[randomdata]

> I think it's a myth that Roundup is used as a desiccant.

I can say from personal experience (I am a farmer) that it is not. My white beans get the roundup treatment. They would never dry down in time for a successful harvest otherwise.

In the olden days before roundup they used to pull them and leave them to dry before harvest, but that brought its own issues, including requiring many more trips over the field. That is a costly endeavour, including needing multiples more greenhouse gas emitting fuel, which has its own fair share of environmental impacts.

> But they can definitely reduce overall man-hours, and so provide constant value as long as they operate.

Even a simple autosteer system, which does not even replace the operator, can cost more than many farmers would spend on labour in their lifetime. Low-volume specialized farming technology is insanely expensive.

What I believe is primarily pushing the technology is difficulty in finding labour, especially skilled labour. Farmers are seeking more automation to simplify the tasks enough that you can throw any random person on the machine and get a quality result out of their work.

Operator-less equipment is inevitable, but there is no way the manufactures are going to let the farmer capture any potential gains. It is going to be priced to meet the costs of labour. The farmers will still choose it because they are having trouble finding labour in the first place.

[ndh2]

> The farmers will still choose it because they are having trouble finding labour in the first place.

If a farmer has trouble finding labor, they don't pay enough. The question is whether or not automation is cheaper than the actual rate that you have to pay in order to get somebody to do the manual labor. Not the rate you would like to pay.

Maybe it's just semantics, but I don't think "trouble finding labor" is a thing.

Anyways, thank you for your comments in this thread. Very insightful.

[randomdata]

> Maybe it's just semantics, but I don't think "trouble finding labor" is a thing.

In a perfect market it isn't. In the real world, I know a big struggle in my area is simply getting enough people to come here in the first place. Not just farmers, but all businesses. It is a small population and there has been an recent economic turnaround, so all of a sudden there is a lot of work, but nobody nearby to do it. It will eventually correct as people start to move here, but that takes time. Possibly a lot of time. People tend to not uproot their entire lives to move to a new location on a whim, no matter how much money is on offer.

A shortage (the technical definition, not the one the newspapers like to use) is also possible under the right conditions. In my legal jurisdiction, the government has defined a price ceiling on doctor services. If there aren't enough doctors, we legally cannot offer them more money to attract them, or push other patients out of the market. Trouble finding doctors is very real, especially in rural communities where doctors are less apt to want to practice and no amount of money the patient is willing to offer is going to fix that.

[usefulcat]

"Operator-less equipment is inevitable, but there is no way the manufactures are going to let the farmer capture any potential gains."

In a properly functioning market, seems like competition between manufacturers would be the mechanism by which the gains would be passed along to the farmer. Are you saying that there is or will be insufficient competition in that market?

[randomdata]

> Are you saying that there is or will be insufficient competition in that market?

It think is the case. I would suggest that there are only three main players in the industry right now. And what smaller ones are out there seem to have little involvement in the kind of computer/electronics tech that would bring the automation being discussed here, but rather build simpler mechanical-focused machines.

When many of these machines can already be priced at amounts nearing $1M to buy as a farmer, I imagine the capital costs to develop that new equipment to be in the hundreds of millions, if not billions. The opportunity for a new business to build a new machine end-to-end, with that level of technology, is pretty small. It doesn't help that the market of farmers out there willing to buy these machines is also comparatively small to other markets that might appeal to someone with that skillset.

It becomes more complicated than that as not all manufactures have a strong dealership/service presence in all operating areas, so even if another manufacturer can technically offer you the same machine for less, you may not be able to consider it due to lack of reasonable service. Farm equipment breaks all the time, so service availability is an absolute necessity. That is even more important than the original purchase price.