing left to do? Who will be left that remembers our roots, and has a connection to our Mother Earth like no one else has? What do California tech bros care about the people whose livelihood they’re destroying?
I’m all for new tech. Like I said, I work in the industry! But I do believe we can bring new tech to the table without crushing the family farm. Is growing one company’s profits really more important than people?
Tech and Robotics is replacing the low-skilled jobs. Sure new jobs are being made too, but they often require more advanced education. And that all to reduce the cost of the final product or get more margin.
Tech itself isn't the problem. It has been consumed by city finance traders. All the CEOs are marketing guys that answer to shareholders only. The come in and tear companies apart from the inside for short term profits.
The problem is finance has gotten out of hand again, going mad since the 80s, and now all the long term costs are mounting up. We'll end up with the 1920s style trust busting crack down again, it's already starting in the EU and even initial noise of it in the US.
Thank you for this comment. It's a tragedy and also a difficult question to grapple with.
Ker-ching. Move over peasants, we have shareholders who need new yachts.
Apple..... "Yes". -Indefinitely
JD Tractors can drive themselves for hundred of acers and plant a row in exactly the same place it did 5 years ago. Even remember how hard the soil is and plant whole fields of seed at precise depth...which is important for sprouting and harvest yields.
We need more companies providing problems instead of solutions, as their sales pitch.
eh, the "death of the family farm" has been a thing for as long as i've been alive, and probably for the entirety of the 20th century. big tech ain't new on this. we shouldn't romanticize mom and pop small farms; farming is brutal work and if lots of people really wanted to do it, generations of hard-working parents wouldn't have scrimped and saved to send their kids to school or to better opportunities off the farm (a phenomenon that continues all across the world). at a big picture, yields on mom and pop farms are going to be worse, and are not going to be adequate at feeding people at scale in a modern society.
corporate consolidation and the economic gutting of rural america are real concerns though, and i wish this otherwise well-produced video had focused even more on that as opposed to moments of misplaced--albeit self-acknowledged--nostalgia and big tech scapegoating.
Farm Aid was a thing 60 years ago. Today family farms and startups alike are vanishing like species in the rainforest, and land is either being consolidated, going fallow (not all bad), or being turned into housing developments.
family farms and corporate consolidation are your only two options. The "big picture modern society" you want ends in continued overpopulation and ultimately mass famine
oh great a malthusian
"eh, the "death of the family farm" has been a thing for as long as i've been alive" Yea thats exactly what has occured, it takes a lifetime to play out.
"and probably for the entirety of the 20th century." No, it was allright pre WW2.
"we shouldn't romanticize mom and pop small farms" We should. It is the only way to return to sutainable birthrates.
"farming is brutal work" Was, it isnt anymore.
"if lots of people really wanted to do it, generations of hard-working parents wouldn't have scrimped and saved to send their kids to school or to better opportunities off the farm" Parrents are not known to be able to predict the future. I hate cities with every ounce of my being and yet mother abandoned her family farm to ruin to go live in the city which I cant leave cos the skills and tools of farming where never passed down to me. Id have a better chance of becomming a youtuber to go back to live in a rural area than a farmer.
"a phenomenon that continues all across the world" Not Latvija where the rural urban plit has been 40% 60% for 30 years now.
"at a big picture, yields on mom and pop farms are going to be worse" So fearking what?
"and are not going to be adequate at feeding people at scale in a modern society." Yea they where. In the USSR 50% of food was produced on 1% of the land which was personal gardens. The big kolhozes with tens of times more land produced the other 50% of food cos nobody had any incentive to work on land they dont own to make food they wont eat or sell.
"corporate consolidation and the economic gutting of rural america are real concerns though" You literally just said it didnt. You didnt want families to own fields you wanted big companies to do so.
agreed. theres a *reason* its dying off. it just sounds so disgustingly inefficent nowadays to have family farms. that, and they are holding back the family from actual adequacy, let alone greatness.
16:36 did you just say "subscription"??? I can already see where this is going. Gross
There are plenty of Farms that run Case IH and Agco. Market forces work because we used to be Green. Our Farm is now mostly Case and Agco.
My family produced corn and soybeans from a farm that topped out around 2200 acres, for four generations. My dad and my uncles are probably going to be the last traditional farmers in the family. My brother and I don't have anything to do with it, and our cousins will likely be the end of our farming line. I remember talk about Starfire in the early 2000's when I was in gradeschool, and my grandfather was vehemently against it. We had no GPS or auto anything until about 2013, and at this point it's not really worth doing for as little land as the family manages. Those economies of scale offsetting upfront cost are real.
Efficiency is indeed a big hurdle but the biggest yet is logistics. No matter how cost efficient it is to grow crops in Iowa, it is still cost prohibitive to ship them to North Dakota. Until there is a breakthrough in the freight, the USA will remain in regional markets.
We got trains?
@@MagnumLoadedTractor You do know we've lost about 80% of our railways over the last 100 years because they weren't profitable, right? The conglomerates that gobbled up what's left aren't maintaining anything, just squeezing what money they can out of it. Won't be long before the next catastrophe that will make East Palestine, Ohio look like a picnic. At that, I dare you to find a rail line that runs from Iowa to North Dakota.
Farmers. 🤝 Computer Nerds
Right to Repair
22:20 Feudalism II: Electric Boogaloo
No, this is not feudalism. Feudalism was a system where a noble provided "state like services" in exchange for peasants work/money (mainly security, being a judge, tax collector etc. etc.). What is funny it is technology companies that created something I would describe as neofeudalism. I mean Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft etc. where you basically cannot not used their products otherwise you are excluded in some sense from the society and economy, so they starting to have some state like characteristics. Off course John Deere would love to be in the same position as aforementioned companies and he really tries to make it happen. But it won't happen because automation of agriculture is just too fast (which in long term may be detrimental to John Deere's bargaining power). And automation of agriculture is what affected towns and cities in the 19th century, where a lot of people had to change jobs. It will be just economically unfeasible to operate small farms. Operating farms will become more and more like running a business with people working on farms being just workers, but not owners. And less and less people will be needed to work on farms.
Someone doesn't understand what feudalism is.
@@Hadar1991 you’re sooooo smart. You definitely understood this was a joke because of your massively superior intellect. Thank you for educating me
This situation reminds me of the early transition into the Industrial Revolution, where consolidation of farmland by increasingly few large property owners drove a major element of the migration of people into British cities, providing plentiful cheap labor for rapid growth of factories. With technological changes to agriculture like automation , the number of hands needed is likely to plummet, and this may result in an acceleration to urbanization for job opportunities in other industries, largely services. This is to say nothing of the potential of urban vertical agriculture and lab-grown meat, which could vastly reduce the need for huge swathes of land.
In "Take back the Earth from the Machines", from the "Peasant Workshop", we see how destructive the mechanisation of food production has been.
It rests on ever more energy, supply chains, pollution, soil degradation, community disintegration, insect and biodiversity loss, water contamination, methane emissions, standardisation of food optimized for machine harvesting and trasport instead of taste and nutrition.
In contrast, we could grow a lot more food per acre in exchange for more human-time, restoring soil and biodiversity, if we switched to local permaculture.
We'll have no choice anyway once the energy is more expensive or starts to get more scarce, once the topsoil erodes completely, once there's no more water that can be pumped.
What's so interesting is that John Steinbeck delves into this through his novel _Grapes of Wrath_ . Especially the fact that instead of human hands plowing the fields and finding pride in their work, the lifeless machines take over.
The first rule of automation is that historical automation was good and boosted productivity and freed us from labor, but new automation is scary and will destroy jobs and only benefit big corporations.
People today make the same arguments as ludites, but youd never see them argue that we should go back to spinning wheels.
We got too many mouths to feed to be fkin around with plows now.
Every day, I grow to despise modern technology more and more.
When I was a teenager, I used to dream about having a high tech house with smart interconnected devices everywhere. But as I use modern smart tech more and more, and learn more and more about big tech under capitalism, my dream shifts further away from that and closer to a small cottage in a mountain range by a lake with a little vegetable garden and as little tech as possible.
I've had so many Bluetooth earphones break, garbage software for physical hardware and phones that break after a couple years while my medicore 8 year old Bluetooth speaker still works, my dumb technology just plugs in and functions and my iPhone se still chugs along, that I've come to realise that after around 2015, tech stopped getting better and started going 1 step forward, 2 steps secretly back. Products that are designed to stop working after a certain amount of time became the norm, and new useful features cropped up less and less.
John Deere was once a force for good, the good they have done cannot be overstated, and its what allowed them to gain their current monopolistic position
But now that they have achieved dominance and are spending significant resources on maintaining it, they have become a net negative for humanity. Their unassailable position cannot be fixed by the free market, and government intervention is required
Right to repair and modify objects is necessary for a start. And while subscription fees for things are an unfortunate necessity in some cases, corporations must be forced - in the case of nonpayment- to lock out only remotely maintained features that cost them money, not things that only run locally, and/or use publicly available services. For a start, their autotrac needs to have a free mode that uses public gps.
To combat this, we need standards (like usb-c) for farming equipment such that any tractor can use any equipment from any vendor.
Want a new nav system. Plugin a new nav system.
Want a new sprayer, plug that in too
As it happens Apple was pretty stubborn about not wanting to put USB-C ports on their phones even though they played a major part in developing the standard. Market leaders generally don't want to allow any more compatibility than strictly necessary. I suspect JD would fight tooth and nail to preserve their walled garden.
That's... not really what this is about. This is about things like not selling implements or parts like tires or combine blades outside of their system, which isn't sensible. Motors and proprietary software this makes sense for, but this isn't as simple as "plug in a new nav unit" or "re tumble your key lock on your tractor" this is actually stopping people from being able to do with their tools what they used to do.
I mean you pretty much can. You might need to have an adapter harness with the different connectors but that's not real difficult. The important part ISObus or CANbus communcation is standardized and can be looked up by anyone. Companies can have proprietary beyond that but you can 100% take a John Deere nav system and use it on a Fendt tractor. It's not perfect but certainly not impossible
Good thing your using usb-c, I would have to be up at 4am trying to flip the equipment over trying to get it plugged in 🙃
@@phoenix5193 it is a hack instead of a standard.
I a software developer, we make plenty of things "compatible" even tho they where never standardized or documented.
The difference is. Do you need to hack it together, or is it well documented and easily implimentable.
Diagnostic tools and software should be widely distributed and easy to aquire
John Deere is a joke ever since they've been on this tech kick. They're too expensive and take forever to get fixed. Where I live everyone used to buy Deere's but now most i mostly see Kubota for utility and Case for row crops.
"If they hand over the keys, their machines might get used and altered in ways they shouldnt".
I mean yeah, but also, they bought the machine and own it. They should be able to do whatever they want with it...
17:54 A farmer is out of their depth, is like saying a repair tech can't fix an I phone. This is on the same level as pumping your own gas only to find you need a special code from XYZ
19:45 I thought we already produce more than needed. The problem is with wasting what we produce and not distributing it correctly to those that need it
19:35 It's hard for me to believe agricultural land is peaking... Also a lot of food is thrown away which could easily be used if there were more people.
It's even decreasing because of desertification.
At 16:00 you say that to buy a newer sprayer to equip see and spray to your own sprayer it would cost 50,000. That is a joke to buy a 5-7 year old used sprayer it would cost about 180,000 to 230,000 because you need to buy a John Deere sprayer for it to work and as far as I know you need the carbon fiber boom on it as well.
And to buy a brand new sprayer with the tech on it from factory is north of 750,000
If buying isn't owning, then pirating isn't stealing
If this is really reducing waste and improving application efficiency so much...this sounds like a good argument for shorting fertilizer companies over the next few years.
Ah capitalism, where every sector eventually ends up working for the richest 1%.
When a CEO says "We quickly became a leading company in Robotics and AI" ... be prepared for smoke selling
There is a complication. See & Spray need accuracy is supposedly not higher than 99%. For grains, the accuracy has to be higher than even six sigma. The problem is data gathering and training is hard because you can only plant one/two crop a year over a given area. You cannot use video training because there is no manual version of it. Its not as hard as self driving but its hard if you have to get the edge cases out to say 1 in a hundred thousand or 1 in a million.
It feels like the music in your videos has become increasingly louder. It's quite distracting. Your videos are great but I had to drop out 3 mins in because I wasn't listening to a word. Also the epic music doesn't really fit the context many times. This could be improved! Cheers.
John Deere is one of the biggest sponsors of scholastic robotics competitions
The presupposition behind this whole video is that a machine visual interface can 'know' what a plant needs, misses the whole point of what plants really need- which is an intact soil ecology, one that is destroyed by plowing, harrowing, spraying with poisons and adding salts called fertaliser to the dirt they plant into. I don't call what they do farming in soil, as soil is alive, unlike the wasteland that is created by modern farming practices.
Open source.
What's more disgusting is that this indirectly raises the prices of food. If it costs more money for a farmer to repair his equipment, then that added cost is going to have to be paid for downstream. That means you.
This is one reason why i want to be a no till farmer on only 1-3 acres of land. Its very profitable if you do it sustainably and with conservational practices. I'll be ahead of lots of farmers when it comes to it.
The defining feature of a tech company is offshoring manufacturing. During recent solar storm created auroras, gps tractor guidance was unusable for canadian and northern US farms.
(Plowing turns out to be an unsustainable method - the solution is clearly to plow faster)
@21:21 "A ton of food" you killed me.
I just want to correct sam on 1 thing. farmers are incredibly tech savvy. many of them could fix their equipment or take it to a friend to fix it for them if only John Deere didn't put software locks.
They also prevent some of their providers from selling parts.
Big tech. Corporations. Government.
All have contributed to the destruction of healthy, sustainable farming.
And we, as a society, let them do it.
This is on all of us.
Monsanto much?
Don't even mention those Disney villans
I’m watching this video while I run the John Deere see and spray
In almost every clip shown of planting corn, the row marker arms are being used. This indicates that a guidance system isn't being used because the row markers are a visual aid to line up the next pass. RTK GPS makes these row markers unnecessary.
Any chances of you doing another season of Extremities? Loved that show!
It's always hilarious watching non-farmers talk about agriculture. Strong mary's room vibes with this one.
John Deere: Guys, our tractors have AI.
Farmers: But you doubled the price.
John Deere: Yes, we told you it has AI.
Farmers: What does the AI do?
John Deere: Double the price.
I Was briefly phone 'tech support' for Massey's robot tractors. They gave us the manual and gave us a ride in one for about 10 minutes.
So happy when I got canned.
The loss of autonomous farms to big absent landowners cripples the remains of the Roman Empire to this day
You said a new sprayer costs $50k 😭😂😂 try $700k.
Honestly i can forsee 1 of 2 things happening or possibly both. 1. Deere becomes what peterbilt is to semi's (the top of the line in farm equipment in the case of Deere) and they lose ground to Kubota and competitors that dont do planned obsolescence. Or 2. The government institutes right to repair laws.
Private equity has made short term profit margins the objective.
Management gets the bonuses. The stock price goes up and private equity dumps the stock.
Short termism is killing once great American companies.
It is exactly what they did to Boeing.
John Deer helped farmers to destroy the soil lol. Look how dry and sandy the soil is, no nutrient at all. Without fertilizer and pesticides, nothing grows on this bare land.
Embrace technology to try to make your life easier; teach the machine how to do your job better than you ever could; be replaced by that technology you helped teach
21:21 more like 50,000 tons
(it's about 5 tons per acre in the most productive regions of the US I think)
Way more than 50 grand for a new sprayer lol. A golf course spray along rig can run you a 100k or more!
It's access to protocols and data dictionaries that prevents you from repairing this trash, it's either CAN, ETHERCAT or just plain ETHERNET the rest is data and prtocols.
@20:28 uh, no. Even the B-roll you showed contradicts that statement. Corn and soy are grown packed tightly into rows with just enough gap for the plant to grow and no more.
5:32 The tractor shown is an Allis Chalmers model WC.
Here is a novel idea to consider, quit wasting food. " In the United States, people waste 92 billion pounds of food annually, equal to 145 billion meals. They throw away over $473 billion worth of food annually. Shockingly, they waste 38% of all the food in America." ( Sometimes we can't see the forest because of the trees in the way )
I feel this hard, my family has been farming starting with my great grandpa. Luckily in small towns like ours dealers are good and we aren’t exactly a poor community, a.k.a. We Farmers do make enough money for this
So there's a battle for some percentage points in field utiliziation. At the same time, each animal calorie costs at least 4 plant calories. By just cutting back on meat consumption, world food supply would cease to be a point in putting every more pressure on yet another sector.
Wait until Jeremy and Caleb gets to know this shit
having recently gotten into farm sim 22 i wondered why Deere was so heavily featured. The oof feeling of overlap is real. I remember the 'high tech' looking combines harvesting family ranch fields in the 90's. Things are wild now a single operator can do a lot more. Savings are important but so are consumer rights and the need to prevent monopolies. For this reason Im very much anti vertical integration going out of my way not to use one company for my needs.
Fascinating tech but depressing conclusion.
Thanks for one more outstanding documentary, Sam.
This is just the CEO not wanting to be a CEO of farm and construction equipment supplier and instead wants to be the great highly innovative CEO of a tech company even though in reality nothing has changed.
A lot of CEOs are like this.
with farming and trucking being automated congress NEEDS to get a UBI in place. something like 40% of the work force of america are in those 2 industries alone and if that collapses we're more than fucked
We need to return to the old ways, return to ensuring the harvest is plentiful in the coming season through sacrifice and human poop.
how many farmers were at the intervention ? testing the kiosk machines and asking questions? i want to know .