

Tractors Are Getting Smarter - PTPells
http://money.cnn.com/2013/08/29/leadership/deere-sam-allen.pr.fortune/index.html

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robbiep
My family run John Deeres with Starfire and greenstar. With our neighbours we
have several RTK stations to get centimetre accuracy.

When we got our first auto-steer in 2001 it changed my school holidays..
Instead of having to drive mind numbingly slowly I was able to read books, and
then progressively shift onto movies etc with the first video iPods etc.
awesome. Huge increases in productivity and reduced inputs.

On the other hand, our neighbours who have often got seasonal workers to drive
tractors have lost several tractors due to the workers not paying attention
and running into power poles etc.

I have heard that the biggest obstacle to self driving machines has been the
legal implications of having a tractor with no driver. It would be great to
overcome this but there's still a way to go because at the moment no system I
have seen can handle obstacles, specially if they haven't been programmed in
(at the moment you can place a mark near trees, and it will beep when you near
the end of your run to alert you to turn around) - also each implement
requires very précise monitoring that may change markedly in the same field
depending on the conditions in terms of ground speed, implement height and a
host of other factors.

Awesome technology

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ChuckMcM
My uncle was an early adopter of these sorts of things for his rice farm. When
I saw the movie "Cars" for the first time and the film portrayed Tractors as
"dumb" I thought to myself, if you really knew what went into a modern tractor
you would not portray it as "dumb" in an animated movie.

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reustle
But to be fair, the tractors in cars weren't modern at all, they were from
roughly around the 1950s/1960s

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Qworg
Deere's recent patent filings point to a totally autonomous managed fleet of
farm equipment. They've had a long standing relationship with NREC out of CMU
to develop autonomous and semi-autonomous systems.

In terms of accuracy, here's a metric to think about: due to fewer overlaps
and misses, yields were up 7.6% and cost savings were up 6.8% - and this was
with just recent tech advances.

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ihsw
Where are you getting those numbers from? Surely such improvements would be
fairly isolated to an acre or two, rather than hundreds of acres. Those
numbers (6.8% and 7.6%) aren't in the article.

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Sanddancer
At an acre or two, you'll be doing most of the work by hand, with using push
tools -- rototillers and the like -- for the occasional tough part. These
sorts of process improvements are one of those economies of scale things that
really only start making sense when you're dealing with an amount of land that
you can't just eyeball.

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ihsw
Yes, I agree completely. That's exactly why I'm suspicious of the numbers the
parent quoted.

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D9u
I remember when having an air conditioned cab was considered to be high end
farming... Then it was 8 track stereo, and microwave ovens. The tractors were
over $100,000 before the advent of the personal computer. I wonder what the
cost of a smart tractor is now?

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reustle
> Most people don't don't realize that an 8000 series tractor has more
> computing power than the first space shuttle...

So does my $200 cell phone...

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icebraining
Hell, so did my N64.

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zeckalpha
Their GPS steering is really cool. I think they get better accuracy through
multiple GPS receivers spread out across the entire tractor.

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randomdata
Some vendors use multiple receivers, but Deere uses one, with possibly one or
more on the implement(s) being towed, depending on the configuration. RTK
provides centimetre level accuracy with the single receiver.

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contingencies
Tractors may be getting smarter, but _the entire notion of large-scale
monocrop farming is basically forkin ' stupid_.

Through recent research I developed the distinct impression that anyone who
has managed land for an extended period+ with and without modern industrial
farming methodology seemed to say that the general outcome of such was
dependence on external entities for seeds, technology, energy, fertiliser and
pesticides... and this seems to include both academia and government bodies in
charge of agricultural knowledge dissemination.

The most lucid illustrations of this quandry I have yet encountered are
Masanobu Fukuoka's _One Straw Revolution_ (a few decades ago) and the USDA's
_Alley Cropping_ instructional video series:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8Kwb5yInPM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8Kwb5yInPM)

Basically, the claim is that higher yields with lower maintenance are possible
through non-industrialised methods that rely on crop diversity and natural
systems.

My impression is that the US (and Europe) heavily subsidise or artificially
protect a lot of their agriculture whilst burning loads of fossil fuels to
plant, maintain and harvest them which is a situation that has partly evolved
to cater to vested interests in government and energy sectors.

China wastes loads of food, leads the world in agricultural research, and
certainly does not yet have anything like a food crisis. Not only that, but
their population is stable or dropping.

Overall, this article is pretty FUD.

\+ Not I!

