| ▲ | MisterTea 7 hours ago |
| > However, the tech exists for a reason and is not inherently bad, the issue is the lock-in, the lack of choice and interoperability. These low-tech tractors could become a hot bed for open source experimentation. Nothing stopping someone from sticking a tablet on the dash. You could run GPS harvesting optimization software or some webthing locally. Could be cloud or clever DiY farmers could run their farm off a local instance on a small machine using a WiFi AP atop the barn or whatever. |
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| ▲ | dylan604 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| This was my take as well. How many 3rd parties might be able to bring on upgrades/modifications to a "dumb" tractor to make it smart vs only being able to buy a "smart" tractor from one vendor and be forced into it's rules/restrictions/prices |
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| ▲ | tempest_ 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | Plenty of options for putting auto steer on a dumb tractor already exist. | | |
| ▲ | kube-system 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Cheap ones too -- aliexpress has them. But there's more to agtech than driving a tractor around, a lot of what these big integrated systems do (at the high end) is very data driven -- determining where and how to plant, irrigate, fertilize, etc. There's a lot of integration work beyond just making the tractor drive. | | |
| ▲ | MisterTea 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > But there's more to agtech than driving a tractor around, a lot of what these big integrated systems do (at the high end) is very data driven -- determining where and how to plant, irrigate, fertilize, etc. How difficult is this to implement outside of big ag-tech? I feel that a community of experienced farmers and programmers (or programmer-farmers) could tackle this. | | |
| ▲ | tempest_ 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It really depends. The bigger agcorps have tones of integration. The machine, from tractor to combine and everything in between often feeds data together to produce a holistic understanding. Things like
- How much fuel was used
- Where your tractors and sprayers drove
- Soil samples and content
- How and where every bit of chemical and fertilizer was applied
- What weather hit your field
- How much and and the moisture content of every bit of the field you harvested It goes on an on. | | |
| ▲ | worik 32 minutes ago | parent [-] | | > The bigger agcorps have tones of integration. Yes, but how useful is the integration? The sprayers/spreaders can be connected cheap computer to achieve most of what you describe. I used to do literally that but in aircraft. Must be easier and cheaper in tractors |
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| ▲ | lallysingh 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I think this has all suddenly shifted with high-quality programming AIs available. How difficult is this to implement with Claude? | | |
| ▲ | kube-system an hour ago | parent [-] | | The software is certainly easier to build, but there's a lot of hardware involved here beyond the tractor. Claude is not necessarily going to make it easier to do soil sampling or measuring field conditions or yield outputs. |
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| ▲ | jfengel 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | What kind of sensors do those cheap kits come with? A tractor is a big thing to have rolling around unsupervised. I would want a lot of safeguards. Blindly going from one GPS point to another sounds like a nightmare. | | |
| ▲ | kube-system 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | The cheapie aliexpress specials simply drive the line they're programmed to drive. They have GPS and a gyro to account for the slope of the land. You're supposed to stay in the tractor while they're operating as a safety... but this doesn't always happen in some parts of the world. | | |
| ▲ | krater23 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | 30 years ago you had a hand-gas and clamped the wheel to drive the tractor in a line. Using GPS is a litle bit more safe than that. And I talk about Germany! |
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| ▲ | andrew_lettuce 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Is suspect most farmers would prefer the diy add-on version of these than the single manufacturer integrated one. A modern smartphone and stay of I/o sensors send like it could do pretty much the entire job | |
| ▲ | dylan604 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Right, but that has nothing to do with a vendor making a dumb tractor. Why do we need to dismissively move the conversation from TFA. The data driven approach is made up of several parts, and we're looking at a specific part | | |
| ▲ | kube-system 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Making a dumb tractor for the use-case of dumb tractor is obviously a winning idea. I just don't think you're going to effectively compete with big agtech by putting a bunch of parts in a box, shaking it, and hoping you end up with a beautifully integrated solution. Integration hell is the reason big commercial firms dominate when it comes to large integrated systems. | | |
| ▲ | throwaway173738 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Why not? They sell telematics systems separately from cars. It’s possible to do this and it might not be too difficult depending on how the system is composed. | | |
| ▲ | kube-system 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Precision ag is orders of magnitude more complicated of a system than vehicle telematics. Again, driving the tractor is the easy part, and you can already get cheap systems to do this. |
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| ▲ | dylan604 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | admittedly, i'm not a farmer nor an expert in data driving farming. but getting a farmer the ability to precisely drive a tractor in a field so that planting seeds, applying fertilizer, and any of the other steps would be a huge win. The settings used when doing that can easily come from bigFarmData gained from other sources. Can it be used even more precisely when everything is gathered/integrated by one company? That's a question that I'm not by default saying yes to, but it seems like you do think that is true. Even if it is true, does that mean the difference from a farmer going broke because his DIY tractor behaved slightly differently than your solution? I'd posit that a farmer only being allowed to play the bigFarmData game by only being allowed to buy from one vendor that is expensive while also forcing any repairs to be expensive will cause farmers to financially unnecessarily struggle. | | |
| ▲ | greedo 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The economics of farming (at least in the US) are brutal. Scaling up is really the only way to make a living long term. Some of this is due to equipment cost (look up how much a combine costs), and some is due to competition. It's not unusual for a farmer to be land rich and cash poor. If you want to see a couple of guys learning how to farm from scratch, visit https://www.youtube.com/@spencerhilbert. Spencer and his brother made a bit of money off games and Youtube and have been starting out on corn, hay, as well as raising beef. It gives a pretty good insight into how pervasive tech is in farming, and how despite that, how much of farming still relies on hard, physical work. | | |
| ▲ | dylan604 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | I'll check out Spencer's channel. For a comedy perspective, there's Clarkson's Farm or Growing Belushi. Even though they are for entertainment, there's a still a lot of info in those shows to not be written off. However, I'm not as interested in being a farmer at that level. I'm much more interested in the homesteading aspect of farming. I'm not trying to feed the world as much as me and mine and maybe some extra. So not just farming, but also some ranching with sheep/goats/chickens/pigs. I have friends doing this that I'm keeping an eye on. They had a head start as their kids grew up in FFA and are already familiar with raising live stock, and then having them processed to make that part much less daunting. | | |
| ▲ | greedo 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | I get that. Crop farming is so different than raising animals. |
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| ▲ | kube-system 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Scale is a huge factor. It makes the most sense to invest in precision ag tech when you have enough acres that the investment pays off. At 5000+ acres, farms are using integrated systems that combine satellite data, on-tractor sensors, soil sensors, drone sensors, in-field weather sensors, with a lot of science to squeeze the most out of the land. At that scale, there's a lot of money invested in a season and you aren't looking for a DIY project, you need production quality product with proven scientific rigor. You probably don't have the manpower to do a DIY project anyway, you are relying heavily on automation and outsourcing. And at the low end, it it more effort to implement any of this than you'll get out of it. So a DIY solution is aiming for somewhere in the center of the market -- enough scale that it makes sense to bother, but not enough enough money to avoid the headache of DIY. It might make sense for some mid-sized farms in developing economies, but it seems to be a narrow window to me. |
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| ▲ | pcblues an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | The kid? :) | | |
| ▲ | dylan604 an hour ago | parent [-] | | I had to scroll back up to see what this reply was to, to get the full chuckle and yup, I was told frequently by my male parental unit that the top two reasons for having kids was chores and tax deductions. But there's a reason farm families leaned on the large side. The more hands you had helping the less hard things could be while never being easy |
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| ▲ | mynameisash 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Years ago, there was a TED Talk[0] from the guy that started Open Source Ecology[1]. The TED Talk was really cool, but I haven't really followed what they did. It sounded promising to have open-source technology for use in this space. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S63Cy64p2lQ [1] https://wiki.opensourceecology.org/wiki/Main_Page |
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| ▲ | PunchyHamster 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| They have no driving electronics, electronic throttle, ECU controlled injection etc, so you are limited, you can't for example easily make it go constant set speed, because the throttle isn't electronic. It went a bit too far, optimum would be modern enough to have drive by wire but with open ECU and documentation |
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| ▲ | dghlsakjg 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | You can still control a completely mechanical engine to work with set speeds. There are mechanical governors that can do this, or you can get an electronic component that moves the throttle for you. Fixed speed engines with variable load are much older than the transistor. It is no harder than doing it with an ECU, except that you need to install a servo or speed governor with hand tools, instead of fiddling with ECU code. | |
| ▲ | jcgrillo 19 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | It has a governor.. The P pump 12 valves (and many other multi-application diesels) come with either one of two different governors, an automotive one which has a high idle and low idle, but unrestricted fueling in between. This is what you want in a car or truck where you're controlling road speed with your foot. There's also the "industrial" governor that essentially maps lever input linearly to engine RPM, and endeavors to maintain its set RPM independent of load. This is the kind you find in tractors, generators, boats, etc. These governors are basically mechanical analog computers which use the inertia of flyweights, springs, and some very clever linkages to do their thing. |
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| ▲ | spockz 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| There are already open source auto pilot and cruise control implementations for cars. (Not all cars are supported obviously!) so to have this in place for tractors off the road seems very doable. Edit: specifically thinking of https://comma.ai/ |
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| ▲ | Jbird2k 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Well open source AutoSteer exists it has a lot of features like rate control built in to it. The system is called AgOpenGPS it’s very popular for retrofitting older equipment with modern technology. |
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| ▲ | andrew_lettuce 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The beauty here is even beyond experimentation the tech will change repeatedly over the life of the equipment, and you can cheaply adapt to that. There is very little advantage to the modern tractors, beyond luxuries and the finish of a self contained package. Farmers rarely ime prioritize either of these |
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