Re:John Deere Announces Strategic Partnership with SpaceX
by wongarsu on Tuesday January 30, 2024 @12:09PM
(#39192660)
> if they don't do their job during that time the farm looses all their income for the year.
That's exactly why farmers push for right-to-repair. The old model of "each farmer can repair their tractor, or at least jury-rig it to work for a week" was much more scalable than John Deere somehow having enough staff and service partners to handle anything that goes wrong in those couple of weeks, and then having these people mostly idle the rest of the year.
Of course at the same time newer tractors are much more capable, and allow a farmer to be much more efficient. But for a country it's also somewhat risky to put a large part of their food supply behind a single point of failure
That's exactly why farmers push for right-to-repair. The old model of "each farmer can repair their tractor, or at least jury-rig it to work for a week" was much more scalable than John Deere somehow having enough staff and service partners to handle anything that goes wrong in those couple of weeks, and then having these people mostly idle the rest of the year.
Of course at the same time newer tractors are much more capable, and allow a farmer to be much more efficient. But for a country it's also somewhat risky to put a large part of their food supply behind a single point of failure