"I still believe you need some newer machinery in the mix, and my harvest equipment is where you’ll find it."
I find this very interesting because on our farm the main source of savings has been running 7 (3-4 in the field at a time) 1480 and 1680 combines valued at $5-8,000 each. (and about 15 headers to match, equally worthless). We keep them well maintained but if we do have a failure that is not an instant fix we literally just pull another one out of the shed and carry on.
Where we farm late-90's and early 2000's seeding equipment is now cheap as dirt too, we run two air seeders worth a combined $50,000, maybe?
I have a Steiger, branded as a Case 9170, they have weak spots (wiring, rear diffs & planetaries) but they are cheap horsepower. Around my parts the "Rome" tractors would be older Versatile 4WDs that are easy to repower and have nice big cabs.
All that said, I find the large savings claims here to be a bit suspect. Dropping new electronic engines in these frames, even if you do a lot of the work yourself, costs real money. Once you are 80-90k into a 1980 tractor.. they made a lot of good equipment in the 90's that you can walk up and buy for those kinds of dollars. And he isn't doing the work all himself, those hours cost real cash out of pocket (a small farmer like myself that fixes himself.. well you can just keep whittling down your personal hourly rate by putting in more hours).
> I find this very interesting because on our farm the main source of savings has been running 7 (3-4 in the field at a time) 1480 and 1680 combines
There is a balance with labour.
Big for their time, but those are not much of a machine by today's standard. A newer, larger machine could easily replace two of them. Maybe three. As harvest is typically the labour bottleneck, I can see how having as few people in the combines as possible is beneficial to the farm. The article would suggest that there are five of them regularly working on the farm. A couple of truck drivers, a cart operator, and that only leaves two to run the combines. If they, like your farm, need four 1680s get the work done they would have to find seasonal help, which can be quite difficult.
But naturally other farms may have different needs and requirements.
It is true that lots of my neighbours have trouble finding help, I never do though. We have a crew of retirees that help us at harvest. We retain our staff with working air conditioning and a low-stress environment. Low stress because we have way more harvesting capacity than we need.
When we have 4 machines going in the field we are doing at least 1 1/2 what a new machine can do and our labour costs are made back in fuel savings. (Modern combines are absolute pigs on fuel!)
This is certainly a problem. As farms become larger and cost of operating machinery gets higher, for some crops/grains, using herbicides as dessicants is becoming the norm.
Glyphosate is used during pre harvest for dessication than as a herbicide. And it’s approved. Canadians have just started cracking down on this so organic standards are maintained. This is a whole another can of worms(also drift) due to massive increase in scale and size of farming because we just have too many mouths to feed.
When was it never not the norm, save 50+ years ago when glyphosate wasn't commercially available? Around here, I don't think I've seen a pickup head used in my entire lifetime. Still see an occasional one sitting in the scrap heap.
The engine conversions are easier than you might think, so long as there is an adapter for your gearbox. Companies like Cummins sell them as crate motors, complete with the computer and everything you need, down to the electronic accelerator pedal. Now, you may have to cut off some motor mounts and weld on some new ones and maybe solve a few coolant and hydraulic plumbing issues but I would guess that these guys probably have a go-to motor and they’ve got that down pat.
That said, I kind of doubt you’re getting out the door with an industrial Cummins turbodiesel for under $40K.
For sure they are buying something that they are familiar with and dropping it in that works with the standard transmission. Once you have have done the first the next one is easy. (That's our experience with rotor swaps on the 1480's!)
But yeah, when you add the cost of the crate engine... you're eating up a lot of your savings!
I grew up on an extremely small scale farm on the west coast of Norway, lots of rain and 100m from the sea, 12 or so km from the open ocean (you see the Atlantic if you drive a boat 500m out to the middle of the fjord.)
Rust didn't stop any of our tractors, not a single stroke of paint even for the 40-50 years old machines.
But here's another thing, picked up from a friend of me after I asked him why he bought a brand new Valtra at some point instead of buying a slightly used one that was available on the market.
His answer has stuck with me since: if you enjoy getting up and going to work in the morning that count for something too.
I still happily use old equipment - if it works - but I factor in the value of not wasting my (or my customers, when I work as sysadmin) patience on slow computers.
> lots of rain and 100m from the sea, 12 or so km from the open ocean
If you are that close to salt water and don't have a problem it sure does seem to make the rust thing a red herring!
Agreed, it is of the utmost importance that the old machines start and go when it is time to work, that's the primary thing!
But I own a rather new sprayer, worth more than my entire combine fleet combined. Why? After a lot of honest consideration of the choices we were making we concluded that the experience of spraying with our old one was so miserable that we were failing to do things that needed to be done when they needed to be done. There is no substitute for getting the job done properly, on any reasonably large farm that is the biggest profitability factor. If any farmer needs a quiet cab and heated leather seat to motivate them to go out and finish seeding in a timely manner then it is a good investment, no matter how frivolous it might seem!
Also I really appreciate seeing so many active farmers here on HN, having grown up on a farm, studied farming and worked a bit in farms it makes me happy for HN as a community that we manage to keep farmers coming back :-)
Possibly JamisonM lives in a drier area where rust not a concern? Rust was certainly never an issue for my grandparents' farm, they're 20+ years gone and the tractors are still going, rust and all.
We have heavy, heavy soil here. We do wash equipment to make sure that wet soils are not left in the nooks an crannies of our equipment, but the idea that we'd have a frame rot away from rust.. that seems like a 100 year timeline issue to me. Combine hoppers need to be cleaned out every season and do rot away, put that's not a tractor frame.
The painting at issue always seems to be very cosmetic to me, painting the hood on a tractor doesn't extend its life.. but it might increase its resale value!
Where do you live? If we didn't paint our machinery every 2-3 years, we would have rust in the frames. Source: The Massey 1100 that is sitting in my machine shed right now acting as a huge and impractical paperweight because of a lack of rust maintenance by the previous owner.
What environmental conditions do you have that lead to that?
Around here a brand new car will start to show significant rust after a few years, but the tractors spend 90% of their life in the shed. They stay in pretty good shape.
Nothing wrong with finding something to do over the winter even if there isn’t a whole lot of practical value. Some people are happier when things are neat and tidy.
I just looked at a random paint intended for farm equipment and found a minimum application temperature of 50F which is easy enough to accomplish in a machine shed or on a warm day. You could also just blast your work quick with a heat gun. Nothing need be perfect.
I think a lot of this is false economy. If you like doing mechanical work then make that your line of work.
Comparing old to new:
1. New tractors get much better fuel mileage
2. New tractors have technology that can go a long way to making the payments on them
3. New tractors have a lot more operator comfort and if you're putting in eighteen hour days that's important.
Lets say you're a writer. Why not keep an IBM XT around to do your work? Granted finding those 5.25 inch floppies are a chore;<). But that XT can still write and print your work. You can even use Microsoft Word version 1.
The smartest play that I've seen farmers use is to buy gently used equipment. A three year old tractor has depreciated 30-40% and as long as you're able to make repairs is a steal over new. You get most of the benefits of new at a lower price.
Some do, some don't but this is mostly true (which is why the farmer in question is re-powering the old tractors).
> 2. New tractors have technology that can go a long way to making the payments on them
This is pretty flatly false. Whatever monitors, guidance, and steering technology (which is all I can think of that you might be referring to) is available for these tractors as well.
> 3. New tractors have a lot more operator comfort and if you're putting in eighteen hour days that's important.
This is also addressed with new seats and making the cab air-ride in the article.
But then these upgrades are why I think this in particular is a false economy, he is spending a lot on these old tractors!
Gently used is still pretty pricey, newer year but high-hour tractors are where I always feel the sweet spot is, a 9,000 hour 2005 model tractor is pretty cheap and is also pretty good in most cases.
>The smartest play that I've seen farmers use is to buy gently used equipment.
This is the "just buy a used 4Runner" way of doing things and like a used 4Runner it tends to only make economic sense on paper because everyone else who's read a blog about not making terrible financial decisions is trying to do the same, supply and demand works its magic and prices go up to the equilibrium where this method of doing things doesn't actually make economic sense. There is no free lunch.
There is no free lunch but you can make strategic choices that fit your needs. We ran an 85ish John Deere grader for years because it worked great for the kinds of jobs we did. It would break down but we usually had downtime between road jobs where we would do other work and fix the grader on the side. Turned out to be our best value piece of equipment in terms of dollars+labor in vs. dollars out.
We had a 70s Kenworth truck tractor that had been converted to a dump with a 12 yard box. It was practically invulnerable and while it lacked many modern bells/whistles it met all our needs. Paying for new equipment would've been paying for features we did not need.
Our main backhoe however was always new. This was for various reasons. At the time there was a lot of innovation happening with small backhoes and that included features we used. Often we were using our backhoe for residential work wherein new equipment makes a big impression. Also, a backhoe failure can be much harder to fix onsite it made sense to have low hour equipment.
IMO, this is how equipment purchasers should make buying decisions. Match the purchase to your need.
Which brings us to the frequently-on-hn topic of manufacturers loading up tractors with DRM crap so if it breaks you or the neighborhood shop can't fix it, you have to take it to the official dealer shop. Good luck booking a slot there during harvest season.
But yes, maybe slightly old machines are the solution rather than spending a lot of time and money to keep ancient rustbuckets going.
It reminds me of the Massey-Ferguson models 135 and 165, produced in the 1960s, now among the most popular used tractors, especially in Asia and Africa:
"These old Masseys, like the 165 and the 135, they're so basic but they're incredibly reliable and they just keep going on and on.
We've had examples where they've literally been sitting in a hedge for 10, 12 years, people have put a bit of diesel in them, they've tow-started them and boof! - off they go - just like that.
Parts are plentiful and they are easy to fix. They have good, strong, basic mechanics."
Massey Ferguson/AGCO partnered with TAFE* of The Amalgamations group. TAFE rules the region. They then became a shareholder of AGCO and is able to export equipment everywhere. These are very fruitful partnerships. While TVS group of companies had partnerships(mostly Japanese. I am slightly familiar with how these partnerships are crafted..having audited a few TVS group companies way back when I was in India) for automobiles, Amalgamations Group had a more varied interest..ranging from tractor parts to Diesel engines to manufacturing vehicle batteries.
Amalgamations is a tremendous success story. It was founded in my hometown and we are very proud of it.
It is just my bias but I find TAFE better than Mahindra. Mahindra just seems ..flimsy?
My grandfather bought a new mf 165 in 60s. It is still going strong and used for productive work. It has even fully functional original tires! Always been stored inside and almost always handled with thought. Ergonomics suck compared to more modern tractors but it's just fine for small-scale work anyway, kinda fun actually.
My father used to operate a MF 135 on his father's farm in his youth. He bought another one a few years ago. It is now used for mowing grass and thorn at their country house, and to give the grand-kids rides and driving lessons (they love it).
Recently it stopped working, but a search quickly suggested a solution thanks to an active online community :) If I remember correctly, the intake at the bottom of the tank got clogged, which happens from time to time.
Given these enormous price tags, why on earth hasn't someone disrupted this industry?
Surely someone can build a useful, powerful tractor that meets the needs of a large portion of farmers for less than a third of a million dollars. And if they make it repairable and not DRM-encoded (like John Deere) surely that would build a loyal brand following too.
Bezos has that famous line: "Your margin is my opportunity". Well shoot, there really does look to be a margin in that industry.
Because the other large players are so large that they will either buy you out or legally stamp you out of existence before you can gain significant market share. And farmers aren't going to be easy to convince to drop $100K+ on a tractor company with no history, no reliability metrics, and no guarantee the company will even exist in 20 years when something major breaks requiring more expensive custom manufacturing. It would take 100 million or more dollars in capital to even start a new heavy equipment company before you even start dealing with all the legal costs and requirements of staying in the market with the other big players.
In developing nations people like you know to keep their mouth shut while in the developed world people like you are coddled until they actually believe their insipid comments are worth reading.
MTZ [0] of Belarus is probably the most repairable tractor brand. It's better quality than it used to be. Exported all over, and supposedly gaining a foothold in the US too...
Because it’s competition to multi billion dollar existing companies.
John Deere has the ability to buy every new ‘disruption’ and lock it up in a vault..never to see the light of day again. Why would they disrupt anything? That would be akin to market cannibalisation.
The opportunity cost here is pretty high, but there are still ways to break in.
Your best bet would be to start up a small company, find a few farming operations that would be willing to try your equipment out, and then scale from there. Making 1 prototype of each flavor of machine from scratch would probably be a huge undertaking. Might be easier to use existing equipment as a starting point for prototypes. Alternatively, you could pitch a design to a few investors and go from there, but investors being what they are... It's a hard journey either way.
Also, no one says you have to turn around and sell your assets to John Deere when they inevitably detect you as a threat. The power of privately-held corporations is that you can do whatever the hell you want within the confines of law. I would strongly advocate whoever pulls this off to stay in the market and punish the shit out of the incumbents.
JD bought out Blue River Tech for a two hundred plus million. They shuttered their lettuce weeding robots and use it for cotton now...the last I heard.
I get it. But I don’t know why they had control the platform for specific crops.
My guess is that since BRT tech is ‘see and spray’, there will be a tie up with precision herbicide application with Bayer(née Monsanto) products.
Remember..afterall..John Deere wanted to buy Climate and Monsanto before DoJ blocked it with anti trust objections.
Buying out your competitors is not a sustainable replacement for innovation. If you don't cannibalize your own products, others will. Look no further than Kodak for an example.
There are lots of large agricultural equipment companies engaged in real competition and John Deere doesn't have unlimited resources to buy up competition.
You look at a company like SeedMaster that is in direct competition with JD in a lot of areas and using profits to fund some genuinely new ideas.. they are still here!
Because if you can start a disruptive company, and the shareholders believe your claims about how disruptive it'll be, the valuation of your company will be more than John Deere can afford to buy from their own valuation based in the profits on their margins...
As a farmer I am interested buying one, especially as I am using tractors for light work: spraying, towing and light field work. There are few hacked tractors already available, but it will take some time before supply chain mature enough.
I am pessimistic about having heavy duty industrial scale tractors with current battery technology. Those machines are monsters and when you interpolate consumption from light workloads to those monsters it just doesn't compute. Another angle in economics is that those machines have to work for many hours a day (combines in heavy seasons run for 12+, 7 days a week) which is also hard with current batteries.
Given that unlike cars, tractors work in a bounded area, could some kind of permanent power cord work? Given that irrigation water can get to all those crops, can't a power cable?
I think the difference is that water lines for irrigation are mostly aerial except for the one spot where they enter the ground water source. Further, the lines themselves don't move, the machine holding the lines moves. Finally, there is a substantial difference in 'I have a small water leak' and 'I have a small power leak'.
Maybe I'm being too closed minded, but I can't see that working long term. The stresses of being dragged around the field, or the infrastructure required to hang the power cord overhead would just be outlandish. For some reason, I can't get the picture of a powered grid of wire mesh over a field like giant bumper cars.
Series of heavy-payload drones to keep the cable aloft. The drones can draw power from it to power themselves indefinitely. And of course you'd need a massive slip ring at the tractor.
I was about to post the same. After all, if I can mow my lawn with an electric mower without electrocuting myself with just a little bit of route planning, can't farmers do just the same?
for farm situation i think battery swaps would work much better. Also giving that the farmers can also have wind/solar installs those extra batteries can be used as grid storage the rest of the time.
I believe that this is the area where hydrogen technology is supposed to step in. I am sceptical of that as well though.
As you note the light loads will do well with electric systems, there is a lot of low hanging fruit to take care of on every farm before the big horsepower will get tackled.. and maybe autonomous tech will get good enough that the answer will instead be replacing a lot of the high-HP jobs with more lower HP jobs instead?
Well, the time window in which you should do certain farming operation without product degradation is often quite short and having smaller tractor doing it autonomously might not cut it. Once you need to buy few of those to replace one you are buying into bigger chance to failure, more maintenance duties etc and it might result in higher cost per unit.
I think biogas might be winner for farms. If reliable and cheap production and liquefaction could be done. LNG seems perfectly reasonable self-supplied source for farms. There is likely enough waste material around for power needs of farming equipment. And source is local.
Depends on the what’s being grown. Sometimes you need monster HP.
Even with light work, electrical systems add to the weight leading to built in inefficiencies. I don’t know if we can move away from diesel at this point.
You need monster HP when you are trying to do a lot in a single pass, when I talk about the idea of autonomous+electric I am envisioning trading less work per pass for less HP and trading that off for more units and less labour.
Back in the bad old days you'd work 6 inches deep with a single-bottom plow behind a single draft horse! You can always break it up enough to get the HP down! ;)
It’s suitable for vegetable and small acreage farms. That’s the farm automation platform I am working on...we can swarm small Ag bots over connected small acreages. It’s the best use of robotics and automation tech in the field because every market farm or small acreage farm flips beds 2-3 times/year and have crops that have continuous multiple harvest windows.
If you're doing ground work with a tractor then weight is actually a good thing. The way it was always explained to me is weight determines what the tractor is capable of, horsepower is how quickly you could do it.
Not for tractors of this size. A Tesla has enough battery to last maybe 10 minutes at the rate big tractors use power. A Tesla might put out 500 horsepower for 3 seconds, but then it is up to the speed limit and you back off to 20 horsepower for the rest of the trip. A tractor starts off putting out 500 horsepower, and maintains that for 10 hours or so.
That's like comparing a Camry to a Deere -- you'd redesign the entire vehicle for peak & nominal loads.
Going from a 4,000 lb tesla to a 25,000 lb tractor, you'd accumulate significant additional battery mass & completely redesign EV systems (motors, controllers, batteries, charge paths, etc). A more apt comparison would be the Tesla Semi.
While you're at it... it might be worth completely re-thinking the problem in light of semi-autonomy. E.g. if you're going to have recharge periods, a fleet of 3x 8000-lb semi-autonomous robots might be preferable to a single 25,000 lb tractor (since labor is no longer a consideration). This also has benefits for soil compaction.
> a fleet of 3x 8000-lb semi-autonomous robots might be preferable to a single 25,000 lb tractor (since labor is no longer a consideration). This also has benefits for soil compaction.
Actually this is false. Turns out soil compaction is NOT linear with weight. Your 8000lbs tractor making 3 passes compacts the soil across 3 sets of tire tracks, the 1 25000lbs tractor does about 10% more compaction in the one set of tire tracks, but no compaction at all for the other 2 where there are not tires at all. This is why tracks end up worse then tires in the real world: same 10% less compaction, but you lose all the gains at the end of the row when you turn and now the tracks compact a lot more ground.
To draw a parallel, and I don't know how things work in the states, in Europe the CE mark is only valid when the equipment is installed in the approved way.
I did this for a boat once (including a brand new engine), and the relevant regulation is the Recreational Craft Directive. To get a boat legal to sell, you need to perform a relevant declaration, reference to the correct EU regulations and their localised translation into law, pay someone qualified to prepare the paperwork and translate the regulations ... a nightmare of paperwork and very expensive.
I'm not suggesting any bad-faith legistlation in the Recreational Craft Directive, I fully support very progressive environmental regulations, and not drawing the parallel too too closely...
But if you did want to curtail people's freedoms through regulation paperwork, there are all kinds of places you could hide a gotcha.
Off the top of my head:
- How about the energy efficiency of the whole power train?
- Approved lubricants.
- Annual energy efficiency certification of the whole vehicle from an approved organisation.
The numbers are nuts. But true. Tractors do depreciate at $85-100/hour. Maybe more.
Makes one wonder..how would the modern tech beauteous tractor bots depreciate ...any VCs or paper number crunchers amongst us? I can’t wrap these numbers around my head.
Crop subsidies are messing up with valuations and tech progress. It is the root rot of all tech innovations pronounced DOA.
$100/hour is for engine time, to which you can roughly estimate maintenance for other parts of the device.
You can expect to get 10,000 hours on a diesel engine before it needs at least a partial rebuild. The article talks about getting 40,000 hours out of a tractor, so that would probably be partial rebuilds at 10,000 and 30,000 hours, and a full rebuild at 20,000 hours.
Included in that $100/hr is fuel and insurance and replacement parts etc. for a device designed to haul around 20 tons of equipment offroad as part of it's daily tasks.
Compare that to the federal milage rate for passenger cars that are designed to move around 0.25 tons of equipment at $0.58/hr, you come up with ~$50/hr (@ 20 tons) for something designed to drive on paved interstate highways. It's not especially unreasonable.
Cost per hour and Cost per operating hour. Those two figures show the hard number a machine needs to earn for a business.
I used to sell people software to help figure and track that; which meant i helped several people initialize a system and see those numbers laid out for the first time. It was frequently traumatic to their assumptions. You can lard up the presumed maintenance budget for old iron and it still beats new all up and down.
The problem with an industry like tractors is, from my humble and limited experience as a farmer who hated it is that it's less about the industry and more about a mismatch between needs and reality. Farmers need machines that can operate at as close to zero ongoing cost as possible. They need automation and simplicity from the machine as well as any software. They need an assurance that, if something goes wrong they can either fix it themselves at that moment with common and standard tools, or that someone can come fix it for them within the hour, for a very low cost.
The problem with fancy modern tractors aren't that they are a negative value, or that they aren't extremely handy. It's that they are unbelievably expensive, because they are geared toward huge production, extremely efficient corporate "family" farms.
The kind of people who use old, out of date machinery because it's cheaper and easier to fix are a) dying out, and b) not a huge market in the US.
Maybe I'm way off base, but the 'need for disruption' in farming has always struck me as naive at best, and extremely egotistical at worst. That being said, as someone who actually did farm for 20+ years before quitting that for a cushy office job, I would love for the barrier to entry to be lower. I would love to hobby farm, but it's so expensive to do anything nowadays that it's impractical. But that, again, is not much of a market.
I hear you..every word you said.. Should we move to a model that shares equipment? Or create farming-as-a-service?
Of course this might mean that farms have to be contiguous acres. But less risk and lower capital sunk is a good deal. That is the kind of disruption needed.
So there is currently an informal structure for that across the US. I know where and who has a combine that I can borrow or pay just a little bit to harvest my crops. I know who can cover feeding for me if I'm out of town.
Also, that is what we used to do across the country. Co-ops and informal neighborly agreements to trade labor used to be the standard. We've gotten away from that with the development of mega-farms.
Start following some row crop farmers on Twitter, especially the guys that post tractor porn. This stuff will blow your mind. They can plant dozens of rows of corn in a single pass. The software and tech that drives a big John Deere planter is just unbelievable. Also, unbelievably expensive.
This stuff is expensive because it is expensive to make.
Versatile can deliver the same HP for around 25-30% off the the sticker price of a CNH or Deere, but that's really the bottom of the barrel in terms of margins and using commodity parts. A lot of this stuff is just that expensive to make!
The bar to entry is actually the lowest it has been in a while in terms of equipment, land is the real barrier to entry if you want to make a living as a grain farmer.
> "older machinery has to be a fit, and you have to put the time in to fix it. A lot of farmers don’t want to work on restoring equipment and I completely understand, but I could never do what I’m doing now with new equipment. That’s just the math of it.”
I bet this is a fun place to work. Hackers of Heavy Metal.
I found it interesting that his entire crew working on the Steigers and Rome are from South Africa..like half a dozen of them.
Does that mean America doesn’t have enough mechanics who have experience with these machines? Steigers are big in Australia acc to the article. South African crew seems a tad odd but I wonder if it’s just availability of the labour rather than any other specific reason.
I can't speak for South Africa, but here in Australia if you have old equipment you get real good at fixing it yourself because you can't just overnight parts to your door like Reed does, you have to trawl through Ebay looking for the part and someone who will ship it around the world at a reasonable price.
I used to bring an empty suitcase on my trips to the US and return with many parts for my "vintage" '81 Yamaha motorcycle.
I'm guessing seasonal labor in the southern hemisphere off-season? I can't speak to why he wouldn't have seasonal labor from (say) Australia, unless maybe the country's big enough that they can travel domestically to places that have less of an off-season?
I wonder about this and the (perceived?) lack of mechanics in the states. It could be down to centralization into large corporate farms and the shift in ownership preferences favoring leased equipment with factory support.
But as a one-time farm boy myself I wonder if it isn’t simply a lack of opportunity or the presence of better opportunities?
I work in tech now because I can but my first career path was auto tech/farm hand. I worked on a farm to pay for school but as soon as I could get a better paying career I did.
I also don’t miss the stereotypical trade work environment. Lunchtime conversation on the farm or auto shop would be fireable in the tech world. Lots of “locker room talk”. I wonder how many people that kind of culture scares off.
On HN please assume a charitable interpretation. America is short on good mechanics. This is about qualified South African labor imported because Americans are underqualified, not the other way around.
America has an annual shortage of around 39,000 techs...
>That's an underhanded comment or do you assume Africa can't produce any technical skills?
Lighten up a bit, eh? The parent didn't say anything negative about South Africa, rather he plainly wondered about the labor market for these skills and why it was necessary to bring talent from another country. It is an interesting and valid question that seems to imply a lack of homegrown US skills.
Personally I wondered if the make of tractor was South African and thus the likely source of trained technicians, but that's not the case here. Which leads us back to the root question - why SA? Good trade schools? Organizations that are helping people find apprenticeships around the world? Familial connections on the part of the subject of the article?
If I had to posit a theory it would be that increasing farm sizes came to North America first, and so a full generation+ of American "farm boys" are long gone to the city. In South Africa I believe the trend came later so now there are a lot of said "farm boys" with some experience but no farm to work on anymore, looking for work.
https://youtu.be/E-HeAnJcJvQ : check this out..it’s just ripping the field with a cultivator. I have never seen one of these Rome tractors before. Apparently it’s an Arkansas beloved..Mid west farming, it’s a planet of its own.
I got to meet a guy who was building tile plows for Michigan fields in the early 90s... This meant putting tons of machine onto the back of a cat d8 dozer; which then went out and put 1ft pipe 6ft into the ground in one pass. miles at a time. That was pretty impressive.
> When Reed began farming in 2005, he paid $120,000 for his first new tractor, but fast-forward to 2020, and the equivalent tractor’s price tag now reads a heftier $350,000.
The big question is why have tractor's tripled in price in the past 15 years? Regulations? Cars haven't gone up anywhere near that in that time frame.
Here in Europe I think it started even before 15 years ago from my limited experience:
In the 80ies as far as I can remember everything was extremely basic: open cabins without even doors was common IIRC (I was <10 years old then).
There used to be one power outlet and one hydraulic outlet, often controlled manually.
In the nineties I think bigger machines became the norm, as did closed sound proofed cabins and 4wd. Also it seems to be the time when simple automation became available, like systems to (slightly) adjust plow depth based on the resistance in the ground.
A couple of years ago I spoke to the kid running the Fendt on a field nearby after he stopped next to my 3yo who was watching from his stroller from the curb. He says everything is automatic on the equipment he runs now. The fertilizer can be programmed ahead of time to increase or decrease output based on yesteryears (or this year's) soil measurements. It even largely runs itself in the fields, even at the edges and his task was more or less to babysit it. I wonder if he didn't also mention that it would do automatic geo radar measurements as it drove around the field.
At the same time we've seen a couple of different trends playing out:
- smaller farms give up. Last I heard 3000 farms closed down here here in Norway every single year, and the trend had been going on for two or three decades then. Larger farms will then rent the leftover areas.
- except for the largest farms everyone is dependent on a second income. On the west coast I hear often wife or husband will be working in the North Sea at oil rigs on a 2/3 - 2/4 rotation (two weeks on, 3 or 4 weeks off).
- farmers also find work in carpentry, road construction and maintenance etc. They are often popular because they are extremely hard working. Sometimes as employees other times as subcontractors (for example for snow removal it helps a lot if you already have a powerful tractor that will otherwise be unused during the winter).
- Around here I think there is a trend towards agricultural entrepreneurs who owns the newest combines etc and do the harvesting.
Thanks for the perspective from across the pacific. What kind of crops can you grow in Norway? What kind of soil?
I have been talking with a Danish Ag robotics company and what I understand about Denmark is soil compaction issues and excessive tillage. We are talking beets/potatoes/maize etc.
It varies a lot. Norway is extremely long north to south[1].
Grass can be grown everwhere, even north of the artic circle. In eastern and middle Norway there's some grain production. In western and eastern Norway there are hotspots (pun unintended, but noticed and kind of valid) where fruit farming is possible.
My grandparents did fruit farming (and fishing) in addition to a bit of dairy farming.
My dad tried to specialize in dairy farming.
I'll try to get back and add some more.
[1]: for perspective: from the southernmost part of Norway to the northernmost is about the same distance as from the southernmost point of Norway, in a straight line across Denmark, Germany, the alps and I think all the way down to Rome : -)
Because tractor manufacturers wanted to make more money, and they figured taking it from farmers was the beset way to do it, so they raised their prices.
With little competition, farmers just bought what was on offer (except when they hold onto their old iron).
> Reed employs a group of highly skilled operators from South Africa
This is mentioned as an afterthought but struck me as strange . Migrant workers commuting from South Africa? The article even mentions their wage at $30/h.
My brother is good friends with a family that has a fairly large farming operation near our hometown. Their dad puts out blog posts periodically and in one of them he mentioned something about the South African workers being delayed or unavailable due to the pandemic.
I would guess they maybe make a good labor pool due to being in the opposite hemisphere, so they can come up to the US during their off season. Not sure on that though.
I was surprised when I read about it, and then a little less surprised when I read it in this article. Guess it's a thing.
We have the same thing here in Norway, both in fruit and vegetable farming (planting, weeding in ecological farms) as well as in sheep farming were sheep shearers fly in from Australia/New Zealand after finishing the season down under.
I'm guessing the extremely expensive Norwegian labour costs make that viable? In Ireland, I never heard of sheep shearers being brought in from Australia or New Zealand (in fact the flow of young workers has been in the other direction since the 2008 crash).
My understanding was that the sheep shearers were specialists and the others were cheap labor.
Note that Norway has strict laws and regulations when it comes to wages, but especially this year it has become clear that certain farms finds all kinds of ways to fleece some of these people anyway:
- rent out overpriced "flats" with bunk beds that are the bare minimum allowed standard
- changing terms after people arrive
- generally try to skirt regulations in every way possible
$30 an hour sounds good until you realize you only work for short spurts at a time. There are months where you have jack shit to do and yet you still must eat and survive. And there aren't a ton of jobs that are willing to let you take off days or weeks at a time to go work your farming job. "Sorry boss, rain is coming, so ill be gone for the next 3-5 days, that is fine right?" "Sorry no, I can't come in for an emergency, im busy doing 16 hour days in a combine for the next 2 weeks."
Locally (where we have a lot of folks who come from other countries to work in agriculture), I've always assumed it's about duration: If you come to work the season, you are a migrant worker. If you come to stay on a semi-permanent basis, you are an expat. But maybe I've been using those words wrong?
H-2A visa holders. Even American farms source global labor. Given his location, it's probably better than trying to fight the brain drain and sort out the unreliable burnouts left in the local labor pool.
This is the <insert nationality here> scrapper/dirt hauler/landscaper way of running a fleet. You over provision junk so that enough of it's running at any one time and you do minimum maintenance.
It takes a special confluence of low labor costs and in-housing certain types of labor to make this work. Don't read too much into this. This is just a story of a guy who's hyper optimized for local conditions. Not some broad brush statement about whether to buy new equipment or end of life equipment.
The most interesting takeaway for me was "don't let your costs of inputs be determined by specialized vendors when your revenue comes from a commodity".
Or backwards: "if you are in a commodity business, then you need to carefully control the costs of inputs, possibly by avoiding non-commodity capital equipment".
But corporate farms have swallowed family farms and there has been a massive consolidation. With every aspect of farming.
Big tractor and the guy who sells you herbicide and suggests what seed to buy. You seed, inputs and yield projection is all done for you. And now with data collection..esp with tractors being outfitted with modern tech and AI, the farmer is like chopped meat...they are basically overseers with inherited land who collect subsidies, do the accounting, pay taxes and deliver to grain elevator.
The system is designed to slowly chip away farms so the balance sheet becomes debt heavy and cash poor/land rich farmers end up selling anyways. The whole thing is rigged. The name of the game is consolidation.
Across the border, I don’t know how it works w/Canadian commodity farms but at their dairy industry works with a diff subsidies model. It’s not like they have eliminated subsidies completely but it has helped not shutter dairy farms and is more protectionist.
The concept of making do with less in the Western world is something driven by necessity in other less wealthy nations, the prime example being the Indian "Jugaad"[1]
I find this very interesting because on our farm the main source of savings has been running 7 (3-4 in the field at a time) 1480 and 1680 combines valued at $5-8,000 each. (and about 15 headers to match, equally worthless). We keep them well maintained but if we do have a failure that is not an instant fix we literally just pull another one out of the shed and carry on.
Where we farm late-90's and early 2000's seeding equipment is now cheap as dirt too, we run two air seeders worth a combined $50,000, maybe?
I have a Steiger, branded as a Case 9170, they have weak spots (wiring, rear diffs & planetaries) but they are cheap horsepower. Around my parts the "Rome" tractors would be older Versatile 4WDs that are easy to repower and have nice big cabs.
All that said, I find the large savings claims here to be a bit suspect. Dropping new electronic engines in these frames, even if you do a lot of the work yourself, costs real money. Once you are 80-90k into a 1980 tractor.. they made a lot of good equipment in the 90's that you can walk up and buy for those kinds of dollars. And he isn't doing the work all himself, those hours cost real cash out of pocket (a small farmer like myself that fixes himself.. well you can just keep whittling down your personal hourly rate by putting in more hours).