Is it though? You could already replace an axel or a radiator or tire, couldn't you. Isn't this about software?

And having seen the software testing environment at John Deere, I am terrified of letting novices diddle around with that stuff. Do they understand dynamics and calculus and control systems? Because the John Deere engineers do. They account for slosh in the sprayer trailing the tractor behind the disk, adjusting the steering to within inches of the previous pass and respecting hard field boundaries including implement width and turning radius dynamics.

I just don't see anybody doing anything but hacking around and causing dangerous situations. Then wanting it fixed under warranty.

Or worse, running through a fence into a neighborhood and demolishing property.

This is an odd comment in my opinion. Do you work at John Deere? I ask only because you say you are familiar with their testing environment. I don't think your horror scenario is realistic. How many farms are located in a neighborhood? If a farmer destroys property they are probably liable. I don't think John Deere is restricting repairs to protect random property damage since since I've never heard of that happening before.

Sorry, should have said, worked on the John Deere guidance module for auto-driving tractors. As a contractor.

There are field limits defined. But they are respected as algorithms need, to determine turn parameters at the end of a row. I could imagine easily that fiddling with that code could end up with a tractor on the other side.

What horror scenarios do you think are realistic? Remember we are considering multi-ton machines with maybe a thousand horsepower, wielding huge spinning blades and crusher mechanisms. What scenario can we consider that is not a horror show?

I am still trying to understand your point.

While I agree these systems are highly complex, I am not sure why farmers need to mess with source code to perform a repair? If farmers are messing with the code (disabling sensors or whatever), then I'd have to assume the farmer knows they are taking on this risk that their tractor will not function as expected.

If sensors can be safely disabled, then why not provide an easy to do that?

Again, we're not talking about a lawn mower or toaster. We're talking about a multi-ton autodriving machine of destruction. God no, don't disable a sensor, any more than you'd disable a sensor on a jet airliner.

I agree; farmers should under no circumstance mess with code to perform a repair. I'm concerned that the software documentation is part of this bill (and in the minds of many technologists, should be open).

The closest example I can think of is my car. If the seat belt sensor doesn't detect when my safety belt is properly working, I think it's ok to disable the sensor so that I can operate my vehicle without warning lights and sounds distracting me while I drive.

I am sure there are comparable sensors on these vehicles that can have inaccurate readings that can safely be ignored if the operator knows what they are doing.

Assuming that there is some sort of sensor that’s measuring these turn radiuses? What happens to the machine when the sensor malfunctions? Does it shut down (requiring work to stop), keep going (being a huge liability) or is there a box of them under the chair the operator can swap in and keep going? I think what’s being asked for here is option 3, not so much being able to modify turn parameters.

To me, even though you might call this hitting a nerve, this comment and the one you did earlier, scream the classic stereotype of white collar workers looking down on blue collar workers like farming. "If they were smart like me, they wouldn't be farmers." "They are too dumb to manage a multi-ton machine despite having done it for over a century. Unlike me, who has written code for a few years."

Farmers aren't stupid. They're actually sometimes very high-IQ people because maintaining a profit with so many constraints is extremely difficult; and Silicon Valley flunkies would be in bankrupt within days of trying.

Your car, heater, air frier, lawn mower, etc all have the potential to kill you. I’d even argue that the probability of a car killing someone due to technical malfunction or user tinkering is way higher than a farm equipment that operates in a large open area.

If all of these things were locked down following John Deere’s logic our daily lives would become very expensive and inconvenient.

We as a society have more than enough legal and insurance frameworks to mitigate any of the risks that you’ve mentioned.

Your car, heater, air fryer, and lawn mower are consumer devices. If you modify them and they become unsafe, you're at fault.

However, farm equipment is classified as industrial equipment and if you can modify it to be unsafe without being an expert in that domain, then it is the manufacturers fault that you can do that.

Locking down industrial equipment so that it requires a trained technician to modify it is one of the ways that industrial equipment manufacturers try to mitigate the liability that they face.

> then it is the manufacturers fault that you can do that.

This is not always the case, and if it gets to the point that legislation has to be written to stop you, it's likely you don't care that much about the law in the first place.

When Marvin Heemeyer built the Killdozer, nobody blamed Komatsu for providing him the parts. Unprecedented, violent problems can happen with all sorts of equipment. We stop these accidents by holding professionals liable, not their machines.

The killdozer isn't a problem in terms of industrial liability.

Product Liability in the Farm Equipment Industry - https://youtu.be/NdN577BbnSY

I'd stress watching the section on farm equipment - https://youtu.be/NdN577BbnSY?t=1166 and then continue on to case study 1 where a farm worker was maimed and the manufacturer was held liable (see lessons learned - https://youtu.be/NdN577BbnSY?t=2561 ) ... and liability waivers to try to shift that to the farmer is at https://youtu.be/NdN577BbnSY?t=3760

The legislation and liability for industrial and agricultural equipment already exists. Under that structure, the manufacturer is the one facing the product liability claims if any claims are to be paid out.

If you (the framer) modify a JD tractor and someone gets hurt, JD is is the one likely to pay.

I’m a robotics engineer designing an open source solar powered farming robot (links in my profile).

I gotta be honest it sounds like you have been exposed to Deere’s propaganda and believed it. To put this another way, I feel like you’re missing what this bill is really about.

Deere has added software locks to their modules so that even if you can source another identical module with identical firmware and you’re capable of plugging it in, you have to use dealer software to change the software lock and allow the module to work with your tractor.

No one is saying farmers need source code, they’re saying they need access to the dealer software tools (not engineering tools!) to allow replacement of modules without a trip to the dealer.

This is extremely important for farmers! Please read the replies to your comments and consider that you may have been misinformed. Respectfully, I think this can be a learning moment for you today.

You're bang on the money with

> exposed to Deere’s propaganda and believed it.

and I feel we can add a dash of smug superioty over presumed to stupid farmers.

I worked on sheep shearing robots in the 1980s at UWA and went on to have a global career in geophyical data aquisition, processing, and interpretation with a sideline in developing "Google Earth" pre current Google Earth .. all funded by part time work in 800 million tonne per annum iron ore mining projects.

Now I'm hanging about with farmers in rural WA.

"Giant John Deere tractors" are small fry compared to mining machines .. and many farmers here have FiFo (Fly In - Fly Out) minesite experience working as electricians | mechanics | operators on mining operations.

The bulk of local area mechanics that come to fix tractors have that same background .. understanding the technology is not the issue with agricultural machine repair, it's gate-keeping by the companies and system protocols designed to hinder part replacement, board updates, diagnosis, etc without a commission going back to oginal manufacturer.

This reminds me of when I taught a robotics class for a week at a university in Mauritius, off the East coast of Africa near Madagascar. We're exposed to so much nonsense about how "people over there" are simple and can't understand complex concepts. But those kids from Kenya, South Africa, Ethiopia, Nigeria, and Morocco were exactly as talented as students from Palo Alto. People don't need to be treated like babies, they need to be given tools. No matter how special some engineer thinks they are, there's loads of equally talented people all over the globe.

By the way please show your farmer friends my open source farming robot. Sounds like you and yours would appreciate it. https://community.twistedfields.com/t/join-the-solar-farming...

I would like to have a couple of sock-puppets to upvote this more!

I jest, of course, but, this is such an important point that engineers and the designers of a product don't have monopoly on intelligence and people need not to be babied. I think some people even come to believe it themselves and develop some kind of learned helplessness.

Hey, I joined up a few days ago and wrote a little intro post, but I seem to be blocked from posting pending admin approval. I know you’re busy, so I don’t want to bother you, but I’m eager to participate.

ooh thanks for letting me know! I am slow to do admin stuff there. I have approved your post. Welcome!

Cheers!

I imagine this multi ton machine running over a fence, into a tree stump. The stump disconnects the wheel from the axle and it's no longer able to drive.

I think what we're saying here is changing the oil is not allowed. You can't change your own oil, or use third party oil because there is a detector that says this oil is not John Deere brand oil. The engine is now deactivated and you must call a John Deere technician to put in the encryption key to unlock the engine. Your next available appointment is in 938 days. Please note, we have a higher than expected volume of repair calls than usual this year. Your appointment may be de-prioritized. Sorry for the inconvenience.

If the John Deere engineers understand those systems so well, then they could design their products in ways that the farmers could repair the products for common use cases. They are intentionally designing the products to prevent that. That's the whole problem.

They're designing the products for maximum safety and performance. It was never in the cards to make it open. It's easy to cast blame but without that requirement in the spec, they didn't budget effort to make it so.

The law essentially means the code is open. A huge change, that will take years and millions to achieve?

(As an outsider looking in) I think Deere's (and many other companies) financial incentives more align with product gatekeeping, than with maximum safety and performance; maximum safety does not pay Deere's bills, but service appointments do.

It kinda just sounds like you're content with family farms not existing, because all of your points fail to address the economic realities for these farms.

> They're designing the products for maximum safety and performance. It was never in the cards to make it open.

Well, then, that was stupid of John Deere and makes them a victim of their own arrogance. Period. There wouldn't be a law right now if John Deere hadn't unnecessarily, by their own actions, pissed off so many people in the process of increasing "safety" and "performance". As though anybody complained about the lack of "safety and performance" in the century-long history of tractors before computers came along and saved us.

Let's be clear here: John Deere, a multi-billion dollar company, isn't the victim here, but the aggressor against family farms, good intentions or not. Mourning for them is absurd.

> A huge change, that will take years and millions to achieve?

Nope. It's as easy as clicking "Publish" on the repositories and setting the Dropbox folder to "Public." I could do it in 15 minutes. Any legal review or trade secret review or whatever else is entirely the company protecting their own interests. John Deere has done that long enough, a hard deadline is their self-inflicted penalty.

I am concerned about the safety of the rest of us. It gets lost in the partisan yelling.

Safety and performance are elements of the cover story not drivers of the product strategy.

>They're designing the products for maximum safety and performance

How do you know this. Do you work for Jon Deere? Since the code is closed source that's simply an assumption

Product liability for industrial and agricultural equipment gets interesting.

You can modify a household lawn mower and if you get maimed by it by those modifications, you're at fault.

However, for industrial equipment if you can modify it - the manufacturer is likely liable. Consider how often you hear about deaths due to manufacturing defects (the stats for deaths for framers is 60 - 70 per year per 100,000 in the US).

https://www.wkw.com/farming-accidents/blog/farming-accidents... (personal injury lawyer site)

> However, for industrial equipment if you can modify it - the manufacturer is likely liable.

That’s interesting if true, but do you have a better source (ideally, a court case)? I don’t see that theory of liability discussed anywhere on the page you linked.

Product Liability in the Farm Equipment Industry - https://youtu.be/NdN577BbnSY

It also has two case studies in it.

This legislation is more akin to allowing you to repair your PC and replace a damaged RAM module.

I don’t think any farmer is looking to tinker with the control software, and even if they want they should be able to tinker considering it’s their property and their farmland and only they themselves are liable for any damages caused to neighbours or otherwise.

John Deere is just trying to create artificial barriers and extract more value from existing customers.

The way I understood the issue (as an outsider) is that they weren’t offering things like gaskets for sale. Sure, I can pull out the old one if it pops but what do I do now? That plus there being a remote kill switch if someone does figure out how to manufacture replacements…

I can go down to my local John Deere supplier and buy any part on any John Deere tractor back to 1931.

I'd argue allowing farmers to fix their own stuff is way better (and safer) than them having to seek out sketchy foreign vendors/hacks in order to fix their own equipment on the black market as an alternative.

Obviously the majority of farmers aren't going to be going into the software and editing it themselves, but instead paying reputable companies in the industry to do the programming/fixing/debugging for them.

Companies like John Deere could embrace this by releasing a ton of guides and self-learning classes to teach these same farmers how to do basic coding, repairs, debugging and etc. themselves. Could start a whole new wave and generation of tech-literate and educated farmers which would be better for all involved.

Huh? This is about things like hardware modules not connecting to the bus until an authorized repairer allows them to, exposing part numbers so board level repairs can happen, releasing board schematics, and things like that. Nobody is suggesting re-writing firmware? There is a mountain of context that you're either unaware of or leaving out on purpose for some reason.

Everybody is suggesting that.

This bill explicitly demands release of software documents. Why do you suppose?

Anyway yes the open-source voice is loud here. Just being a voice for taking care how carefully that happens.

software documentation includes things like APIs, bus protocols and configuration, and other interface points. It need not have anything to do with re-writing firmware and nothing is calling for that.

Oh look, the Pinkertons are trying to sow FUD in hacker news again.

Joe's been an active member here with good contributions for a long time. I disagree with his opinion in this thread, but he's not some fake account trying to cause trouble.

Plus farming is often time-sensitive and you need to repair equipment with what you have on-hand, not have to wait for parts or repairers.

2000 acres is a "small" "family" farm?? The myth of farming in the United States far over-estimates the where the _value_ in farming lies. Yes, John Deere is exploitative - but what about the wealthy land owners that profit off the backs of poorly paid _farm workers_? Or the huge government subsidies paid to growers of commodity grain? The idea of the "family farm" as a productive and legitimate sector of the economy is mostly a myth[0].

[0] See "Farm and other F words" by Sarah Mock for a more complete treatment.

This only seems large by European standards I think. The 50-100 acre farms in my homeland are a relic of pre-industrial times, and can't be competitive in a world market without vast EU subsidies.

Do you have any references on small farm size efficiency? In Japan ~90% are < 50 acre both by land mass and count, and seeing the 100m^2 farms in my neighborhood I can't believe it's anywhere near efficient, even when sharing farm equipment.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/agricultural-land-area-by... https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-farms-size?country...

Japan has a bunch of issues with agriculture and too-small farms is part of it:

* https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2015/11/25/japan-strugg...

* https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/japans-farms-wea...

* https://thediplomat.com/2014/09/japans-agriculture-dilemma/

Small family farms are good when a country is still developing and has excess labour, but once industrialization gets going folks move to urban areas for factory jobs and farms need to consolidate and mechanize. This has been the story over history for all countries have been 'developed', and in the post-WW2 is generally true of Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. Though this mechanization never really happened in Japan.

How Asia Works: Success and Failure in the World's Most Dynamic Region goes over this quite well:

* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16144575-how-asia-works

It is large by American standards.

The USDA says that only 4% of farms in America are 2,000 acres or larger.

https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Highlights/2019/2017C...

The average farm in America is 446 acres, according to the USDA.

https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistic...

The OP is completely out of touch thinking that 2,000 acres is small.

>Since 1974, the Census of Agriculture has defined a farm as any place from which $1,000 or more of agricultural products were produced and sold, or normally would have been sold, during the census year.

That's a weird definition.

Acres of contiguous land controlled by a single owner is how people tend to use the word farm.

In reality, farmers are often equipment owners and negotiate with landowners to manage X acres.

None of this discussion is worth wile in referencing farms.

Best could be said : a farmer who has to service equipment equal to a 400 acre farm benefits by laws protecting their farm equipment.

Here in Western Australia, the average cropped area per farm is almost 3,000 acres. From my perspective, 2,000 acres is a small-ish farm, and the 50-100 acre farms surrounding my parents' house in Scotland are comically small, heavily-subsidised gardens.

GP may be wrong about the USA as a whole, though I'm sure there are areas of the US where 2,000 acres would indeed be a small farm.

I'm pretty sure this is what led to communism

You can operate a 2000 acre farm with 4 people. That's a family farm bub.

There's an issue with how the census defined a farm.

Exactly, thank you.

Also, let’s be clear: we’re talking about the US. I’m sure it’s different in other countries.

> 2000 acres is a "small" "family" farm??

The 'farm vlogger' channel Laura Farms operates a 2000 acres (800 hectares; 8 sq. km) farm:

* https://www.youtube.com/@LauraFarms/videos

What does your dad saving money on mowing his lawn have to do with farms with 2000 acres of property?

Both use equipment that needs to be repaired. Isn't that in the title?

2000 acres is not a small farm period. For context the price per acre where I live (centre of Quebec, Canada) is 15k$. So 30M$ for 2k acres, it's an industrial farm that need employees (at least one or two if it's a highly automated crop) and can afford the price of brand new John deer. You can even afford a Combine harvester at that size. Our farm is around 120 acres and we definitely cannot.

That really depends where you live, since this thread is about Colorado:

>The 2021 Colorado average farmland real estate value, a measurement of the value >of all land and buildings on farms, was $1,610 per acre. This is an increase of >1.3 percent from 2020 and 2.5 percent from 2019.

So we're talking $3.2mm today and by what the person you replied to said, I'm betting that his family bought that land a very long time ago.

I'm not a farmer by any means, but I just did a quick search for land in Colorado and I'm even seeing ~2,400 acres on sale for $1.7mm today. There's 15,000 acres listed for $2.1mm. I mention not being a farmer because I don't know if those lands are viable for anything.

2,000 acres of highly-automated 4-employer farm nets an income of $240,000 USD per year. John Deere equipments all cost more than that.

Furthermore, computerizing farm implements means shorter life span for its equipments.

Probably why older cars are lasting longer than newer ones. Computer chip failure of a 20-yo car means a trip to the wrecking yard to get that chip or get totaled; 40-yo car, not as much.

Do you only buy a house or car valued less than your annual income or do you finance it?

Can a middle-class or poor family afford a brand-new leased Mercedes Benz every two years?

No, that's why you buy a regular car

Can you buy a regular tractor?

2,000 acres is the top 4% of farm sizes.

https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Highlights/2019/2017C...

By way of comparison, a top 4th-percentile income is $205,000 a year.

Saying 2,000 acres is a small farm is like saying $205,000 a year salary is low-income.

I know dozens of people that have a few goats or who 'farm' hay for the tax benefits.

I’m sorry but this is sorely misguided.

How many of the farms surveyed are the owner and operator’s full time job? How many of those farms are owned and operated by multiple families at the same time?

Farming in the US is nothing like a corporate job, or even most small businesses, for reasons I just don’t have the time to share. Your comparison to income for the general population…doesn’t work.

Farms with 2k acres or less are indeed small, family run operations. Especially if you only farm cash crops. These are the kinds of farms that rely on right-to-repair the most. Not the homesteader family with 16 acres and some goats.

Sorry all, your idea of what most full-time, successful, multi-generational farming operations in the US looks like is simply not accurate.