[HEHENE]

Having worked on a John Deere integration for an agtech company I can't say I'm surprised. The MyJohnDeere API had a lot of idiosyncrasies that smelled like inexperienced or mismanaged development, especially around authentication/authorization.

At the time I was working on it they had some extremely arcane authentication process that required round-trip emails, various link clicking and code entering, and all kinds of craziness. Toward the end of my tenure our point of contact finally told us they were moving to OAuth but they had nearly zero documentation on it.

For anyone who isn't knowledgable in the farming space, I'd highly recommend a browse through John Deere's API documentation [0]. Before the agtech gig I hadn't really given it a second though, but modern farms are very high tech operations. Really cool stuff happening in agtech.

[0] https://developer-portal.deere.com/#/myjohndeere/api-invento...

[nightowl_games]

We need a new word for these high tech massive farming operations. I come from the Canadian farming sector. Most of the farmers here are individuals, or medium sized family operations. Even the big farms aren't "high tech". There just a lot of guys and a bunch of leased machines. We have essentially 0 "high tech" farms.

I wouldn't say "modern farms are very high tech operations", I'd say "high tech industrial players are in the process of taking over western agriculture".

The word "farm" mean something special to me, as I was born and raised on one. What your talking about is something completely different.

[MAGZine]

I'm curious to know what your standards for high tech are. I know that there are many farms in southern alberta who regularly get the latest farming equipment which includes john deere's that drive themselves.

Hell, Lethbridge is home to at least one successful agtech biz, if not more. They're flying drones to analyze weed cover and optimize spraying based on positional data.

It can be very high tech. I don't know what you're saying that it doesn't exist. It's happening in canada literally right now.

That said a lot of these are for medium to large operations. Despite high tech, farmers who farm smaller plots generally have better yield. The automation has basically just let business expand into larger operations they might not otherwise have manpower or expertise to cover.

[commentingbadly]

> There just a lot of guys and a bunch of leased machines. We have essentially 0 "high tech" farms.

I think OP might mean that these "high tech farms" are less like farms and more like movie studios. The tractor makers and the bank are acting like a movie studio. The are running a production in a certain area, with certain high tech equipment, with certain subleases on land for a certain number of years. There is no one driving vision and keeping the flame of what high tech should be. It's more like, "let's get this soy to market in the new way that is 7% cheaper before the other team does." Just a guess on what OP means

[universa1]

hmm... having grown up on a farm in Germany and even though my father was only employed as the manager, it still felt more like "our" farm. It was definately a big farm compared to the german average, but then that average also includes a lot of part-time/side-business farms, where.

Despite the size, the general methods between a smaller and a larger farm are not that different imho. But the amount of tech in a modern tractor was and still is amazing, and at the time the average car was definately not up to par. "automatic" GPS assisted driving, "laser" assisted driving (on harvesters). Beyond that, most of the "management" data was already digital 15 years ago, partly due to compliance requirements. And satellite imagery, soil samples, etc... were at least partly integrated.

And I would still call this a farm! Times change, and clinging to the old times in some nostalgia doesn't help. (I don't want to imply that you do!)

And on a slightly different perspective: I don't think bigger farms necessarily produce worse food, generate more externalities, etc... The processes are much more optimized, and at least I think the potential for better food with less externalities is with bigger farms. Also it is a somewhat bogus comparison: Mostly nobody complains that their car / laptop / smartphone comes from a factory, but for farming there is this strange preference for something of 50-100years past.

[GuB-42]

> Also it is a somewhat bogus comparison: Mostly nobody complains that their car / laptop / smartphone comes from a factory, but for farming there is this strange preference for something of 50-100years past.

It is not specific to farming. Handmade, artisan stuff sells well, even when it is objectively worse. And in general, people are more sympathetic to small businesses than big, faceless corporations. We value the human element I guess.

As for food, we tend to equate big farms with everything bad with current agriculture, even if it doesn't have to do with it: crops bred for yield instead of taste/nutrition, monoculture with pesticides/herbicides, ... It is partly true because small, traditional farms then to focus on quality and ethics/sustainability/... rather than price, because they can't compete on price.

[speeder]

I think this is because when an artisan makes something, usually you know he tried hard, even if it ends being crap because subpar skills.

With industrialized products you know they want it cheap, resulting in crap product that didn't need to be crap.

For example once I had to repair my Electrolux fridge, when I opened it up I saw two very nasty things: 1. the holes between parts were all misaligned, to the point it was impossible to insert the screws intended to go in them. 2. it was then glued with a ton of glue spread "randomly" all over the place, it was obviously shoddy.

And the issue I had to fix in that fridge? They used the cheapest "defrost" button they could, one that notoriously got stuck often, so your fridge would stay in "defrost" mode forever and stop working, the solution was disassemble it, force the button back with a screwdriver, assemble it again... every time you used the button.

[msrenee]

Somewhat related, but the glue situation reminded me of the time I realized I'm going to need to hire a woodworker if I ever want quality cabinets in my kitchen. I was doing delivery for one of the big home improvement stores and got asked to stay late and run some cabinets to a customer. Light crap on overtime? I'm there.

I'm looking at these cabinets in the stock room and they're crap. No joinery, no screws, just flat pieces of cheap wood glued together. So I go to joke with the woman who works in that department about how cheaply they were constructed. She looked me dead in the eye and told me, oh no, these were the nicest cabinets we sold in the store. Top of the line. They even use extra glue to make them sturdier.

[throwaway0a5e]

Who's we?

I know a guy who can't go through a drive through without lecturing everyone in the car about how being able to get 400kcal for a buck and a half is an amazing feat of societal progress. But he's old and emigrated from Poland so...

My example may be an outlier but there's plenty of people who are happy to get Chilean produce in January and don't care how much methane their 75/25 beef emitted. HN has the spare cash and brain cycles to care about a lot of things that normal people don't even think about.

[xaedes]

For comparison: A regular buck (the animal) may have something around the 160000 kcal.

[galangalalgol]

As to distrusting large companies, I think that is an intuitive understanding we have that in any organization larger than 100 people, it is likely led by a sociopath. They gravitate towards positions of power, they have superficial charm that hold in large groups where you don't get to know people well, and they occur at about 1 in 100.

[throwaway0a5e]

Even ignoring leaders, once you get beyond 100-200 people responsibility is necessarily divided up such that people stop being responsible for the organization and start being responsible to the organization. And then the organization does sociopathic things things whether people want to or not. Even an organization's leaders are subject to this. After all 100s of people's paychecks depend on their decisions. The more people you add, the more you divide up responsibility, the more you remove the leaders from the customers, the worse it gets.

[cronix]

> What your talking about is something completely different.

I wonder if farmers felt the same way when tractors first started coming onto the scene replacing ox/horses and a plow, or combines, or grain carts, or seed drills, or...

Did you grow up using any of that at-the-time "high tech" equipment? It was high tech at some point, now just common tech. At what point is something considered "high tech?" If you were born in the age of cell phones, are they considered high tech, or just common tech you can find on any street corner like gumball machines? If you were born in the 1950's, does your opinion differ on cell phones from someone currently in their 20's who grew up with it and knew no other way?

Technology fueled the Agricultural Revolution. https://www.thoughtco.com/agricultural-revolution-1991931

[hellbannedguy]

If a John Deere salesman knocked on that screen door 80 years ago and said, "Mr. Farmer I have something that will make your life easier. The only drawback is when it breaks down, you can't buy parts, can't see repair documatation, and only pricy factory workers whom live far away will be able to repair the machine at set rates.

The farmer would have slammed the door, and fed his horses.

[cto_of_antifa]

To be fair, if you made the pitch that way to farmer today they would as well - those points are all iffy.

mostly, though, the nature of labor has completely and utterly changed in 80 years and comparing the two is like apples and oranges.

[cat199]

> those points are all iffy.

for tractors generally, maybe, but have read many things specifically about john deere being very DRM/anti repair, and a quick google seems to highlight that there are court battles being fought over exactly this right now.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-03-05/farmers-f...

[salawat]

And yet... Deere still gets bought. So clearly someone isn't pointing out something they should be.

[analognoise]

Or the comparison is flawed, farmers aren't dumb and it makes economic sense to buy the Deere?

[ABeeSea]

So said the blacksmith’s son watching the invention of the steel press.

“High tech industrial players are in the process of taking over western forgery.”

[nightowl_games]

Ya and we don't call a factory a Blacksmith now do we?

"Modern blacksmiths sure are big!"

[ABeeSea]

Blacksmith was a job. Forge was the location. And industrial forges are very, very large.

Blacksmith:Farmer::Forge:Farm

[hinkley]

Foundries were a thing, but even those are giving way to factories, right?

I mean, someone will always make stock, but fewer companies melt metal these days, or at the very least relative to those that carve it up or weld it together (which may or may not involve a little melting, given spin welding and other techniques).

[ABeeSea]

Foundries and forges are different things.

A forge is closer to what you would call a manufacturing factory:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forging

A foundry smelts. But it is also technically a factory for input material. In the same way a sawmill is a factory.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundry

[TheTester]

The industrial revolution and its consequences...

[snarf21]

For perspective, my parents both grew up on farms and I spent my summers on them. You are right but "farming" used to be a family with 3 acres and an ox and a plow. These small farms you lament are just as much a whole new world to the ox and plow as a 16/20 row combine that can process 150 acres a day is to your childhood. Efficiency comes from specialization which creates incentives for economies of scale. Software will continue to eat the world.

[frosted-flakes]

Factory farm.

[newsclues]

Southern Ontario has farm tiling fields with high tech gps tractors.

Lots of tech for data and tracking

[alricb]

Sovkhoz? That's what they called them in the soviet union.

[anonymfus]

I like the idea of SMBC author Zach Weinersmith to repurpose a word "villain" for them IIRC what he wrote on his twitter correctly.

[louis___]

> Really cool stuff happening in agtech.

I don't know if I agree with you. These kind of agtech farms tend to get heavy on pesticides use and tillage, which on the long term kills the ground life.

And it leaves the farmers' hands tied when a bug happens : https://www.vice.com/en/article/xykkkd/why-american-farmers-...

[p_l]

They tend to be because it's cheap and easy to be this way.

Meanwhile they are also the biggest levers if appropriately motivated (whether by extra legal or legal incentives) to use better solutions.

[throwaway894345]

I've worked as a contractor for John Deere, and I can vouch for "inexperienced and mismanaged development". I was working on the embedded side of the business, not the API side. Some interesting observations:

* John Deere didn't hire anyone for a Software Engineering job unless they were a licensed engineer, at least in the area that I worked in. This meant a lot of EE and CE majors were writing the software and they pretty much all viewed software dev as "a foot in the door" to do the hardware work to which they aspired. This may not have been true across the company (perhaps only in the area that I worked in) and it may not be true today.

* This also manifest in a culture that was utterly divorced from the rest of the software industry. They're just moving from subversion to git, much of their "CI/CD pipeline" was built with windows .bat scripts and code generation via excel files that take hours to run (I shit thee not). They build pretty much everything in-house from hardware to embedded operating systems, and their embedded codebases are littered with #ifdefs to conditionally compile different code snippets based on the specific model of tractor/comine/sprayer/etc and feature set that it is to be loaded onto. It's hard to put into writing how difficult this is to maintain.

* They build everything in-house, but it's a big company and people just email around binaries for various development tools with no way to find the source code or even the author except to ask around. Submitting a patch to a dev tool is an enormous effort. Word is they're moving to GitHub, and I think it's going to be a game changer for developers.

* Other than that, there's a long tail of other problems. IT seems to have management paranoid that if developers are too productive the hackers will steal their IP and the company will go under or something. So getting a server provisioned is a months-long affair and teams will occasionally just run a Jenkins server from a former coworker's desktop that IT forgot to pick up. There's a culture of "don't try to improve things that aren't immediately in your purview". They routinely pick tools that are abysmal to work with--I don't mean "everyone has different preferences", I mean "they bought SharePoint and made everyone use it, but didn't pay for the SharePoint consultants who program the software to be actually usable within an organization (I'm generously assuming that it's possible to make SharePoint usable--I'm not sure this is the case).

All of that said, John Deere has some really cool problems that would be really fun to work on if not for all of their organizational issues. They had self driving tech years before anyone else, they have a vast array of vehicles that run these distributed networks of embedded controllers, they make their own hardware and software (which could be a lot of fun to work on if managed properly), they aspire to use ag data to improve yields and have a credible path forward (as opposed to the "step 1: use big data, step 2: profit!" sense). Additionally, I think they probably are innovative and well-run in many non-software respects, but I'm not qualified to comment.

Similarly, for all of its issues (including hostility toward folks who want to repair their vehicles), I really want them to turn a corner and succeed because agtech is really cool and they're an American Icon with a (increasingly tarnished) reputation for quality, innovation, and providing quality jobs. I wish them the best and maybe one day I'll apply and try and help from within.

[batmaniam]

Where would one find these kind of jobs? Practically all job boards I see just list standard companies doing ads, or whatever.