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.
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).
As a former Deere engineer, Deere's old stance of doing things right has changed to doing things for maximum profit, and John May is one of the biggest indicators of that. Layoffs are happening in both manufacturing and engineering to increase profit margins, production lines are being moved offshore, and technical leaders that made Deere the company it is today are being fired, in the interest of cutting costs. There is no longer anything special about Deere as a company, and in a decade there will be nothing special about their machinery. As a side note, Deere is currently in a hiring freeze. All of those job listings will never be filled, at least in the short-term. In fact, Deere is actively trying to reduce headcount in their tech department, through enforcing return to office policies. They are planning on a 2% reduction in headcount.
While I didn't know all of this, I knew a little bit of it and I'm glad I didn't invest in JD. Relying on brand power and market share is a proven way to loose everything, in the long run
@@lelagrangeeffectphysics4120 Not exactly. CNH is currently doing about the same things and there's kinda the big 3 in farming so if AGCO is also doing it that's just the way it is and everyone has to deal with it
19:48 it’s not that farmers don’t know how to fix the tech side of the machine. It’s that we legally don’t have access to the tools to do so. The big tractor companies take the Apple route with software where they don’t sell you the software needed to fix something and force you to call a manufacturer technician out. On problem we run into at least once a year with our newer ish combine is if the engineer cuts off after chocking the machine there is a chance the computer will get locked into a factory degen mode. For this we have to call a guy out who then hooks up a laptop with company software, presses a few buttons and is done. Takes 5-10 minutes to fix, but because Case won’t let us have that software we have to wait at least 3 hrs maybe even till the next day for someone to come fix it.
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.
In South Africa many of the farmers simply refuse to buy this hi-tech equipment. Instead they'll own a basic tractor and sign short-term leases for the fancy equipment only at the times they really need it (usually at planting and harvesting time). These lease contracts usually include the operator who has been trained by, and works directly for, the manufacturer. This system works well because if the fancy stuff breaks down then the manufacturer has to get it fixed while supplying the farmer with a spare. It costs the farmer slightly more, but avoids all the costs and hassles of owning this stuff.
Consider buying from China, they have better equipment that does not capture farmers. They have cheaper drone systems that don’t require contracts or bound to manufacturer repair harassment.
People tend to check out all available options before buying tractors. No one is going to buy a brand new tractor from a new brand with no record to its name and no proven track record. A tractor isn't just a car with big wheels, it has a lot of very complex hydraulics, electronics, gearboxes, etc.
@@sheeplord4976 I'm no farmer, but it's like people think these pieces of equipment are just big riding lawnmowers. The implements to harvest soybeans and corn, the machenary that separates cotton as its harvested are really complex and complicated. Margins are already thin, Just "go lease a new tractor" at an increased price isn't a good business decision. If you're in a pinch and you HAVE to plant or harvest, you have to do whats necessary. But leasing season over season, I don't see how that's profitable.
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.
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
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
It cost me $1,500 to activate Auto steering one time on a tractors built in screen. If I wanted to use a removable screen to move tractor to tractor it cost me $1,500 every single year to use that screen. They know how to squeeze every penny out of you. Other companies don't charge a fraction of this and don't hit you constantly with activation costs and fees
It’s for the same reason college costs so much now, government subsidies. The government subsides farmers big time so Deere and other companies make everything more expensive to increase profit margins.
@@ldib7798 Are you kidding so subsidized collages caused John Deere to be so greedy in monthly fees and not allowed to work on your OWN tractor. As for government subsidies to farming is okay in America. Or maybe government subsidies are making JD lay off in America and move operations to Mexico. After the best profits ever. John Deere sucks.
im sorry but activation fee's are rediculous. I can understand the not letting farmers fuck with there data because it could lead to major errors in the code and then they might get sued when the crop fails but Activation cost is just saying you have to pay us to turn this on. put it in any other context, you have to pay me to let you use the faucet and get water, you have to pay me to turn the lights on in your home. you have to pay me to turn the cooker on.
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?
It wasn't that long ago that a 1400 acre hop farm I serviced as a consultant tried out New Holland. They were too fed up with Deere to give them a second chance from the previous growing season. Halfway through the growing season brand new Kubotas started showing up. And they've stuck with Kubota. NH is junk, Deere is expensive and doesn't run like it used to. Kubota isn't perfect by any means but at least they work most of the time. The farmers with money run orange, the broke ones are blue, and the ones that run green either have more money than sense or they're running old green that'll probably outlive them.
Yep, my dad owns a John Deere and two other tractors one of which is Kubota which we use the most, it has needed a few repairs but it works well and is super reliable. The John Deere on the other hand still needs repairing and has been sitting there for 1/3 of the time we’ve had it.
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.
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.
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
all I am seeing is it's a company which capitalized on market and revolutionized farming and helped farmer make stupidly huge profits and easy farming. but now people calling same company evil. typical american thing. if you don't like their equipment then just don't buy itt. it's that simple. you want to use their equipment since they are the best but also then call them evil after signing terms of use with them.
@@internetperson3436 My man gotta read a bit more. But agree with you, everything gradually becoming a service/solution will eventually lead us to become technopeasants.
My Dad retired from a local John Deere dealer in 2007 after 50 years with the dealer as a mechanic. He didn't retire due to age or health reasons. The local dealers were getting sold out and combined into regional dealers. My Dad saw the writing on the wall and jumped ship a month before the dealership was combined with another and relocated over an hour's drive farther away. He would be PO'd if he were still alive to see what has become of John Deere now.
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.
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.
18:15 "JD has found itself in the middle of a battle over the right to repair" wow go easy on the euphemisms Wendover. They've declared war on people being able to repair the equipment they've bought.
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.
@@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."
Fun fact: John Deere's diagnostic software was apparently made with some open source components which might unravel their anti-consumer practices. Meanwhile Mack/Volvo/etc software is being reverse engineered by some nerds. Basically these companies treated software as an afterthought, hence why stuff like Tech Tool has horrid UX and is only available on heavily locked down configurations of Windows. So the laptop is constantly updating slowly and even when it works you're waiting forever while a highly unoptimized program communicates on J1939.
@@daisy9181 My friend's Dad who was a master mechanic for 25 years and got into programming as a hobby wound up in tech. (I'm on a similar path atm) As a SWE he points out that most people don't understand the diagnostic method and KISS. He's tried to retire and the company just throws a fat pay increases at him, even when he's like "you've made me into a legacy maintainer" and he expects them to jump onto some new boxed solution or not be ready when he does retire, stepping on a tech debt landmine either way.
@@daisy9181 Talented coders need to incorporate the ability to sabotage their software at the coder’s will. That way if the company tries to fire them just before release, they can simply trigger the sabotage mechanism and take their hard work with them.
@@megamanx466 No they are not implying a backdoor, there are methods of disabling code without having access to it (Hint: it disables itself if you don't have access)
I live in France and I remember, 20 years ago, most farmers drove mid-sized orange Renault tractors, the other half had red Massey-Ferguson, blue New Holland, Claas, etc ... Now 80% of tractors I see are big green and yellow John Deere with agressive faces. I don't know how they did that but it's becoming scary
The farms I used to help out on back in those days had similar tractors, Masseys etc.. The ones that could afford John Deeres bought them because they had things like stereos, heaters, air con, really comfy seats and what-not. I don't know how comfortable those tractors were in France back then but I do recall plenty of people here in the U.K. opting to by JD because of that extra comfort factor. Plenty of the rear arm controls seemed easier to use on JDs of that era as well. Just more modern, in short. The 3350 at one of the farms in my home village was pimp compared to anything else.
Newer sprayers BTW aren't anywhere close to $50K, try $500K!! A 2024 408R sprayer with all the bells and whistles including "see and spray" is gonna be at least $750K!! Plus once see and spray becomes prolific and everyone has it, chemical companies will raise the cost of spray, and it'll work out to roughly the same cost to the farmer anyways.
Farmers must get together and begin switching to hemp from GMO cotton, corn, and soy. Not as much pesticide spraying, less fertilizer. Less water. Then processing facilities can bring jobs. The seed cake waste from oil production, and the leaves can both be fed to livestock.
see-and-spray is not going to increase the cost of chemicals, at least the generic ones. But in advanced systems, it can permit usage of cheaper, more broad spectrum chemicals. But I agree, these prices are on the insane side. The backbone of the sprayer is the same. The tech is cheap, thanks to smartphones. Actual cost is probably 10-20% of the sticker price.
@hardopinions well fertilizer giants base their price on current crop yield and market prices. Whenever farmers earn more, they increase the price regardless of markets. Here in Europe subsidies subsidies increase when you use rtk section control spraying, sprayer manufacterers know this and make it a marketing arguement to increase the cost above what would be viable without aid.
Just like any other commodity or product. Prices aren't set by producers and businesses. They are set by supply and demand. Quit being a commu ist useful idiot@@fermewilmotsagriculturebio3434
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.
I'm a farmer who is also a computer geek. Suffice to say, you don't need this equipment to turn a profit, and the expense of this equipment is grossly understated. A person with 4500 acres would not have a 50k pull behind sprayer, they would have a self propelled sprayer. A 2023 612R like in the video, used but low hours, is 500k. Maybe they could find an older self propelled sprayer with higher hours for 50k, but at 4500 acres, spending 100k wouldn't be unreasonable. I have a 1966 JD 4020 tractor, a late 70's-early 80's JD 7000 planter(with upgrades), and an early 80's JD 6620 SideHill combine, good enough for me. I get one of the cleanest samples (a small amount of grain that has been harvested with a combine) of anyone around(not my opinion, someone else), and can have much less loss in the field after harvest than someone who is directly across the property line from me (not my opinion, someone else). You can have all the sensors in the world, some of the best tools are your senses. Like last year after a corn head rebuild, I noticed I was having shatter loss at the head (corn stalk was being pulled too quickly through the stalk rolls, so when the ear detached, it would break kernels off and they would fly out of the head). So I slowed the head speed down. When you start harvesting a field of corn, you go a little ways, and look at the residue output of the combine. Are the cobs fully threshed, are they fully threshed but broken, are there kernels on the ground, how many in a sq.ft.? Keep adjusting everything until the harvest loss on the ground and "trash" level in the grain is acceptable.
Can't say it better. All those luxuries are confort, all in all, it's what grows in the field (and that you can get out of the field) that makes your money. I was looking at the john deere precision system a decade ago and how it'd cost me an yearly wage, not to mention the subscription, so I decided to keep going my own ways with no autosteering. But last year I found an non expensive kit you could install yourself, while profiting from an open source RTK project, decided to build both and I now have a centimeter precise autosteering with no subscription and that cost me 4k only. The greater benefit is indeed to not overlap, but half the reason is to steer straight and clean while seeding. It remains a luxury, but I wouldn't do without now (unless they charged me as much as JD for some reason). My father taught me that all the money I don't give out will be my money in the end (less the taxes....), so to make a good compromise between what I need and what I want. The oldest tractor we have is a JD4040 from 1978 that's self steering now, it's amazing that the GPS wasn't even a thing when this tractor was designed back then....
You americans are 30 years behind concerning farming anyways. You still farm like the sowjets did. Look at us Germans. We manage to get one of the highest yields in the world while upholding biodiversity. Thats how its done.
I am not familiar with farm machinery, but I have used Beckhoff Automation industrial computers to control a few complicated industrial machines. Beckhoff computers are modular and made up of a series of plug-in slices where each slice is designed for a particular function on the machine. It can use an LCD screen that can be used for controlling different operations on the machine. The computer is built for industrial environments. I believe that if say a couple of farmers were to contact them to use their controls for use in their machines Beckhoff would gladly help them with the programing for free. They have no special pricing for volume orders all orders have the same pricing. If they are successful there is a big market for them on all other types of machines. Check their site out to learn more.
you know, I'm wondering when there isn't all this older but still great equipment is gone and the only choices we have are a used 6145R or a 7210R. Those are great tractors but would be a horrible fit for my farm. They could squeeze us out just by letting time run the older equipment out and leaving just huge equipment to buy
I cannot think of another small business that takes on more debt in proportion to its profit than a farm. To add to that a lot of these are ran by just a family with little if any hired help. Farming is tough.
My dad doesn't grow anything but he has livestock, and he has farmer friends that he's said the same thing about. Think he told me he'd only make about 5k a year (in revenue) if it wasn't for the subsidies. And its a pain on tax season
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.
My Grandfather is a farmer and my family has many ties to farming communities. John Deere has alienated a lot of loyal customers with its practices on repair. Tractors aren’t McDonalds Ice Cream Machines. Those farmers need to either be able to repair it themselves, or take it to a local shop. They can’t afford to wait for a John Deere tech to come from three counties over two weeks later to grant his blessing, all while charging an arm and a leg for the privilege.
Charging an arm and a leg for service calls is such an understatement. We called them out to work on 2 pieces of equipment on the same day. Took the guy 15 minutes to "fix" the tractor, and then another 15 minutes to install a pulley on our discbine (for warranty purposes).. $650 to half-ass fix the tractor and $680 to install the pulley, labor cost, total came out to $1541 for a 30 minute service call I'll never buy from those bloodthirsty weasels
I'm a first generation farmer in central IL, I have a medium size farm. You did a great job on this video I really enjoyed it and learned some stuff I didn't know (about Deeres company's they have bout). One thing to remember why this won't be the end for family farms or will not necessarily impact farm size is simply deprecation. Large farmers don't keep tractors for very long, they want new equipment with less problems. Deprecation on a new combine can be as much as 1/4 of the purchase price in the first year. Someone has to buy the expensive used technology. I enjoy having auto steer and its something I will continue to invest in, but the see and spray can only save me money if it can pay for itself. Just offering another side to look at, I always enjoy watching your videos.
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.
@@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.
Sir I assure you that it is imperative to the function of your machine which pulls a thing over the ground, that it have a sensor who's sole purpose is to make the device inoperable if a part is replaced until one of our technicians, paid for by you and at a time convenient to them, physically connects their laptop to it.
And one day that fully automated farming system will crashes, (being intentional, or by simple decay of the society) and there will be no food, and no farmer left to face the crisis. Looks pretty evil to me.
@@heinzketchup4558 lol I worked on software designed for dealers to diagnose issues and activate features on a fairly expensive brand of car, and absolutely. They take it seriously too, it's not just "our program has the ability to turn that feature on", it's "that feature will not turn on unless the secret encryption key is successfully downloaded from our servers and written to the computer chip in the car, and to make it available on the servers you have to go to our web portal and pay the activation fee". There's just no getting around that.
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.
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/...)
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.)
@@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.
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.
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.
This approach is exactly the opposite of what made America great . Henry ford intentionally built products cars/tractors that were serviceable buy the owners anywhere (in the field) , and the country flourished ….
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.
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.
My dad is a farmer. When the solar flares happened, my dad was one of few in our area that was able to continue planting. Because everyone else's planters have fancy GPS and they basically run themselves. The fact that farming is becoming a lot more dependent on technology is not a surprise to me. Last year I saw drones spraying fields w/ nutrients and stuff. Edit: I actually laughed out loud when you said "a sense of pride in maintaining straight rows". I was in the combine once and tried to stay on the rows. God, that's hard. And then he flexed on me and said he could eat while doing it. Edit 2: I don't think family farms are dying because they can't afford the fancy new equipment. However, it's been near-impossible to start a farm without being in a family farm already for quite a while
If it's infeasible for a small farmer to enter the market without an inheritance of equipment/land, then family farms are dying. As some farmers kids grow and don't choose to be farmers, the pool of family farmers will dwindle until the market is completely dominated by big agro.
@@maksimfedoryak as far as my understanding of a subscription goes, it does not have to be digital and server based but just a recurring purchase of the same thing. Maybe automated
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.
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.
Thank you for being one of the few people on UA-cam who isn’t solely gushing about technology, but also speaks about the social impacts, for better or worse.
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
Ever since I learned that farmers had to deal with these practices, I can't stop thinking about how a whole community's food supply-not to mention that farmer's livelihood-is upheld by a software glitch or whatever the case is. Praise to the farmers out there for not only feeding all of us, but dealing with all the headaches. Appreciate you!
You know what? Boeing did something similar. Company CEOs went from being an engineer that use to work on big airliner or military projects to a CEO who only worked in marketing and only Wall Street liked. So they go there saying tech company this that using all the latest buzz words etc. Well Look how that worked out for them. Caring about stock price only and the latest keywords took them from crushing airbus the only competitor at the time and killing it with the us govt to a joke with more competitors. Hopefully Boeing will recover and hopefully companies like John Deere learn from the Boeing mistake but I fear they won’t and they won’t be the last. Enjoy the tech praise and up tick in stock while it lasts….
Well... The video makes it look like everything is more or less fine. A bit greedy and not very farmer friendly but fine as it's mostly just going with the times, increasing output in one way or another. Thus I'd find the comparison to boing a bit off. There's only so much you can do with hardware. We understand the materials we use and how we have to use them pretty well. So as long as they have a good product and good quality control there won't be too many issues. There can't be too many improvements in hardware either. The fokus shifts to other fields of technology where bigger gains are possible. If GPS guidance etc weren't working farmers would stop buying them. There are other options after all (even though many farmers do seem to Fokus and be proud of owning one brand).
@@mad_max21 Well, depending on the mistake I think farming equipment actually has the potential to kill far more by mistakes. Spray to many chemicals (or not enough) now people can get sick from the food. A software bug reduces food production so now food prices go up which hurts the economy which hurts everything and unstable markets may collapse into famine. Hell the solar flairs nocking out autopilot is such an example. Have such an error for long enough at exactly the wrong time and now no farm that uses autopilot produces anything. Individually it's not really a major issue. But the more widespread the tech (and issue) is, the worse it could be.
I believe it should be law that for a company of above a certain sice the CEO must have worked in the company for atleast 5 years. CEOs that dont know how a company or industry works and just get brought in to maximise proffit for the next quarter before the gamblers/shareholders can bale out leading to the companies demise in the long turn are a plague.
@@einfachnurleo7099 I find it likely that John Deere is growing more hated by the day and its only a matter of time before they start losing sales to individual boycots. Reputation is a very important thing for someone who wants to sell something.
That's capitalism for you. There's nothing to stop the monopolization. They push for infinite growth and profit, which is impossible, and harms everyone else.
@@austinhernandez2716 Nothing to stop the monopolization? Companies have literally been broken up because they formed monopolies. Stuff can and has been done.
@HALLish-jl5mo that's only true when it's not legal to bribe politicians into making regulatory bodies ineffective. I don't like Biden, but I'll admit he is the first president in years to have a doj willing to sue monopolies, but these cases can take years, or even decades. If you think companies getting broken up is common in America, then you have been misled.
I remember a few years ago, Deere hosted a show on RFDTV for people to call in with questions. It was laughable how hard the reps avoided the word "tractor" in favor of "solution". Like "we would recommend an 80hp solution for the implement you want to run."
17:55 bro legit be forgetting the countless farmers hacking their equipment. It's not that they don't know how to fix them. It's that they’ve been legally locked not to by the company.
In the UK John Deer went from 30% market share to 24 in just 3 years. I don't know what it is today 4 years later. I just remember that big drop with the whole right-to-repair issue.
One correction for the end of year video: Deere didn’t buy Bisco Industries, the distributor of fasteners and electronic components in 2014. They bought Bisco Inc. (Boston Irrigation Supply Company) a distributor of irrigation equipment in the northeastern US
And rightfully, they should. Once that technology becomes more mainstream to other competitors, John Deere is gonna dig themselves a grave... covered in sawdust and compost
@realbosstakea Yeah, until Deere goes and cries to daddy in Washington and foreign competition gets a 100% import tax thus creating a virtual monopoly.
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.
@@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
My college buddies and I were joking that "solutions" had become a meaningless business buzzword back in the 90's. History doesn't repeat but it most definitely rhymes.
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.
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.
Eh, I think it’s more of the “big tech” mindset and standards that did. The lack of right to repair and DRM bullshit is what is ruining agricultures, automobiles, and countless other aspects of our lives
Except John Deere doesn’t have a monopoly. Ag is probably one of the most competitive spaces out there. The big difference between Deere and other companies is how damn persistent they are at putting up dealerships EVERYWHERE. As a farmer myself, this is one of the biggest aspects when it comes to buying new equipment which is having support for the equipment you just bought. I can agree however, that big tech did not ruin farming. If anything has ruined farming it’s all the outside investors as was stated towards the end of the video. Land owners not knowing what farming even is, hedge funds buying and selling commodity futures, other mutual funds buying up stock in every ag department out there etc etc etc. it’s bled us all dry.
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.
If you hate capitalism and technology so much then pack your stuff and move to Cuba. Bring a GoPro with you to document your experience in a blacked out commie stone age hellhole. Get some of your Luddite friends to come with you if you can, in exchange of red-blooded patriotic Cubans.
"Repairs as revenue stream" that alone should be just not a thing. It should be an at-cost thing to keep your rep as good customer service not something you actively seek or even plan into your products to make more money.
@@matthewbarabas3052 Until you find that the vector encabulator is the thing causing you the issue. And because we are now using a digital vector encabulator you have to have it configured or the point metrics are going to drift and your lines are not going to line up. And because its digital, it needs the Proprietary Software.
@forzaacmilan36 since the equipment is only used on the private land of the owner who made the unauthorized repair, NO, safety issues are NOT a justifiable reason for the manufacturer to sabotage unauthorized repair or otherwise make it impossible! Even if they were vehicles made for public roads, it's not John Deere's responsibility to make sure the customer maintains them in a safe operating state!
When here in Slovakia they started buying John Deere tarctors, they came with a long list of warnings what not to do with it, like protect it from deep mud, water etc. because of the electronics. The tractors we had were made in Czechoslovakia, these were some beasts of a machines. As long as their engine gets diesel and air, it works. There are some examples that had a belly armour underneeth them, so you could make a fire under it to warm up the engine if it was needed. Im not saying that John Deere is bad, but they are much more complicated to work with than older machinery.
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.
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.
@@matthewbarabas3052 Except stuff will eventually break to the point where it has to be replaced. Then you stuck with that new 'smart' tractor that has a 'smart' cap for -insert relevant fluids- that once you open it, locks down the tractor until its 'authorized repair' is done. Its not that farmers don't want to repair stuff, its that JD et al are actively preventing the repairs.
@@nickierv13 then they shouldnt buy any of the smart tractors....? this is a none issue, frankly, unless they completely stop making standard tractors, which they definitely cant.
16:25 "medium-sized farm at 450 acres" My parents grew up on 27 raising 8 kids and 32 acres raising 5, while my grandaunt married the guy with the largest farm in the area at just above 100 acres. 450 to 1000+ acres in Ireland would be considered land barons and lords and we got rid of most of them a century ago.
My family owns 240 acres of pastureland in Kansas that we lease. Only provides around $7,000 a year in income, property tax is about $5,000 annually, so about $2,000 annual net. Takes much more to make real money, or you have to be in the cattle business.
Your 16:00 statement of sprayer cost is way off. Our 2021 R4044 was $520,000 and is compatible with see and spray. The new X9 with see and spray is currently pushing $900,000 USD.
Firstly I thought that the video will be just hate on new technology being more efficient, but after I saw it I realised it was not the point. Very well made video about rising problem with Deere and farming. Good job.
I don't know why, but the consolidation reminded me of East Germany (and most likely other Eastern block nations) forming smaller, privately owned farms into massive LPGs, Landwirtschaftliche Produktionsgenossenschaften (Agricultural production cooperatives). They worked on a similar principle that farmers weren't their own bosses anymore, with the only difference that profits went to the state instead of some few people that own the company
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.
Fun side fact: Avgas, the fuel used in small, propeller driven aircraft, is still leaded. Farms that use crop dusting planes are introducing higher than average heavy metal contamination to both the food supply and local air conditions. Living downwind from a small airport is about bad as moving to Flint, MI.
It’s not just farm equipment this is happening to either. What error code does your washing machine or vacuum cleaner spit out if not working properly. Better take it to an authorized dealer because the tools and software you need to repair it yourself are unavailable or outrageously expensive. Either that, or just purchase a new one and trash the old. This is also the franchise model applied to agriculture. The family doesn’t own the farm or the land anymore. At best, they manage the farm, crops, and livestock for a multinational conglomeration. Your equipment comes from one company. Your seed comes from another company. And, your products are first sold via contract to a third processing company. These farms are no longer the metaphorical donut store or ice cream shop hanging a shingle in a small town. You now need big money to buy a franchise into a brand name ecosystem. Otherwise, you will be out competed into bankruptcy.
Change every instance of "company" and similar corporate terms to "lord" in this description (especially in the middle paragraph), and you've come pretty close to describing the feudal system of medieval Europe. Though back then serfs only had one "lord" and his lackeys to worry about, instead of dozens of competing ones all fighting to claim you while promising protection but not *actually* giving it when needed unless you pay up and have followed their rules in a way they feel is acceptable (probably with frequently shifting goalposts). ... ... ... wait a minute. >_>
@@HumbleWooper Yes, but it is so much worse now. One finds out how really "essential" they are when one deals with different ranks. Lord/Baron = Direct manager w/in company Viscount = Corporate "partnership" Earl = Local municipality Marquess = County/County-equivalent Duke = State level Royalty = Federal level Each and every one gets a cut of cash to protect your "rights" and "business". Even the mob is not that harsh. They just take your kneecaps, not your livelihood.
Brilliantly insightful narrative exposing not only a company's veiled intentions, but actions. I've heard this from farmers who are trapped in Deere software/resolution to simple remedies. Also, identifying the key word "solution". Comment written early on, so farmers issues may have been addressed. It was addressed, excellent video.
What you describe at the end, the owner of the land living timezones away and profits not being spent in the local economy, is what's been wrong with globalisation from the start, not just in farming. And it's similar to what's wrong with private equity. To the owner of a shop/ factory/ restaurant who sits in a boardroom many timezones away, the employees in that shop/ factory/ restaurant are just faceless numbers on a spreadsheet, not the mother of your kid's best friend or the goalie of the local foodball team. I'm not a communist, but capitalism is fucking up the world for all but a very small, very rich elite. Oh, and as for "we need to produce more food with less land", let's start by wasting less food, then get smarter (like less beef), before we try to be more efficient and ruin farmland even further.
I'd say no, America doesn't even have true capitalism, which would be bad anyway cause it breeds monopolies, however, we DO have Corporatism. We have Corporations gaining rights as people, lobbyists who influence policy with millions of dollars, policies that our congressional leaders endorse, prioritize and implement to work more for Corporations than what the government is supposed to aid, The People. Half of those in Congress ARE business leaders and former employees for some of the biggest corporations in America, some of whom return to CFO, CEO, ETC. to the same or different company after their term is up or they have mad stock in said multination corporations or other government subsidized industry. You got your Political think tanks and scientific studies with loaded pockets of biased research to sway the congress or the simple common man that big business and big government is good and that this society weve built up is pure, patriotic perfection, then no one wants to rock the boat cause they're trained to appreciate the crumbs. And the ones that DO are labeled "Communists" who "hate" America and are ungrateful idiots from either side of the same, red and blue, two-headed political dragon. Most of whom are too rich to understand the commoners, what does Donald Trump, or Joe Biden possibly understand about the struggle of todays plebs, NOT a god damn thing, the super rich paid off by the ultra rich. OK sorry I'm done ranting
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
"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.
By costing millions to buy equipment needed and making it impossible to do maintenance yourself. That said, the single biggest expense outsize land and equipment is the cost of gmo seed. Your profit is in the cost of your seed.
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.
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.
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1:49 is that a bird's eye view of the John Deere Ottumwa Works in Iowa? I'm German but I was a high school exchange student in Ottumwa and that view looked too familiar!
I went to Job Corps in Ottumwa. I'm sad you had to see one of the worst places in the US. There were crack pipes everywhere in Ottumwa... meth capital of the country for a short period of time.
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@@Ramonathooh that meth time was luckily shortly before I came. Ottumwa is not the best place for sure but I had some good time over there and I enjoy revisiting every few years!
Any chance of linking this video to another one on how on earth the Dutch are the second largest exporter of agricultural products worldwide behind only the US in spite of being almost 235 times smaller in surface area?
You should add a qualifier there. They are the second by monetary value. There are lots of other that export more by volume, kaloric/nutrient value etc.
I may be totally off, but a lot of this seems like *relatively* easy tech that, these days, could be developed by a fairly small team. Perhaps we'll see startups competing with large corps like John Deere in the near future.
Yeah it is. I think JD spent so much on engineering talent that they have to cover the cost of that with exorbitant tech / hardware fees now, or they're purely charging monopoly prices while they can. I was thinking that with a relatively small team, these $700K sprayers - that i've read about numerous times in this comment section - could be designed, programmed and built for less than $100K a piece. The ML really isn't that difficult to figure out. Honestly the whole system isn't that difficult to figure out. .
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.
Nearly, if not, all farmlands are corporate 💰💰 pits that create this persona that "The heart of America is with the farmers" while the devil [i.e.: politicians] grin behind that notion 😈 A damn shame 👎🏾
Family farming, or at least making enough food for local communities, will be back once humanoid robots are 10x more common than cars (which will happen in less than 10 years the moment the software is solved due to insane real world value). Also many more people will be growing their own food when they can have a personal famer, gardener and chief working 24/7 for free.
@@kazioo2Not a chance, infact, its going to happen the opposite way. The world's gonna go through such a crisis, either a World War with nukes or a killer virus and we are going to plunge back into a neodark age. Way before we get those human killing robots.
So… do people still wonder why US manufacturing has largely dropped out of existence? Sounds like all of us here would jump on any competitor who might come along offering an affordable working product.
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.
15:55 $50,000 would possibly get you a 15 year old John Deere sprayer. Getting one compatible with See and Spray would probably be more like $300,000 for a used machine. Over $500,000 for something new.
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.
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).
As a former Deere engineer, Deere's old stance of doing things right has changed to doing things for maximum profit, and John May is one of the biggest indicators of that. Layoffs are happening in both manufacturing and engineering to increase profit margins, production lines are being moved offshore, and technical leaders that made Deere the company it is today are being fired, in the interest of cutting costs. There is no longer anything special about Deere as a company, and in a decade there will be nothing special about their machinery.
As a side note, Deere is currently in a hiring freeze. All of those job listings will never be filled, at least in the short-term. In fact, Deere is actively trying to reduce headcount in their tech department, through enforcing return to office policies. They are planning on a 2% reduction in headcount.
So then 10-30% of the employees leave, and then they stagnate because they think they are a monopoly yes?
While I didn't know all of this, I knew a little bit of it and I'm glad I didn't invest in JD. Relying on brand power and market share is a proven way to loose everything, in the long run
Sounds awfully like Boeing.
Capitalism baby
Line gotta go up.
@@lelagrangeeffectphysics4120 Not exactly. CNH is currently doing about the same things and there's kinda the big 3 in farming so if AGCO is also doing it that's just the way it is and everyone has to deal with it
19:48 it’s not that farmers don’t know how to fix the tech side of the machine. It’s that we legally don’t have access to the tools to do so. The big tractor companies take the Apple route with software where they don’t sell you the software needed to fix something and force you to call a manufacturer technician out.
On problem we run into at least once a year with our newer ish combine is if the engineer cuts off after chocking the machine there is a chance the computer will get locked into a factory degen mode. For this we have to call a guy out who then hooks up a laptop with company software, presses a few buttons and is done. Takes 5-10 minutes to fix, but because Case won’t let us have that software we have to wait at least 3 hrs maybe even till the next day for someone to come fix it.
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!
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?
And now its coming for the auto industry
In South Africa many of the farmers simply refuse to buy this hi-tech equipment. Instead they'll own a basic tractor and sign short-term leases for the fancy equipment only at the times they really need it (usually at planting and harvesting time). These lease contracts usually include the operator who has been trained by, and works directly for, the manufacturer.
This system works well because if the fancy stuff breaks down then the manufacturer has to get it fixed while supplying the farmer with a spare. It costs the farmer slightly more, but avoids all the costs and hassles of owning this stuff.
Not a bad idea, but sucks for the trained operator because you just know they aren’t getting paid enough to live between “events”.
Consider buying from China, they have better equipment that does not capture farmers. They have cheaper drone systems that don’t require contracts or bound to manufacturer repair harassment.
People tend to check out all available options before buying tractors. No one is going to buy a brand new tractor from a new brand with no record to its name and no proven track record. A tractor isn't just a car with big wheels, it has a lot of very complex hydraulics, electronics, gearboxes, etc.
Smart
@@sheeplord4976 I'm no farmer, but it's like people think these pieces of equipment are just big riding lawnmowers. The implements to harvest soybeans and corn, the machenary that separates cotton as its harvested are really complex and complicated. Margins are already thin, Just "go lease a new tractor" at an increased price isn't a good business decision. If you're in a pinch and you HAVE to plant or harvest, you have to do whats necessary. But leasing season over season, I don't see how that's profitable.
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.
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
It cost me $1,500 to activate Auto steering one time on a tractors built in screen. If I wanted to use a removable screen to move tractor to tractor it cost me $1,500 every single year to use that screen. They know how to squeeze every penny out of you. Other companies don't charge a fraction of this and don't hit you constantly with activation costs and fees
The subscription world. You own nothing and will be happy. For fucks sake, my offices COFFEE MACHINE is a subscription service... it's ridiculous.
It’s for the same reason college costs so much now, government subsidies. The government subsides farmers big time so Deere and other companies make everything more expensive to increase profit margins.
@@ldib7798 Are you kidding so subsidized collages caused John Deere to be so greedy in monthly fees and not allowed to work on your OWN tractor. As for government subsidies to farming is okay in America. Or maybe government subsidies are making JD lay off in America and move operations to Mexico. After the best profits ever.
John Deere sucks.
Its great technology, but a smaller farmer can forget about the feature that connects machines working on the same field.
im sorry but activation fee's are rediculous. I can understand the not letting farmers fuck with there data because it could lead to major errors in the code and then they might get sued when the crop fails but Activation cost is just saying you have to pay us to turn this on. put it in any other context, you have to pay me to let you use the faucet and get water, you have to pay me to turn the lights on in your home. you have to pay me to turn the cooker on.
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.
It wasn't that long ago that a 1400 acre hop farm I serviced as a consultant tried out New Holland. They were too fed up with Deere to give them a second chance from the previous growing season. Halfway through the growing season brand new Kubotas started showing up. And they've stuck with Kubota. NH is junk, Deere is expensive and doesn't run like it used to. Kubota isn't perfect by any means but at least they work most of the time. The farmers with money run orange, the broke ones are blue, and the ones that run green either have more money than sense or they're running old green that'll probably outlive them.
It may set on fire once or twice but dammit they still run, those things take abuse
Yep, my dad owns a John Deere and two other tractors one of which is Kubota which we use the most, it has needed a few repairs but it works well and is super reliable. The John Deere on the other hand still needs repairing and has been sitting there for 1/3 of the time we’ve had it.
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.
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.
all I am seeing is it's a company which capitalized on market and revolutionized farming and helped farmer make stupidly huge profits and easy farming.
but now people calling same company evil. typical american thing.
if you don't like their equipment then just don't buy itt. it's that simple.
you want to use their equipment since they are the best but also then call them evil after signing terms of use with them.
We should change it from “beware of Greeks bearing gifts” to “beware of companies offering solutions”
I've never heard of that phrase but "beware of companies offering Solutions" is one I want to use
@@internetperson3436 My man gotta read a bit more. But agree with you, everything gradually becoming a service/solution will eventually lead us to become technopeasants.
beware of geeks
@@internetperson3436 its reference towards Trojan Horse
Combine them into " beware of greek companies gifting solutions"
My grandfather was a John Deere mechanic back in the 70s and 80s. He took pride in his work. He would be disgusted by them now.
My Dad retired from a local John Deere dealer in 2007 after 50 years with the dealer as a mechanic. He didn't retire due to age or health reasons. The local dealers were getting sold out and combined into regional dealers. My Dad saw the writing on the wall and jumped ship a month before the dealership was combined with another and relocated over an hour's drive farther away. He would be PO'd if he were still alive to see what has become of John Deere now.
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
18:15 "JD has found itself in the middle of a battle over the right to repair" wow go easy on the euphemisms Wendover. They've declared war on people being able to repair the equipment they've bought.
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."
Fun fact: John Deere's diagnostic software was apparently made with some open source components which might unravel their anti-consumer practices. Meanwhile Mack/Volvo/etc software is being reverse engineered by some nerds.
Basically these companies treated software as an afterthought, hence why stuff like Tech Tool has horrid UX and is only available on heavily locked down configurations of Windows. So the laptop is constantly updating slowly and even when it works you're waiting forever while a highly unoptimized program communicates on J1939.
@@daisy9181 My friend's Dad who was a master mechanic for 25 years and got into programming as a hobby wound up in tech. (I'm on a similar path atm)
As a SWE he points out that most people don't understand the diagnostic method and KISS.
He's tried to retire and the company just throws a fat pay increases at him, even when he's like "you've made me into a legacy maintainer" and he expects them to jump onto some new boxed solution or not be ready when he does retire, stepping on a tech debt landmine either way.
@@daisy9181 Talented coders need to incorporate the ability to sabotage their software at the coder’s will. That way if the company tries to fire them just before release, they can simply trigger the sabotage mechanism and take their hard work with them.
@@ethanlamoureux5306 You're basically implying a backdoor... that they could possibly be sued over later. It's not worth it. 🤦♂
@@megamanx466 I never said it would be easy!
@@megamanx466 No they are not implying a backdoor, there are methods of disabling code without having access to it (Hint: it disables itself if you don't have access)
I live in France and I remember, 20 years ago, most farmers drove mid-sized orange Renault tractors, the other half had red Massey-Ferguson, blue New Holland, Claas, etc ... Now 80% of tractors I see are big green and yellow John Deere with agressive faces. I don't know how they did that but it's becoming scary
Do you live in northern France? Because there the average farm is also very big and so the economies of scale that Deere offers play out in full?
@@5th_decile I do. It might be part of the reason but I'm not sure. I know too little about this.
The renault ares, one of the best tractors ever!
The farms I used to help out on back in those days had similar tractors, Masseys etc.. The ones that could afford John Deeres bought them because they had things like stereos, heaters, air con, really comfy seats and what-not. I don't know how comfortable those tractors were in France back then but I do recall plenty of people here in the U.K. opting to by JD because of that extra comfort factor. Plenty of the rear arm controls seemed easier to use on JDs of that era as well. Just more modern, in short. The 3350 at one of the farms in my home village was pimp compared to anything else.
Welp, if we can't use John Deere, I guess its time to bring back the Lamborghini tractors
Clarkson style
Or go JDM with Kubota 😅
@@MarloSoBalJror go German with Claas. They're pro right to repair too
Lamborghini has continuously made tractors. There's nothing to "bring back" lmao.
Id be infinitely more likely to buy as Ive been boycotting John Deere for half a decade now.
@@moogle68 true they never quit, but they did fade from popularity
Newer sprayers BTW aren't anywhere close to $50K, try $500K!! A 2024 408R sprayer with all the bells and whistles including "see and spray" is gonna be at least $750K!! Plus once see and spray becomes prolific and everyone has it, chemical companies will raise the cost of spray, and it'll work out to roughly the same cost to the farmer anyways.
Farmers must get together and begin switching to hemp from GMO cotton, corn, and soy. Not as much pesticide spraying, less fertilizer. Less water. Then processing facilities can bring jobs. The seed cake waste from oil production, and the leaves can both be fed to livestock.
see-and-spray is not going to increase the cost of chemicals, at least the generic ones. But in advanced systems, it can permit usage of cheaper, more broad spectrum chemicals.
But I agree, these prices are on the insane side. The backbone of the sprayer is the same. The tech is cheap, thanks to smartphones. Actual cost is probably 10-20% of the sticker price.
@hardopinions well fertilizer giants base their price on current crop yield and market prices. Whenever farmers earn more, they increase the price regardless of markets.
Here in Europe subsidies subsidies increase when you use rtk section control spraying, sprayer manufacterers know this and make it a marketing arguement to increase the cost above what would be viable without aid.
Just like any other commodity or product. Prices aren't set by producers and businesses. They are set by supply and demand. Quit being a commu ist useful idiot@@fermewilmotsagriculturebio3434
Yeah I heard 50k for a sprayer and had to come check the comments haha. 50k is more like a down payment on the damn things
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.
I'm a farmer who is also a computer geek. Suffice to say, you don't need this equipment to turn a profit, and the expense of this equipment is grossly understated. A person with 4500 acres would not have a 50k pull behind sprayer, they would have a self propelled sprayer. A 2023 612R like in the video, used but low hours, is 500k. Maybe they could find an older self propelled sprayer with higher hours for 50k, but at 4500 acres, spending 100k wouldn't be unreasonable. I have a 1966 JD 4020 tractor, a late 70's-early 80's JD 7000 planter(with upgrades), and an early 80's JD 6620 SideHill combine, good enough for me. I get one of the cleanest samples (a small amount of grain that has been harvested with a combine) of anyone around(not my opinion, someone else), and can have much less loss in the field after harvest than someone who is directly across the property line from me (not my opinion, someone else). You can have all the sensors in the world, some of the best tools are your senses. Like last year after a corn head rebuild, I noticed I was having shatter loss at the head (corn stalk was being pulled too quickly through the stalk rolls, so when the ear detached, it would break kernels off and they would fly out of the head). So I slowed the head speed down. When you start harvesting a field of corn, you go a little ways, and look at the residue output of the combine. Are the cobs fully threshed, are they fully threshed but broken, are there kernels on the ground, how many in a sq.ft.? Keep adjusting everything until the harvest loss on the ground and "trash" level in the grain is acceptable.
Can't say it better. All those luxuries are confort, all in all, it's what grows in the field (and that you can get out of the field) that makes your money.
I was looking at the john deere precision system a decade ago and how it'd cost me an yearly wage, not to mention the subscription, so I decided to keep going my own ways with no autosteering. But last year I found an non expensive kit you could install yourself, while profiting from an open source RTK project, decided to build both and I now have a centimeter precise autosteering with no subscription and that cost me 4k only. The greater benefit is indeed to not overlap, but half the reason is to steer straight and clean while seeding. It remains a luxury, but I wouldn't do without now (unless they charged me as much as JD for some reason).
My father taught me that all the money I don't give out will be my money in the end (less the taxes....), so to make a good compromise between what I need and what I want.
The oldest tractor we have is a JD4040 from 1978 that's self steering now, it's amazing that the GPS wasn't even a thing when this tractor was designed back then....
You americans are 30 years behind concerning farming anyways. You still farm like the sowjets did. Look at us Germans. We manage to get one of the highest yields in the world while upholding biodiversity. Thats how its done.
I am not familiar with farm machinery, but I have used Beckhoff Automation industrial computers to control a few complicated industrial machines. Beckhoff computers are modular and made up of a series of plug-in slices where each slice is designed for a particular function on the machine. It can use an LCD screen that can be used for controlling different operations on the machine. The computer is built for industrial environments. I believe that if say a couple of farmers were to contact them to use their controls for use in their machines Beckhoff would gladly help them with the programing for free. They have no special pricing for volume orders all orders have the same pricing. If they are successful there is a big market for them on all other types of machines. Check their site out to learn more.
you know, I'm wondering when there isn't all this older but still great equipment is gone and the only choices we have are a used 6145R or a 7210R. Those are great tractors but would be a horrible fit for my farm. They could squeeze us out just by letting time run the older equipment out and leaving just huge equipment to buy
@@whatsgoingonhere3465 Agreed, small combines especially. Imagine the wiring/electronic issues those machines will have.
John Deere: Nothing runs over farmers like a Deere.
Nothing ruins like a Deere.
@@godfreypoon5148 if a puma is hunting
I hate 'em.
People keep buying them though.
How many tractors do you own and operate on your farm ? We are at 11 .
I cannot think of another small business that takes on more debt in proportion to its profit than a farm. To add to that a lot of these are ran by just a family with little if any hired help. Farming is tough.
My dad doesn't grow anything but he has livestock, and he has farmer friends that he's said the same thing about. Think he told me he'd only make about 5k a year (in revenue) if it wasn't for the subsidies. And its a pain on tax season
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?
My Grandfather is a farmer and my family has many ties to farming communities. John Deere has alienated a lot of loyal customers with its practices on repair. Tractors aren’t McDonalds Ice Cream Machines. Those farmers need to either be able to repair it themselves, or take it to a local shop. They can’t afford to wait for a John Deere tech to come from three counties over two weeks later to grant his blessing, all while charging an arm and a leg for the privilege.
Charging an arm and a leg for service calls is such an understatement. We called them out to work on 2 pieces of equipment on the same day. Took the guy 15 minutes to "fix" the tractor, and then another 15 minutes to install a pulley on our discbine (for warranty purposes).. $650 to half-ass fix the tractor and $680 to install the pulley, labor cost, total came out to $1541 for a 30 minute service call
I'll never buy from those bloodthirsty weasels
It's no wonder they collect 3 to 6x more from service + maintenance than sales
Three counties over!?
I'm a first generation farmer in central IL, I have a medium size farm. You did a great job on this video I really enjoyed it and learned some stuff I didn't know (about Deeres company's they have bout). One thing to remember why this won't be the end for family farms or will not necessarily impact farm size is simply deprecation. Large farmers don't keep tractors for very long, they want new equipment with less problems. Deprecation on a new combine can be as much as 1/4 of the purchase price in the first year. Someone has to buy the expensive used technology. I enjoy having auto steer and its something I will continue to invest in, but the see and spray can only save me money if it can pay for itself. Just offering another side to look at, I always enjoy watching your videos.
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.
Sir I assure you that it is imperative to the function of your machine which pulls a thing over the ground, that it have a sensor who's sole purpose is to make the device inoperable if a part is replaced until one of our technicians, paid for by you and at a time convenient to them, physically connects their laptop to it.
Sounds like modern cars alright.
And one day that fully automated farming system will crashes, (being intentional, or by simple decay of the society) and there will be no food, and no farmer left to face the crisis. Looks pretty evil to me.
@@heinzketchup4558 lol I worked on software designed for dealers to diagnose issues and activate features on a fairly expensive brand of car, and absolutely. They take it seriously too, it's not just "our program has the ability to turn that feature on", it's "that feature will not turn on unless the secret encryption key is successfully downloaded from our servers and written to the computer chip in the car, and to make it available on the servers you have to go to our web portal and pay the activation fee". There's just no getting around that.
How come food used to be cheaper?
0:40 no solution, just tech slavery
Yeah that's where we use tech for 🤣
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/...)
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.
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.
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.
This approach is exactly the opposite of what made America great . Henry ford intentionally built products cars/tractors that were serviceable buy the owners anywhere (in the field) , and the country flourished ….
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
(23:35) One key is missing on the keyboard
My dad is a farmer. When the solar flares happened, my dad was one of few in our area that was able to continue planting. Because everyone else's planters have fancy GPS and they basically run themselves.
The fact that farming is becoming a lot more dependent on technology is not a surprise to me. Last year I saw drones spraying fields w/ nutrients and stuff.
Edit: I actually laughed out loud when you said "a sense of pride in maintaining straight rows". I was in the combine once and tried to stay on the rows. God, that's hard. And then he flexed on me and said he could eat while doing it.
Edit 2: I don't think family farms are dying because they can't afford the fancy new equipment. However, it's been near-impossible to start a farm without being in a family farm already for quite a while
Case IH is a behemoth all of its own.
farming is and has always been technology, one of the oldest we humans made...
Family farms aren't dying, but how many new people that aren't independently wealthy are able to afford the start up costs of a new farm in your area?
@@al99795 absolutely no one, i know there are some younger people farming but that's usually just the kids taking over the farm
If it's infeasible for a small farmer to enter the market without an inheritance of equipment/land, then family farms are dying. As some farmers kids grow and don't choose to be farmers, the pool of family farmers will dwindle until the market is completely dominated by big agro.
bruh i lost my fuckin mind when u said see n spray is a subscription charged per acre ... brooooooooooother
they really saw adobe and said hol my beer
To be fair, see and spray requires more personal care than selling software with a credit card enabled checkout screen
In future there will be subscription to toilet paper per meter
@@maksimfedoryak Well, toilet paper has always been a consumable so one could very well argue that it has always been a subscription per meter
@@OleBrouer then there will be paper dispenser, which needs connection to server to provide toilet paper
@@maksimfedoryak as far as my understanding of a subscription goes, it does not have to be digital and server based but just a recurring purchase of the same thing. Maybe automated
John Deere are becoming the new Boeing....and that is going to be an unmitigated disaster.
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.
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!
Thank you for being one of the few people on UA-cam who isn’t solely gushing about technology, but also speaks about the social impacts, for better or worse.
The original john deere: "farming is too fuckin hard"
2024 john deere: "farming is too fuckin easy"
2024 Farming is to frickin expensive.
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
Ever since I learned that farmers had to deal with these practices, I can't stop thinking about how a whole community's food supply-not to mention that farmer's livelihood-is upheld by a software glitch or whatever the case is.
Praise to the farmers out there for not only feeding all of us, but dealing with all the headaches. Appreciate you!
You know what? Boeing did something similar. Company CEOs went from being an engineer that use to work on big airliner or military projects to a CEO who only worked in marketing and only Wall Street liked. So they go there saying tech company this that using all the latest buzz words etc. Well Look how that worked out for them. Caring about stock price only and the latest keywords took them from crushing airbus the only competitor at the time and killing it with the us govt to a joke with more competitors. Hopefully Boeing will recover and hopefully companies like John Deere learn from the Boeing mistake but I fear they won’t and they won’t be the last. Enjoy the tech praise and up tick in stock while it lasts….
Mistakes by farming equipment won't kill hundreds like airplane crashes. They won't learn from it.
Well... The video makes it look like everything is more or less fine. A bit greedy and not very farmer friendly but fine as it's mostly just going with the times, increasing output in one way or another.
Thus I'd find the comparison to boing a bit off. There's only so much you can do with hardware. We understand the materials we use and how we have to use them pretty well. So as long as they have a good product and good quality control there won't be too many issues. There can't be too many improvements in hardware either. The fokus shifts to other fields of technology where bigger gains are possible. If GPS guidance etc weren't working farmers would stop buying them. There are other options after all (even though many farmers do seem to Fokus and be proud of owning one brand).
@@mad_max21 Well, depending on the mistake I think farming equipment actually has the potential to kill far more by mistakes. Spray to many chemicals (or not enough) now people can get sick from the food. A software bug reduces food production so now food prices go up which hurts the economy which hurts everything and unstable markets may collapse into famine. Hell the solar flairs nocking out autopilot is such an example. Have such an error for long enough at exactly the wrong time and now no farm that uses autopilot produces anything.
Individually it's not really a major issue. But the more widespread the tech (and issue) is, the worse it could be.
I believe it should be law that for a company of above a certain sice the CEO must have worked in the company for atleast 5 years. CEOs that dont know how a company or industry works and just get brought in to maximise proffit for the next quarter before the gamblers/shareholders can bale out leading to the companies demise in the long turn are a plague.
@@einfachnurleo7099 I find it likely that John Deere is growing more hated by the day and its only a matter of time before they start losing sales to individual boycots. Reputation is a very important thing for someone who wants to sell something.
I love it when monopolies harm everyone in their pursuit of endless growth in fundamentally finite markets.
That's capitalism for you. There's nothing to stop the monopolization. They push for infinite growth and profit, which is impossible, and harms everyone else.
@@austinhernandez2716 Nothing to stop the monopolization? Companies have literally been broken up because they formed monopolies. Stuff can and has been done.
its not all harm, efficiency has gone up
@HALLish-jl5mo that's only true when it's not legal to bribe politicians into making regulatory bodies ineffective. I don't like Biden, but I'll admit he is the first president in years to have a doj willing to sue monopolies, but these cases can take years, or even decades. If you think companies getting broken up is common in America, then you have been misled.
You realize that this conciliation while bad for the farmer is good for the consumer right? It means cheaper products.
I remember a few years ago, Deere hosted a show on RFDTV for people to call in with questions. It was laughable how hard the reps avoided the word "tractor" in favor of "solution". Like "we would recommend an 80hp solution for the implement you want to run."
17:55 bro legit be forgetting the countless farmers hacking their equipment. It's not that they don't know how to fix them. It's that they’ve been legally locked not to by the company.
Yup
Time and cost is a problem when forcing farmers to wait for a tech.
In the UK John Deer went from 30% market share to 24 in just 3 years. I don't know what it is today 4 years later. I just remember that big drop with the whole right-to-repair issue.
One correction for the end of year video: Deere didn’t buy Bisco Industries, the distributor of fasteners and electronic components in 2014. They bought Bisco Inc. (Boston Irrigation Supply Company) a distributor of irrigation equipment in the northeastern US
John deere stopping right to repair makes me think farmers are looking elsewhere for farming equipment
And rightfully, they should. Once that technology becomes more mainstream to other competitors, John Deere is gonna dig themselves a grave... covered in sawdust and compost
thats what it will lead to and thats why capitalism is great
@realbosstakea Yeah, until Deere goes and cries to daddy in Washington and foreign competition gets a 100% import tax thus creating a virtual monopoly.
@@realbosstakea **sees bad thing happening under capitalism** - "capitalism will fix this"
@@beefeeb It always does... How's the Soviet Union doing?
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
My college buddies and I were joking that "solutions" had become a meaningless business buzzword back in the 90's. History doesn't repeat but it most definitely rhymes.
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!
From what I learnt here, Big Tech didn't ruin farming, letting John Deere build a monopoly did.
Most underrated comment, here.
Eh, I think it’s more of the “big tech” mindset and standards that did. The lack of right to repair and DRM bullshit is what is ruining agricultures, automobiles, and countless other aspects of our lives
Monopolies of any kind are detrimental to the society.
Except John Deere doesn’t have a monopoly. Ag is probably one of the most competitive spaces out there.
The big difference between Deere and other companies is how damn persistent they are at putting up dealerships EVERYWHERE. As a farmer myself, this is one of the biggest aspects when it comes to buying new equipment which is having support for the equipment you just bought.
I can agree however, that big tech did not ruin farming. If anything has ruined farming it’s all the outside investors as was stated towards the end of the video. Land owners not knowing what farming even is, hedge funds buying and selling commodity futures, other mutual funds buying up stock in every ag department out there etc etc etc. it’s bled us all dry.
It’s not a monopoly though… my grandparents have used Japanese machines for decades.
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.
If you hate capitalism and technology so much then pack your stuff and move to Cuba. Bring a GoPro with you to document your experience in a blacked out commie stone age hellhole. Get some of your Luddite friends to come with you if you can, in exchange of red-blooded patriotic Cubans.
"Repairs as revenue stream" that alone should be just not a thing. It should be an at-cost thing to keep your rep as good customer service not something you actively seek or even plan into your products to make more money.
car industry took the same path
Repair as an income stream is simple a scam. It leads to "planed breaks"
There's no excuse to not allow customers to repair the farming equipment that they bought
I’m guessing safety issues would be one reason
then repair the equipment? its not hard...
@@forzaacmilan36 What safety issues? Do be specific.
@@matthewbarabas3052 Until you find that the vector encabulator is the thing causing you the issue. And because we are now using a digital vector encabulator you have to have it configured or the point metrics are going to drift and your lines are not going to line up. And because its digital, it needs the Proprietary Software.
@forzaacmilan36 since the equipment is only used on the private land of the owner who made the unauthorized repair, NO, safety issues are NOT a justifiable reason for the manufacturer to sabotage unauthorized repair or otherwise make it impossible!
Even if they were vehicles made for public roads, it's not John Deere's responsibility to make sure the customer maintains them in a safe operating state!
When here in Slovakia they started buying John Deere tarctors, they came with a long list of warnings what not to do with it, like protect it from deep mud, water etc. because of the electronics. The tractors we had were made in Czechoslovakia, these were some beasts of a machines. As long as their engine gets diesel and air, it works. There are some examples that had a belly armour underneeth them, so you could make a fire under it to warm up the engine if it was needed. Im not saying that John Deere is bad, but they are much more complicated to work with than older machinery.
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.
Man I'd listen to Sam talk about literally anything. This dude can make anything seem like the most fascinating thing in the world.
@16:00, that's hilarious that you think a newer sprayer capable of using see and spray is only $50000. It's more like $300,000 if not more.
Ya I don't know loads about it but that seemed low
A tractor you can't fix in the field yourself is as useful as a brick trying to fly. JD makes it just about impossible to fix yourself in the field.
And yet they're still in business
Then don't buy it.
a farmer if siupposed to be self sufficent in *everything* thats why they are farmers. if they cant be self sufficent, they should sell their farms.
@@matthewbarabas3052 Except stuff will eventually break to the point where it has to be replaced. Then you stuck with that new 'smart' tractor that has a 'smart' cap for -insert relevant fluids- that once you open it, locks down the tractor until its 'authorized repair' is done.
Its not that farmers don't want to repair stuff, its that JD et al are actively preventing the repairs.
@@nickierv13 then they shouldnt buy any of the smart tractors....? this is a none issue, frankly, unless they completely stop making standard tractors, which they definitely cant.
16:25 "medium-sized farm at 450 acres" My parents grew up on 27 raising 8 kids and 32 acres raising 5, while my grandaunt married the guy with the largest farm in the area at just above 100 acres.
450 to 1000+ acres in Ireland would be considered land barons and lords and we got rid of most of them a century ago.
Out in states like North Dakota farms are as big as 40,000 acres.
US farms are way bigger then in Europe. Have you seen how empty North Dakota is
1000 acres is small
Remember America is huge, Texas itself is the size of central Europe, literally from Poland to France east to west
My family owns 240 acres of pastureland in Kansas that we lease. Only provides around $7,000 a year in income, property tax is about $5,000 annually, so about $2,000 annual net. Takes much more to make real money, or you have to be in the cattle business.
Your 16:00 statement of sprayer cost is way off. Our 2021 R4044 was $520,000 and is compatible with see and spray. The new X9 with see and spray is currently pushing $900,000 USD.
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.
16:00 minute mark, a new-ish sprayer is $500,000, not $50,000. Your missing a 0.
I laughed out loud when I heard that
Firstly I thought that the video will be just hate on new technology being more efficient, but after I saw it I realised it was not the point. Very well made video about rising problem with Deere and farming. Good job.
I don't know why, but the consolidation reminded me of East Germany (and most likely other Eastern block nations) forming smaller, privately owned farms into massive LPGs, Landwirtschaftliche Produktionsgenossenschaften (Agricultural production cooperatives). They worked on a similar principle that farmers weren't their own bosses anymore, with the only difference that profits went to the state instead of some few people that own the company
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
Fun side fact: Avgas, the fuel used in small, propeller driven aircraft, is still leaded. Farms that use crop dusting planes are introducing higher than average heavy metal contamination to both the food supply and local air conditions. Living downwind from a small airport is about bad as moving to Flint, MI.
GPS accuracy was also changed on May 2, 2000 by turning off purposefully-introduced errors
It’s not just farm equipment this is happening to either. What error code does your washing machine or vacuum cleaner spit out if not working properly. Better take it to an authorized dealer because the tools and software you need to repair it yourself are unavailable or outrageously expensive. Either that, or just purchase a new one and trash the old.
This is also the franchise model applied to agriculture. The family doesn’t own the farm or the land anymore. At best, they manage the farm, crops, and livestock for a multinational conglomeration. Your equipment comes from one company. Your seed comes from another company. And, your products are first sold via contract to a third processing company.
These farms are no longer the metaphorical donut store or ice cream shop hanging a shingle in a small town. You now need big money to buy a franchise into a brand name ecosystem. Otherwise, you will be out competed into bankruptcy.
Change every instance of "company" and similar corporate terms to "lord" in this description (especially in the middle paragraph), and you've come pretty close to describing the feudal system of medieval Europe.
Though back then serfs only had one "lord" and his lackeys to worry about, instead of dozens of competing ones all fighting to claim you while promising protection but not *actually* giving it when needed unless you pay up and have followed their rules in a way they feel is acceptable (probably with frequently shifting goalposts).
...
...
... wait a minute. >_>
@@HumbleWooper Yes, but it is so much worse now. One finds out how really "essential" they are when one deals with different ranks.
Lord/Baron = Direct manager w/in company
Viscount = Corporate "partnership"
Earl = Local municipality
Marquess = County/County-equivalent
Duke = State level
Royalty = Federal level
Each and every one gets a cut of cash to protect your "rights" and "business". Even the mob is not that harsh. They just take your kneecaps, not your livelihood.
Brilliantly insightful narrative exposing not only a company's veiled intentions, but actions. I've heard this from farmers who are trapped in Deere software/resolution to simple remedies. Also, identifying the key word "solution". Comment written early on, so farmers issues may have been addressed. It was addressed, excellent video.
I’d love if a new sprayer only cost 50k, it’s more like 500k+ these days
“A.I. is contentious”
“Here’s a word from our sponsor with which you can learn to advance in the field of A.I.”
That was great! Well put together, informative. I heard about this in 1995 as ai worked in sugar industry. Big farms needed. Thanks.
What you describe at the end, the owner of the land living timezones away and profits not being spent in the local economy, is what's been wrong with globalisation from the start, not just in farming. And it's similar to what's wrong with private equity. To the owner of a shop/ factory/ restaurant who sits in a boardroom many timezones away, the employees in that shop/ factory/ restaurant are just faceless numbers on a spreadsheet, not the mother of your kid's best friend or the goalie of the local foodball team. I'm not a communist, but capitalism is fucking up the world for all but a very small, very rich elite.
Oh, and as for "we need to produce more food with less land", let's start by wasting less food, then get smarter (like less beef), before we try to be more efficient and ruin farmland even further.
What you describe is corporatism, not capitalism. And yes, it's awful.
@@garrettrinquest1605what is better? Socialism or communism?
@@garrettrinquest1605 Corporatism and capitalism are the same thing.
I'd say no, America doesn't even have true capitalism, which would be bad anyway cause it breeds monopolies, however, we DO have Corporatism.
We have Corporations gaining rights as people, lobbyists who influence policy with millions of dollars, policies that our congressional leaders endorse, prioritize and implement to work more for Corporations than what the government is supposed to aid, The People.
Half of those in Congress ARE business leaders and former employees for some of the biggest corporations in America, some of whom return to CFO, CEO, ETC. to the same or different company after their term is up or they have mad stock in said multination corporations or other government subsidized industry. You got your Political think tanks and scientific studies with loaded pockets of biased research to sway the congress or the simple common man that big business and big government is good and that this society weve built up is pure, patriotic perfection, then no one wants to rock the boat cause they're trained to appreciate the crumbs.
And the ones that DO are labeled "Communists" who "hate" America and are ungrateful idiots from either side of the same, red and blue, two-headed political dragon. Most of whom are too rich to understand the commoners, what does Donald Trump, or Joe Biden possibly understand about the struggle of todays plebs, NOT a god damn thing, the super rich paid off by the ultra rich.
OK sorry I'm done ranting
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.
By costing millions to buy equipment needed and making it impossible to do maintenance yourself. That said, the single biggest expense outsize land and equipment is the cost of gmo seed. Your profit is in the cost of your seed.
The whole inability/illegality of planting seeds from the last harvest also needs to be outlawed
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
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.
1:49 is that a bird's eye view of the John Deere Ottumwa Works in Iowa? I'm German but I was a high school exchange student in Ottumwa and that view looked too familiar!
I went to Job Corps in Ottumwa. I'm sad you had to see one of the worst places in the US. There were crack pipes everywhere in Ottumwa... meth capital of the country for a short period of time.
@@Ramonathooh that meth time was luckily shortly before I came. Ottumwa is not the best place for sure but I had some good time over there and I enjoy revisiting every few years!
Any chance of linking this video to another one on how on earth the Dutch are the second largest exporter of agricultural products worldwide behind only the US in spite of being almost 235 times smaller in surface area?
You should add a qualifier there. They are the second by monetary value. There are lots of other that export more by volume, kaloric/nutrient value etc.
@@reappermen indeed, fair enough, but still!
@@juanjan__ one word: Tulips
@@Ramonatho🤣 they're the ones who started this whole speculative mess, the bloody Dutch
I may be totally off, but a lot of this seems like *relatively* easy tech that, these days, could be developed by a fairly small team. Perhaps we'll see startups competing with large corps like John Deere in the near future.
Yeah it is. I think JD spent so much on engineering talent that they have to cover the cost of that with exorbitant tech / hardware fees now, or they're purely charging monopoly prices while they can. I was thinking that with a relatively small team, these $700K sprayers - that i've read about numerous times in this comment section - could be designed, programmed and built for less than $100K a piece. The ML really isn't that difficult to figure out. Honestly the whole system isn't that difficult to figure out. .
If the cost of producing food goes down that means bigger profits for corporate land owners, not cheaper food for us.
nonsense
@@itube0047 No, it's not nonsense. It happened before, it's going to happen again.
@@MrGrumpyGillsamericans spend a lower percentage of their income on food in the 2020's than in any previous decade in history
Just what I needed: another Sam video to have on in the background as I wait for some food.
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.
The family farm has been dead for decades, but the myth has lived on. Ask me how I know.
Nearly, if not, all farmlands are corporate 💰💰 pits that create this persona that "The heart of America is with the farmers" while the devil [i.e.: politicians] grin behind that notion 😈
A damn shame 👎🏾
Family farming, or at least making enough food for local communities, will be back once humanoid robots are 10x more common than cars (which will happen in less than 10 years the moment the software is solved due to insane real world value). Also many more people will be growing their own food when they can have a personal famer, gardener and chief working 24/7 for free.
@@kazioo2Not a chance, infact, its going to happen the opposite way.
The world's gonna go through such a crisis, either a World War with nukes or a killer virus and we are going to plunge back into a neodark age. Way before we get those human killing robots.
@@kazioo2 not practical, if the human owners cant reasonably maintain, or repair, said robots. or if said robots suck too much.
@@kazioo2 is that your "solution"?
Big tech is now collecting big money
And u make big tears
Completely unsustainably.
So… do people still wonder why US manufacturing has largely dropped out of existence? Sounds like all of us here would jump on any competitor who might come along offering an affordable working product.
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.
16:36 did you just say "subscription"??? I can already see where this is going. Gross
15:55
$50,000 would possibly get you a 15 year old John Deere sprayer. Getting one compatible with See and Spray would probably be more like $300,000 for a used machine. Over $500,000 for something new.
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
50k new sprayer? Sign me up!
That's quite a comprehensive video about John Deere! Good Job!
There's a subscription for 'see and spray'? That's crazy. I doubt its much more than basic computer vision software that could run off a raspberry pi.
Raspi might be a wee bit under powered but not by much. But that is 100% being run local.