mcclell3

It likely costs 10k at an average. The point isn’t that it costs $0 to upgrade software. It is that Deere gives a lower price on high spec bc they under price the low spec. They get higher volumes on engine technology bc they use software to meet many customer’s power needs. If Deere made made a perfectly sized engine for every make and model with no software variation they would be idiots and have even higher priced machines. I have no love for the monopoly these companies have on the farmers of the world but the people against Deere here are drastically simplifying agriculture’s OEM business model.

The simple part of this argument is the right to repair part. Deere should just sell their service tool at a profit and provide software updates to the customer and not just dealers. Then we would be done with this right to repair argument.

In this case the middlemen do serve a purpose. The infrastructure that provides farmers access to a global market is typically provided by companies like Cargill and ADM. The part this article points out which is important is the value of on farm storage. By storing a large amount of grain and using modern hedging strategies afforded by most crops being commodities farmers can make money in an area otherwise controlled by Adm and Cargill (storage and marketing). Distribution of the product globally will be hard for any large farm to handle at scale.