[jameshe]

The issue would be in transitioning to any alternative. Equipment is super expensive - and tractors are wayyy expensive, especially if you're a small-scale farmer with only two or three of them. Plus, if your equipment quits working, farmers would have a hard time selling beyond salvage value and would have no way to make more money (aside from existing inventory) to buy new equipment.

[newnewpdro]

> would have no way to make more money (aside from existing inventory) to buy new equipment.

It seems likely to me a bank would be thrilled to loan money to a consistently profitable farmer whose machines just shut themselves off because Reasons and need replacing ASAP.

[jameshe]

Very true. Certainly, this can be the case, but even small farms have overhead where a loan can create instability.

I don't want to make the mistake of assuming farmers can't manage their finances, they certainly can. But on the farmer's end, there's lots of variables that can be in play, adding unexpected debt can only increase that.

On the bank's side, if "widespread tractor failure" is a real event, banks would be issuing potential risky loans in the millions to farms, businesses, and people. Though yes, if it was a local credit union, dealing with just a couple clients, it might be a risk worth taking. Maybe it'd help out some small local banks as well as small farmers - but whether that's scalable could be a challenging business question.

[newnewpdro]

It sounds like something insurance should be addressing. If insurers covered such industry-wide machinery failures in a DRM-ridden automated world, they would be incentivized to fight on the farmer's behalf in preventing the outcome.

[pnutjam]

Pro-tip: "there's lots of variables that can be in play, adding unexpected debt can only increase that." -- this explains everyone's finances, at least those of us that work for a living.

[imtringued]

The problem isn't really that the tractor breaks down and becomes scrap metal. The problem is that if the tractor breaks down during harvest, you will lose a lot of produce during the week or two it takes to repair the tractor. A better solution would probably be to force JD to provide farmers with a replacement tractor within 24 hours for free until the broken tractor has been fixed.