Farmers abandoning John Deere for older non JD tractors.

[RunandFindOut]

So I live in a rural area, and over the past four years or so I'd noticed farms that had newish JD tractors selling them off and buying old tractors.  And we're not talking saving money by going used old.  We're talking these are places with plenty of cash flow selling off post 90s John Deere (and only John Deere) in order to buy ancient machines from the 70s or early 80s as replacements.  Then today I was delivering a pair of massive palleted crates to the biggest farm in the area.  We're talking an over 7000 acre spread here, guy makes bank.  He has two big pole barns that had been full of new JDs.  When I got there all three of his JD combines were gone and in their place were five old MF combines, half his JD tractors were gone and replaced with a variety of old CASE and New Hollands. 

While his grandson unloaded the pallets with a FEL I talked to him.  Old man was pissed.  Apparently he'd nearly lost a crop because two of the new combines broke down, and the local JD dealership was so swamped they couldn't get anybody out to fix them.  When he tried to get parts rush shipped to him so that he could just fix it himself and get the harvest in, he found out that JD no longer bothers with the sort of customer service they used to, and the local dealerships don't maintain the parts inventories they used to.  Oh and on top of that they'd made it effectively impossible to do repairs yourself. 

He ended up having to hire out the work to harvest it while his new expensive combines sat there like paperweights.  Now he's vocal that he's selling off his JD, and that all his tractors are going to be from before electronics.  The pallets I delivered to him were used CNC machines so he (or rather his son who knows how to use them) could manufacture his own replacement parts for them when something broke.

Anybody else noticed something like this?  Farmers abandoning John Deere because of the DRM in their new tractors and poor service and going back to old units that were easier to repair.

[pheonixstorm]

Leonard French did a video related to this

https://youtu.be/V7toRraiTNk?t=233

[Fallen_Raven]

Around my grandfather's farm the only people who bought a John Deere in the last decade were semi-retired investment farmers. Everyone working a family farm refused to touch one. The problem is that none of the old generation of farmers can work the new technology, but the new generation isn't buying enough to make it feasible to stock the new parts in volume. Which of course pushed Deere into the new markets of lawn equipment and those weird work carts, so they are trying to deal with more customers with different problems. So a once dominant name in the agricultural business has become one of several competitors in the Home Depot garden center, and people are moving to new suppliers for the products they need.

Or at least that's the story I hear around the Co-Op. Standard warnings about the ramblings of old geezers applies.

[RunandFindOut]

Apparently they were still popular here on all the big farms up until the past decade.  Yeah they were expensive but you had farms where they'd been loyal Deer customers for literally generations.  And it was mostly because JD had very good customer service and understood that when a farmer needed something fixed they needed it fixed right now cause they were losing money every hour it was needed and not running.  But as you've said they're losing customer loyalty.  I was just surprised at how far some of the local farmers were going.  With quite a few of them abandoning modern equipment and going back to pre-electronics tractors and tools.  And in the case of the farm in question I was at they are the biggest farm in the entire county.  And they sold off a bunch of expensive new JDs all less than a decade old to buy stuff from the 70s and 80s.  And spend over a hundred thousand on CNC machines so they'd be able to make their own parts to keep them running.

[Feenix74]

Yep. We are having the same problem here in Aus https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2018-03-11/farmers-spearhead-right-to-repair-fight/9535730

Here in Aus, many of the commercial scale farmers have embraced the latest hi-tech GPS guided, automated farming equipment but it is becoming a big issue in terms of service and support from the manufacturers of the farming equipment.

[Orin J.]

the problem's legal. well, greed and legal. JD is only leasing you the tractor more or less and will sue you if you try to get repairs of any kind from anyone other than them because of a loophole. and they don't have the kind of support infrastructure that can handle repairs off the cuff most of the time so the farmers have a big expensive display piece until they do.

it probably looked good on paper to try to force dependancy on their customer base, but damn if i can look at a farmer and imagine how telling him he can't fix his tractor was gonna work out with him not replacing it. i hope they change the laws for everyone's sake.

[guardiandashi]

the problem's legal. well, greed and legal. JD is only leasing you the tractor more or less and will sue you if you try to get repairs of any kind from anyone other than them because of a loophole. and they don't have the kind of support infrastructure that can handle repairs off the cuff most of the time so the farmers have a big expensive display piece until they do.

it probably looked good on paper to try to force dependancy on their customer base, but damn if i can look at a farmer and imagine how telling him he can't fix his tractor was gonna work out with him not replacing it. i hope they change the laws for everyone's sake.

in one sense I can totally see why someone would say authorized repairs only as a way to ensure that the equipment works as designed (intended) and you maintain quality to manage the customer experience.

the problem is if you do that you HAVE to have the support, maintenance and repair infrastructure to manage repairs in a timely manner when stuff breaks.

Look at the power and phone utilities as a fairly good example of something that in most cases works fairly well.

on the other hand I can totally see where the farmers are coming from, if my combines are critical and I NEED to harvest my crops within a certain window or I loose money every minute or hour that that equipment is down is literally costing me money, if it looks like I am going to loose the value of the machine within a certain time period because its not working, heck ya I am going to get something that WILL work even if its not quite as profitable to use.

and that is where it sounds like JD is shooting themselves.  they forgot who their customers were and the business model that they needed to support in the interest of short term profits at the expense of long term sustainable business

[RunandFindOut]

the problem's legal. well, greed and legal. JD is only leasing you the tractor more or less and will sue you if you try to get repairs of any kind from anyone other than them because of a loophole. and they don't have the kind of support infrastructure that can handle repairs off the cuff most of the time so the farmers have a big expensive display piece until they do.

Interestingly I just ran across a Federal court case that just smashed the Deere position.  A federal court recently ruled that it was legal to break DRM on a product you bought in order to conduct repairs.  And it was brought specifically over John Deere.  On the other hand it apparently isn't very easy to break their DRM, so I can understand farmers eschewing digital integrated systems entirely.  It's a lot easier to fabricate a steel part that's no longer available than to figure out exactly what part of a complicated embedded computer control system isn't functioning and restore it to proper working order.

[Red Pins]

I understand the latest cars are to follow this model as well - the use of computers in everyday vehicles precludes the kind of neighborhood mechanic I went to for repairs until recently.  He put the tools down late one Friday night to hear his partners, and said he was going to retire next week and needed his share of the garage out the business.  Garage just folded.  The rest of them couldn't replace him and the electronic stuff he had sold at auction.

Really not looking forward to this coming to Canada.  My uncle-in-law is a shop foreman at the Ford dealership in town, he doesn't have much nice to say about how much they're making in profit and what this could do for their bottom line.

[Ruger]

I understand the latest cars are to follow this model as well - the use of computers in everyday vehicles precludes the kind of neighborhood mechanic I went to for repairs until recently.  He put the tools down late one Friday night to hear his partners, and said he was going to retire next week and needed his share of the garage out the business.  Garage just folded.  The rest of them couldn't replace him and the electronic stuff he had sold at auction.

Really not looking forward to this coming to Canada.  My uncle-in-law is a shop foreman at the Ford dealership in town, he doesn't have much nice to say about how much they're making in profit and what this could do for their bottom line.

Many auto manufactures are now making it where virtually all of the engine is now sealed up and you must go to one of that company's repair shop to get virtually anything worked on. Seen it almost every time I visit the Nissan plant in Smyrna, TN for instance, and on some GM and Chrysler product if I recall correctly, although it's been a while since I've been to one of those, especially the latter.

Don't remember it being that way 10 years ago when I was visiting big rig factories, but car manufactures nowadays? Oh yeah...

If anyone other than their repair shops does anything to the car, it voids whatever warranty you may have had with them, and some places can't (or won't) even consider opening up the sealed systems.

Ruger

[ThePW]

I'm over 8 years out of the loop but I think the Navy suffer from similar problems (mainly forklifts but also select GSE for F-35's)… I don't understand how they can go retrotech and succeed? Some parts for older tractors do not exist (one of many reasons why the US Navy replaced dozens of end items in it's aircraft and support equipment inventory right around the time I retired) and I don't believe it'll just require a +2 on the skill check either.

[DarkSpade]

The biggest problem is the onboard computers.  You replace the part and the computer will refuse to recognize it unless an authorized JD repair man plugs his computer into the tractor to tell the tractor it's okay.   It's not a new problem either.  I remember reading about a software company in Ukraine making bank by selling JD tractor owners kits that let them bypass the DRM.

[iamfanboy]

I had an anti-DRM acquaintance who predicted exactly this, almost twenty years ago: that the DMCA would be used to create car repair monopolies the moment computers in cars became advanced enough to do so. I didn't really regard him as WRONG at the time, but it is kinda weird to remember a conversation two decades old that accurately called the future.

His words were, if I'm remembering accurately, "Corporations are eager to create a place where you don't own ANY of the objects in your hands - you only rent them, and pay for the privilege of having them repaired when they break and get into trouble if you act as though you actually DO own them."

[Matti]

I had an anti-DRM acquaintance who predicted exactly this, almost twenty years ago: that the DMCA would be used to create car repair monopolies the moment computers in cars became advanced enough to do so.

Are all new cars made in this year like that? Lada too?

[Ruger]

Are all new cars made in this year like that? Lada too?

Not all...but likely upwards of 90% or so...at least from the big car companies...

Edit: or it is at least quickly heading in that direction...

Ruger

[Cache]

Are all new cars made in this year like that? Lada too?

Heading that way, I agree.

As far as automobiles go, though, I think it's more a product of emissions and efficiency standards than it is greed. Fortunately you can still buy everything you need to repair or rebuild a not-terribly-computerized-if-at-all auto.

It's a lot easier to fabricate a steel part that's no longer available than to figure out exactly what part of a complicated embedded computer control system isn't functioning and restore it to proper working order.

With the advances in 3D scanning, 3D printing, and CNC machining, that is very true.

[Matti]

With the advances in 3D scanning, 3D printing, and CNC machining, that is very true.

Up to until computers and electronics in THOSE start acting up ::)

[iamfanboy]

What really perturbs me is that older Shadowrun books, from the very early 1990s, talked about this fight - between corporations trying to lock their customers into a monopoly on everything from fridges to cars, and individually-owned 3D printer devices who could make anything they needed for their owners.

As it's Shadowrun, things went pretty well for the corporations in that fight.

[Matti]

"We live in future."

Just with less of punk.

[Red Pins]

I could see a startup company going the route of Android; common components put into different models of small-run cars with limited plug-and-play computer components.  Basically the way computers are made to order by individuals now.

Frankly, I'd buy such a thing.  I can't conceive of not owning my possessions, but that's me.

[Matti]

I could see a startup company going the route of Android; common components put into different models of small-run cars with limited plug-and-play computer components.  Basically the way computers are made to order by individuals now.

Frankly, I'd buy such a thing.  I can't conceive of not owning my possessions, but that's me.

So what you're looking for is car equivalent of IBM PC 5150 & its clones?

[Red Pins]

So what you're looking for is car equivalent of IBM PC 5150 & its clones?

I'm not sure.  Hmm.  Think 3D printer and components/electronics going together like lego blocks.   xp

[guardiandashi]

I kind of thought of something similar and yet totally different at another level.

basically you have the hardware of the vehicle that is semi standard, but has essentially a standard control interface much like pc components and usb devices today.

so you have all of these devices hook into a wiring harness that ties them all into the "computer" essentially a PLC (Programmable Logic Controller ) that gets them to interface with the actual computer(s) and for the actual processing instead of the multi-thousand dollar (specialized) computers that are being used in most cars you have an array of ports to plug in what amounts to compusticks which load a "car" application or os that monitors all the various devices/sensors and then tells then the reactions based on the inputs.

if you need additional processing power you could install additional compusticks and load balance them by distributing tasks based on actual processing loads and how critical the tasks are.

[Red Pins]

...Yeah.  That's what I meant.  I feel old, all of a sudden.

[Kidd]

I think most of us would agree we'd do the same if it was a more relatable piece of equipment such as a PC.

Like hell I'm bringing my PC in to the official dealer and wait 3 PC-less weeks for the guy to figure out what's wrong, replace the part and/or wipe my HDD rather than attempt a more time consuming fix, "you should've backed up", but not before poking around to see if I have any homemade, uh, romance videos, or pics of my sister or girlfriend etc

No, I'd rip apart my PC first and see if I can fix it or buy the parts needed. And I'll trash my HDD before handing it over to anyone else, thanks.

Any PC manufacturer that won't let me do that? Yeah, nah, sod that, I'll roll back to Windows XP if I have to.

"We live in future."

Just with less of punk.

Word.

[Luciora]

Manufacturers don't make money off selling parts to old equipment.  Money is made by selling new complete gear.  If the farmers are doing their own repairs and replacement, that is lost money to the company. 

Times have changed considerably when a farmer could make money from a single tractor and an oil change every year, so to speak.

That's not to defend Deere, but i'm sure that more reliable machines means less reason to pay a stable of mechanics to be on standby in case something broke.  That costs the company money as well.

[guardiandashi]

Manufacturers don't make money off selling parts to old equipment.  Money is made by selling new complete gear.  If the farmers are doing their own repairs and replacement, that is lost money to the company. 

Times have changed considerably when a farmer could make money from a single tractor and an oil change every year, so to speak.

That's not to defend Deere, but i'm sure that more reliable machines means less reason to pay a stable of mechanics to be on standby in case something broke.  That costs the company money as well.

actually no they do NOT make the vast majority on the sale of the unit, manufacturers make a LOT of money on spare parts and repairs.

to use the JD example: lets say that the machine costs 100k typically over the useful life ~10-20 years they hope to get a good 10-20k+ for non warranty repairs

[PsihoKekec]

And some people think the Succession Wars lostech situation can't happen...

[Matti]

I think most of us would agree we'd do the same if it was a more relatable piece of equipment such as a PC.

Like hell I'm bringing my PC in to the official dealer and wait 3 PC-less weeks for the guy to figure out what's wrong, replace the part and/or wipe my HDD rather than attempt a more time consuming fix, "you should've backed up", but not before poking around to see if I have any homemade, uh, romance videos, or pics of my sister or girlfriend etc

I have seen claims Apple repair centers do just that with incompetent people. Is this one video on YouTube where Mac laptop has faulty motherboard, and repair service personnel couldn't just replace the thing while keeping old SSD.

[Colt Ward]

I think most of us would agree we'd do the same if it was a more relatable piece of equipment such as a PC.

Like hell I'm bringing my PC in to the official dealer and wait 3 PC-less weeks for the guy to figure out what's wrong, replace the part and/or wipe my HDD rather than attempt a more time consuming fix, "you should've backed up", but not before poking around to see if I have any homemade, uh, romance videos, or pics of my sister or girlfriend etc

No, I'd rip apart my PC first and see if I can fix it or buy the parts needed. And I'll trash my HDD before handing it over to anyone else, thanks.

Any PC manufacturer that won't let me do that? Yeah, nah, sod that, I'll roll back to Windows XP if I have to.
Word.

But this is becoming more of a problem as well- I used to have two or three Radio Shacks I would use to buy new components for my PC- basically wiring to plug in new fans  or other smaller pieces of equipment.  I order a new graphics card, it takes the plug for power that used to go to the the fan- now I need a splitter or whatever to get that fan power again.

Problem is, the Radio Shacks are gone and I am not sure where I can go locally to find that $.90 wire . . . or go buy a $15 (or whatever) replacement fan cause the other one burned out.  Places are dropping carrying parts b/c they do not move as much & its overhead.

Yeah, I heard this problem with Deere- my brother in law is a tractor mechanic and works 18-20 hour days in his garage during planting & harvesting season.  It costs money to get him out of the garage to go out to someone's farm during that time.  But he is self-employed, so the new computer stuff on the Deere is iffy with farmers he works with even if he does have something painted green in the que.

And its not just the tractors- like someone pointed out the cars are going that way, the trend is pushing ahead even faster b/c supposedly millennials do not care about owning things- house, car, electronics.  Cars are a interesting cultural/societal case, because the car in America and learning to drive at 16 & getting a license was a symbol of freedom (part of mass transit problems) but the latest generation do not care about owning the means of that independence and one of the self-driving cars business model is where even if you own a car you 'rent' it out Uber-ish instead of it sitting in a parking lot while at work or at home at night.

Insurance companies are trying to get access to the computer running your car (aka black box) and in Russia from what I understand insurance companies require dash-cams.  They want the data on how you drive to determine liability.

Your early 00s phones are very different from your Android now . . . anyone remember swapping batteries?  or having a charger that was a cradle so the battery at the back could get its connection?  Well your phone still has a battery but its now firmly in the casing of your phone.  Why?  Its not for convenience since you have other brand quick charge & spare battery options rather than the manufacturer selling you spare batteries (or having a long life option for more expense).  Its so the phone has constant power as it pings the towers . . . and even with your location tracking turned off, Alphabet knows your movements.