Check out Project Farm on YouTube to get a sense of what the average farmer is like in terms of engineering mindset.
They would love this.
Farmers are smart. When your combine breaks during harvest, you can't just grab another or wait a couple of days for the repair guy to show up -- you need it fixed now. That's not easy.
Not to mention, understanding your soil, your crops, the weather, how they interact, how to handle everything from planting up to post-harvest processing... it's not an easy job.
And this starts at a young age, because all the kids help out on the farm, too. You know why licenses for vehicles aren't required on private property? Farms. Early-teenagers need to be able to drive around a truck, then a tractor, etc.
Just one data point - when the clutch on our 1994 (methinks) Case tractor broke a few years ago, the quoted cost for having a new one installed was close to $5,000. My father-in-law and I spent two days splitting the tractor, refurbishing the clutch using a $250 kit and reassembling it. No expensive or fancy tools, but a lot of headscratching and educated guesses, plus we needed to craft a couple of rather large stands and jigs using timber already on hand.
The $4,750 thus saved is more than we make annually from renting out the fields to a nearby farmer (We just live on the farm, we're not working the land nor having any animals anymore.)
I believe this situation is rather typical on smaller farms - you have to make things work on your own or with the help of friends and neighbours, or you're SOL.
Having a hundred repair jobs a year that might be each be quoted between one and ten thousand sound about right for medium scale farm here, and the bulk of those would be done "in house" .. welding up jigs, repairing sprayers, building sheds, moving silos, putting in gas, power, water lines etc .. all par for the course.
That's the life style, steady fettling.
Hence I do engineering instead. The farm is just an expensive hobby. :)
Homesteading is a dream of mine, but I may be too rooted in the comforts of working in tech for it. Maybe if I win the startup lottery.
-I guess that depends on how you define homesteading; I quite enjoy myself living on a farm with no animals larger than a cat (And I could do without the cat, thankyouverymuch!), having a day job in engineering and spending some - well, a lot of - my sparetime picking up useful skills, like how to fix a tractor on the cheap, forestry, digging trenches, building sheds, maintaining said sheds, filling them with firewood, repaving roads...
I have the good fortune of having my in-laws living next door, though; they've been running the farm since forever and I pick up all sorts of useful things, not to mention they still put in a ton of work. I wouldn't even be able to keep the land from degrading unless we had them to help us out; so homesteading, even by a quite loose definition of the term, means you'll have a hard time doing it part-time.
Hence winning the startup lottery first probably is a good idea; then you can (with any luck) outsource some of the back-breaking stuff, too.
If you're salaried at Google for 40 hours/week with no paid overtime and no side gigs allowed, the median value of your time is $149/hr but the marginal price is $0/hr because working an extra hour doesn't make you any extra money.
I suspect farming is similar - it's not like you can take that free hour, add 4 square feet to your field and produce $149 more wheat.
My grandfather spent his career working on heavy machinery for a government agency and then in retirement has been maintaining all the farm equipment for my uncle. In the summer I helped him replace the complex system of belts in a hay baler. He’s in his mid 80s and was crawling around inside the machine. My job was just to stand there and keep the belt from twisting.
Of course, maybe they're just money grubbing capitalists.
But I think there's more factors than meets the eye, and this behavior is not without cause.
Otherwise, as you say, plenty of players should be clamoring to offer a fix-it-yourself brand that people would flock to and be loyal to.
Maybe sometimes there are real reasons for the way a market and a product are structured.
The people who care if you're allowed to flash the firmware on your bluetooth earbuds are few and far between, but the people who dislike the idea of some remote party being able to use math and law to turn off food production... That's pretty much everybody.
So they're all money grubbing capitalists. But as money grubbing capitalists go, these are among the bigger threats.
My understanding is basically all high-capital machinery makes a _lot_ of money from support contracts and repairs.
I think there is an idea to do something like this anyways, but it legit feels like something that needs to happen out of the goodness of your heart because you _are_ just leaving money on the table.
And if that's the case can't a defector break from the DRM paradigm and offer tractors without DRM so they still make a lot of money at a minimum, but likely more due to picking up more customers?
Like to put it in other terms can't they make up for the difference with increased volume, which drives down per unit production costs and takes money from John Deere?
Like why can't someone be the Kirkland brand of tractors?
You'll notice there are no Kirkland brand furnaces.
In the olden days it would be weird shaped screws and stickers with "warranty void" kind of bright red wording everywhere that would impact their bottom line. Then potential denial of repair or extra costs ("out of warranty") if they could find any plausible reason to attribute the issue to your intervention where you shouldn't touch.
I'd see the introduction of DRM as a way to enforce rules that were already there, more than a radical change to their business model.
So yes, I'd expect a lot of resistance to moving to right of repair.
Voiding a warranty for DIY repairs is very different from making DIY repairs impossible.
A coop loses so much value when it just becomes a one email a year affair with "Hey, it's that time to vote for things again!"
I'm always reminded of the Anarchist Peasants:
I'm somewhat influenced by the descriptions of various farming organisations in Seeing Like A State which I recently read. There is a lot of active cooperation, experimentation, knowledge sharing etc. around crop varieties.
A factory that builds modern tractors is a pretty huge investment. It’s very large and has a ton of very expensive robotics. It also has a huge supply chain that delivers a wide variety of parts to the factory for final assembly.
A factory worker, while a lot more skilled than a day labourer working on a farm, does not have access to the kind of capital needed to start a big factory. So how does it happen? The people who have the billions of dollars in capital needed to start the factory aren’t just going to give shares to workers they hire.
some of the most successful Danish agricultural companies started out as / are cooperatives.
So that provides one possible solution to the problem: start small with no capital and grow over a period of centuries to become a large co-op.
But how do you achieve it today? How do you take a bunch of workers and start a co-op factory that can compete with John Deere?
VC doesn’t work. Investors want equity for their money.
Worker co-ops have only one class of member: worker-owners. People who do both the day-to-day work and are part owners of the business. Unless the VC people are willing to show up and start punching the clock like everybody else, they are a different class: owners who don't work. Worker co-ops disallow that class of membership by definition.
Economies of scale.
We don't live in a fantasy land where things work a certain way just because it would be nice if they did.
That local fab shop would now have to provide 24-hour on-call service, which is a completely different business.
Indeed, and that is cheaper than keeping a guy on staff that can fix your equipment.
The biggest farmers I know keep someone on staff. The next tier down use outside repair services. And the smallest guys (I am a small time farmer, emphasis on small) repair their own stuff.
So in the context of myself and my own needs right to repair is crucial. But I can argue for the right to repair in general as well: Flexibility is key, in light of creaky supply chains.
I cannot claim to know the relative difficulty of such a task, or relevant regulations. But if there were some standard designs that multiple manufacturers were involved in, I bet parts would stay in production for a very very long time.
Contract negotiations for newbuilds are cutthroat, the most important parameter being price, price and price. Hence margins are as you'd expect.
Except when it comes to service work, as service rates, parts cost &c are hardly ever touched upon in contracts, probably seeing as they will be relevant for the lifetime of the product, which may run for decades.
Hence the contract merely states that the supplier must _provide_ service and parts. Which we do. While we laugh all the way to the bank.
Of course, if you become too greedy, a customer is likely to start sourcing any parts not uniquely made by you elsewhere and try to have whoever they can find locally install them. Hence some sobriety is useful when determining service rates and parts markup, but the general principle is:
You do newbuilds so that you can get a large installed base to reap service income from. Newbuilds are sold at the slimmest of margins, sometimes even at a loss. You'll recoup it when they start using the gear, anyway.
Anecdotally, I once was in Rio de Janeiro just wrapping up some service work on a vessel in the Guanabara bay (Fine-tuning a number of variable frequency drives had puzzled one of our FSEs no end, so I was called out from engineering to see if I could make it work out).
Anyway, a service request came in from a vessel also in the bay; rather than waiting for the home office to wake up and process it, I asked the crew on the ship I was departing from to simply zip me over to the vessel in question; less than fifteen minutes after they had reached out for help, I was on board and started looking into it.
They insisted on paying the $5,000-ish fee we usually charge to send someone from Norway to Brazil, despite my being just half a mile away - as they had expected it to be at least two days before someone could arrive; instead, they were back on-hire again in less than two _hours_.
> They insisted on paying the $5,000-ish fee we usually charge to send someone from Norway to Brazil
You work for Aker/Kvaerner, by chance? :)
Oh, heavens, no!
I used to work for Rolls-Royce Marine, but have since jumped ship (or walked the plank!) and now work for a smaller, independent company manufacturing all sorts of offshore handling equipment.
I am of the firm opinion that life is too short for working at large corporations. Obviously, YMMV.
I've worked for engineering service companies where they'll take on a design at minimal profit, in order to secure the manufacturing contract that's worth far more. Or a medical device company that would provide the instrument (normally sold for around $750k) at cost, in exchange for a lucrative supplies & consumables contract that would be needed for over a decade of operation.
I honestly think there's more money to be made in services, generally speaking, than in manufacturing.
Which means you need to get it off the ground without the help of the stock market or investors, all of which are greedy for that money on the table.
He had a team of highly-paid salesmen (and they were pretty much all men) driving around the countryside convincing school principals and the like that they needed new photocopiers.
The profit margin on the machines was basically zero.
But the salespeople earned their keep, because every large photocopier sold also had a service contract that charged a fee for every copy made.
The game was up by the early 2000s when the stand-alone photocopier was replaced with networked laser printers, but while it lasted it paid for a lot of salespeople’s fancy cars, boats, and overseas holidays.
And without the service contracts, schools are fucked when the printer breaks down. Like, here in Germany, a single copier can run through entire crates worth of paper in a day.
It's absolutely ridiculous how fossilized our education system has become. We should be using laptops and tablets loaded with e-books and digital worksheets. No one cares about handwriting anything outside of school any more.
https://cowboystatedaily.com/2023/03/20/big-bud-worlds-large...
> The Big Bud 747 weighs in at 135,000 pounds fully ballasted and its 1,000-gallon fuel tank topped off.
https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=E...
That's a >$3,200 fill-up (give or take volume pricing, with your own larger container). And I thought driving a class A motorhome with a 150 gallon tank hurt to fill up!
Fortunately in the electronics world, we have Framework and Fairphone. And Nokia making noises around improving repairability. Google and even Samsung launching independent parts programs.
One of the ag manufacturers should break off and take the lead. It's not going to be Deere, or Case, or New Holland.
The current situation is market driven and I guess "repairs will be more expensive/planned obsolescence" is more engaging than a higher price.
And I think that's where a government has to intervene. Even if the situation is the one that suit manufacturers and customers (even if they don't admit it), it is not the best for the environment and collectivity in general, so regulation is in order.
I love the idea. I wish that were a thing but I suspect that it would be seen as a lack of profit model and businesses are more competitive than ever now.
I have a 1947 Fordson 2n tractor and there is a large community of people that support it as well as a couple 3rd party parts manufacturers that make parts for many old tractors. I suspect that even if Ford wanted to manufacture parts there are not enough of us to make it profitable. Adding to that modern tractors are much more complicated and have many more parts.
It would be really cool if some college were to take on a project to build the "most capable" yet "simplest" tractors that could do everything the modern fancy computer driven tractors can do but using as few parts and as simple and generic parts as possible and then license everything in a way that businesses could not make it proprietary. Perhaps I have an odd fantasy. Open Source Hardware so to speak. If it were to become popular enough perhaps that college could fund their entire department making human and robotic driven simple and pragmatic tractors.
Massey, Fendt or similar could really differentiate themself and take market share on the back of this I suspect.
Especially with online world having reached farmers as the dealer networks increasingly mean less when you can order equiptment and spares online so JD loses some of the strength they hold by their dominating physical presence alone.