[MisterTea]

> 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.

[dylan604]

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

[tempest_]

Plenty of options for putting auto steer on a dumb tractor already exist.

[kube-system]

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.

[bborud]

35 years in the tech industry has taught me one thing: incumbents that have been around for a long time are almost always more clueless and more full of shit than you think, what they do isn't as hard as they claim and you can probably do better given a fraction of the time they spent just because you don't have legacy systems to worry about and because technology and tooling has moved on.

Incumbents thrive on the myths about what they do being hard and impossible to replicate.

Yes, it is a lot of work to replace what you can get off the shelf today. But it isn't like the basic tech itself is all that hard to replicate step by step if you accept that it takes time and the first N development stages will give you something that isn't as feature rich and polished. And if one makes it open source, interoperability will be easier to do something about.

Perhaps some of the analysis tools/services you can buy today will be hard to replicate, but I doubt they are that hard to replicate. And it is worth having slightly suboptimal results for a couple of seasons than being on the receiving end of a hostage-situation.

But yes, it is certainly a huge effort to get what you actually need.

[kube-system]

The Pareto principle applies. For highly complex systems it’s easy to build most of what the incumbents have. It’s the last 20% where it is hard to catch up just because the incumbents have decades of a head start and have the momentum. And even more so here because it’s not just software. It’s very science and hardware heavy.

For farming, it’s even more tough because the market has a really uneven distribution. Usually the best place to tackle huge incumbents is in the midmarket. They’re big enough to need your automation, but they’re small enough to take a risk to save some money, and the features you haven’t built yet aren’t blockers for them.

But there’s basically no midmarket farming, all farms are pretty much either really big or really small.

[dylan604]

Another clue into this is how hard they litigate. Can't innovate, litigate is a phrase for a reason

[MisterTea]

> 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_]

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]

> 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

[lallysingh]

I think this has all suddenly shifted with high-quality programming AIs available. How difficult is this to implement with Claude?

[kube-system]

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.

[AngryData]

Farmers would be foolish to rely on an LLM because farming margins are too low to makeup for even a small quick mistake. Many farms will profit 1% on investment over 1-2 decades, although year to year yield can vary 30%.

[jfengel]

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]

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]

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!

[defrost]

Here you go, local grain farmer (4,500 hectares, barley, grains) reviews a fully automated driverless swarm bot in boom spray configuration:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljEKN7CsjnM

[dylan604]

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]

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]

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.

[dylan604]

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.

[andrew_lettuce]

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

[pcblues]

The kid? :)

[dylan604]

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

[mynameisash]

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

[worldsayshi]

I absolutely love this vision. He's still working towards the goal. It seems that his vision has problems scaling up though. He seems to mostly still drive this himself.

[PunchyHamster]

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

[dghlsakjg]

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.

[PunchyHamster]

It is far easier for 3rd party stuff to target say open bus protocol rather than a servo + speed sensor pair.

[dghlsakjg]

From a software perspective it’s the same. The software doesn’t care if it is telling a servo to rotate or an ECU to increase speed. Both systems need an external speed sensor feeding in. The only extra on the mechanical engine is adding a generic servo.

Both systems can use an open bus protocol. The mechanical system resists proprietary rent seeking as an added bonus.

We’re commenting on an article about farmers willing to pay for tractors with rebuilt all mechanical engines when the exact same tractor could be built with a new computer controlled one. That choice was intentional.

[jcgrillo]

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.

[PunchyHamster]

I know, I used tractor like this. Governor only keeps RPM, not the air-fuel ratio and a bunch of other emission and fuel usage related stuff.

And it's a bit easier to make 3rd party addons when you just have some open bus standard, not "mount that servo on a gas pedal"

[jcgrillo]

There's a device called an "aneroid compensator" that sits on top of the governor and is used to maintain a fueling profile for a specific density altitude (e.g. limit fuel at higher altitudes on naturally aspirated engines or off-boost on turbocharged engines). This effectively maintains AFR, although it is not a closed loop system. For closed loop control you need to measure AFR directly in the exhaust and compensate, which means you need (at least, a common rail system that can time injection events independently from the valve train would be even better) an electronically governed injection pump. There's no good way to do this with some 3rd party add-on. You'd be much better off just using an electronically governed Bosch injection pump (like those found on 24 valve Cummins or 1998-1999 Mercedes OM606 turbodiesels). But then you incur the encumbrance of the ECU and all the bad corporate behavior that comes along for the ride.

Also note that maintaining a particular AFR in a diesel is kind of a non goal, at least from the perspective of engine performance. With the older style, simple injection systems that are user serviceable you only get one pulse per cycle. So you can't really change AFR without compromising torque output. For a tractor, when I set the lever all the way forward I (the operator) expect it to maintain revs sufficient to maintain 540rpm at the PTO unless it is not able to do so (fueling maxed out under load). Putting more load necessarily means more fuel in for a given RPM, ergo higher AFR. Note that turbocharging changes this equation a little.

[spockz]

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/

[Jbird2k]

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.

[bborud]

I would be surprised if this doesn't exist already in some nascent form?

This is an area where you would probably need entire ecosystem of systems that are onboard tractors, but also for the various implements you hook up to it to monitor sowing, fertilizing, spraying etc. Including backend systems that you can either self-host or subscribe to some service that doesn't have awful terms.

It shouldn't take immense amount of capital to make some real progress towards something that can make a difference.

[infecto]

My bet would be there will be a niche for these tractors at hobby farms but the reality is outside of niche goods and hobby farms, farming is about scale and the machines that companies like JD sell help a lot. Sure the tech is locked down but at the scale those players are running at it’s baked into the service contract to minimize downtime.

[MandieD]

A niche called Mennonites in general and in particular, Amish in communities that are ok with motors, but not with fancy, fragile electronics.

[infecto]

Right those are niches like hobby farms. There is a market but it has a pretty distinct shape. The broader point was a machine like this is not changing farming.

[andrew_lettuce]

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

[laughing_man]

With high end tractors you can have them drive themselves on the rows based on a GPS map that was created when you planted. That's going to be difficult to retrofit.