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> Up until a year ago I was regularly using a Massy Fergusson 135

There is a tradition in several European countries named Affouage: If you live in a rural area, you can get very cheap (or even free) wood at the condition that you go to cut it yourself in the close-by forest.

Many many people who are doing this practice are still using today Massy Fergusson 135, Renault R98/461, Ford 3000-4000 series, SOMECA or similar low tech tractors.

The reason are simple: They are cheap to operate, cheap to repair (damages happen easily forest environment) and their small size is perfect for the task.

The demand for these things will never die. Rugged environment requires cheap and robust hardware.

If this startup can capitalize on that, they do have a market.

I learnt to drive on one of those. I'm a city kid but my grandfather was a wool farmer. Every school holiday we'd visit and I's spend my days literally puttering around the farm, which was pretty huge (~2000ha).

When I started out, 13ish or so, I had to stand on the clutch to get it down.

If you gave it enough beans and dropped the clutch it'll pop a wheelie! (Don't tell my grandpa)

My grandfather had one of these, though gas powered. It may have been the Ford model, cannot remember, though his was built I believe in the late 40s / early 50s. One story that still makes me laugh, he couldn't start it one day, and asked my grandmother to give him a pulling start w/ their ford diesel pickup. One look and my about 12 year old self just knew she wanted to be anywhere else but there (some foreshadowing, she had a reputation for a lead foot). Grandpa had already tied a rope from the tractor to the truck, and I believe he was in maybe one of the lower gears ready to pop the clutch after he got up to speed. Grandma tore (yes, tore) out of the yard shifting gears, and she was accelerating down their long driveway headed for the main road as Grandpa started frantically waving his hat trying to get her to stop. I'm pretty sure he never asked her again to help start the tractor. And yeah, the tractor was started, probably in the first 50 feet of that episode.

My dad had one of these, to support his farming hobby. (He used to joke that we ate fifty dollar cucumbers, and a hundred-dollar ear of corn.)

It came in handy living in the country, when occasionally someone would get bogged down on a dirt road, and this thing would come to the rescue.

The name of the brand is "Massey Ferguson" not "Massy Fergusson".

The reason I know that is not that I'm a farmer. It's that 20 years ago a bunch of friends and I wrote and performed a parody song of Gainsbourg/Bardot song "Harley Davidson" where the motorbike brand was replaced with the tractor one.

"Je n'ai besoin de personne en Harley Davidson"

became

"Je n'ai besoin de personne en Massey Ferguson".

We used to have a really old Massey Ferguson, I think TE-20, at the family (moonshine) farm. It was finally retired around 15 years ago and replaced with a MF 165. I hear you about the clutch--sometimes I feel I can't even push it down far enough.

I also love driving it, apart from the fact the hydraulics are somewhat off, so the front/rear lift won't ever stay in position.

My father drove one of those in his childhood. Now retired, he has bought a used one and uses it to maintain about an acre of land (and his grandkids love helping him).

Once, it broke down, and I was astonished to see that there are forums dedicated to this tractor. If I remember correctly, it was a problem with the fuel line that is rather common, and we managed to fix it thanks to these communities.

As I was researching it, I read stories of MF135s found abandoned in a ditch and starting immediately again. A robustness that makes this and other models popular in Africa...

Must be used all around the world. My parents had one on our farm in the 70s. Maybe it is still there- as a "back up" tractor. I remember it well.

I went through my teenager years driving one of those MF 135 machines. A very versatile tractor. I enjoyed driving tractors (including a much older MF), when I eventually got my car's driver license some years later I found that driving cars weren't really that interesting.

During certain kinds of driving gear shifts became.. tricky. That's when I learned how to double-clutch, something I kept doing on cars as well, for many years after (think going steep uphill on snow and then having to shift into first gear without stopping)

Did yours have a foot feed for the accelerator? I've never seen one without a hand feed for the rpm's on the steering column.

I shamefully have some Facebook Marketplace notifications for some Massy tractors. I'd love one. I don't even have land to use them, I just think they are neat.

Still rocking one over here. The thing had not been maintained for 20 years while still being used, ran several times with almost no oil in the engine, drank gasoil full of water.

And it still works.

Things were made different back then.

I looked up the manual, you got everything you need to repair it. Maintenance is extremely easy. Even have electric schema.

Now my BMW, I looked into the manual how to change a light. It said to go to the dealer lol.

Fuck the modern car / tractor / tools. I blame the people for that, we went from customer that demanded to be able to repair their stuff to people who are now mechanically illiterate. I'm not sure they would even know how to replace a tire on their Tesla :)

That's why manufacturer have all the latitude to do what they do. And that's why it didn't go very far with farmers.

You'll likely appreciate this then: https://farmboymusic.bandcamp.com/track/we-couldnt-start-the...

> The air filter was basically a shisha-pipe that bubbled the incoming air through wire wool and engine oil.

What is a shisha-pipe?

I have the original 1940's Minneapolis Moline R and my wife has the original Farmall H and we both currently live in the city (but grew up farming or close to it) so we're not city kids, but somewhere stuck in between. I deeply get the feeling of using a non-tech machine, and how simple it is but intuitive to use. We used a pain mixing stick to check the gas level in our tractors on the farm, I don't think the gas gauges ever worked. You'd have to whack the starter with a wrench since they didn't ever work half the time. They worked over 60 years before they got their first oil change (my grandpa didn't believe in changing them - but my dad and I think it's just because you'll never get the canister filter to seal ever again if you did change it)

Great memories.

with a spanner in one hand and YouTube into the other

There are so many useful videos on this stuff, but unfortunately the majority of the population still seems reluctant to learn.

> I imagine the clutch is easier on the knees these days! Modern tractors don't really have a clutch. I mean they sorta do, but it's electronic. Even on sizable consumer positioned tractors(I have a JD 5055, but it applies to almost all the JD models), there's just a lever for forward, N, and reverse. Gear shifters work MUCH MUCH better now.

One of my early memories was driving a tractor like this hauling potato harvest with my late grandfather when his "big" tractor wouldn't start. Feels like a 1000 years ago...

My father still has one of these in orange and white. I remember when I was a little child and he would start it up, I could feel the concussion of the exhaust in my chest.

An awesome memory. Lovely things, these.

I remember when I was young seeing a combine that had a radio and television in the cab. wow!

Now things have wrapped back around, and nobody would want that, they want less tech and to use their phone, lol.

Those are so cool. First motorized thing I ever drove was some 1950s Ford tractor, as a little kid. My uncle showed me how to use it. I almost had to stand with both feet on the clutch and pull myself up to release it, while my brother manned the wheel and throttle separately.

While I love wrenching on cars, I imagine a tractor like this would scratch a different itch—something more latent, leftover from childhood.

Do you still have the Massy?

The smaller tractors now mostly use a hydrostatic transmission instead of a clutch[]. You just move a plate that changes the mechanical advantage of the engine powered hydraulic drive. It's basically another set of hydraulics but for driving the tractor.

[] https://youtu.be/TunlPGZ3UOg?t=69

Basic models still sell like hot cakes in India. I see them all the time.

https://masseyfergusonindia.com/massey-ferguson/

I loved the MF 135 my neighbour had. It was great. The injector pump had failed and we'd swapped it with one off a marine version of the Perkins AD3, which had a reasonably "opened up" governor on it. Flat it out could do a whopping 20mph!

> no fancy technology in it at all

It's amazing we can use huge machinery with internal combustion engines and declare it "no fancy technology"

Point #2 ought to be good reason for us to move past our archaic consumption-based economies into something where less consumption isn't considered a "problem."

On the econ Point I think you’d still have someone come in and undercut it. If you can steal a big share of a 10 year market then it could make sense for a lean startup as a once off sprint even if you know after that it’s dead.

The bulb stuff was a cartel not normal functional markets.

You probably can’t sell tractors forever but that’s short-sighted: you can sell parts and service that’s reasonably priced. People don’t just refuse to buy OEM parts on principle, they do it because the prices are often outrageous and/or the procedure to do so sucks and/or is arbitrarily restrictive like needing dealer licenses or what have you.

And just because a tractor is low tech and designed to run forever doesn’t mean it won’t still need parts and service. Time comes for us all and that includes your wheel bearings, bushings and seals.

> However, the tech exists for a reason and is not inherently bad, the issue is the lock-in, the lack of choice and interoperability.

These low-tech tractors could become a hot bed for open source experimentation. Nothing stopping someone from sticking a tablet on the dash. You could run GPS harvesting optimization software or some webthing locally. Could be cloud or clever DiY farmers could run their farm off a local instance on a small machine using a WiFi AP atop the barn or whatever.

OEM can change their mind at any moment and there is always going to be an MBA rubbing their hands together thinking about all the money that can be made.

This needs to be solved at government level with right to repair laws and requirement for open standards instead of believing in magic of "free market".

"Downtime — the thing that actually costs a farmer money during planting or harvest — shrinks dramatically when you don’t need a factory technician with a laptop to diagnose a fuel delivery problem."

---------------

Tractors aren't cars. It isn't merely inconvenient if they are unavailable at crucial times, so ease of repair is critical. Farmers have always done as much of their own maintenance as possible. John Deere has spent a lot of time taking away the reliability and ease of repair that farmers need in order to give them "advanced" features they don't need.

Farmers who want advanced capabilities might now look to build them on top of no-tech tractors with open-source solutions rather than trusting John Deere again. That way, if the "would be nice" tech has problems they can rip it off and get the harvest in without it.

This is probably not this companies vision but it does seem interesting if companies sell "dumb" machines and then consumers can BYO electronics. Like an agricultural version of comma.ai.

Not sure how much appetite there is for that but half price + 5 grand in off the shelf electronics seems like something margin sensitive farmers would do.

I disagree. While those are great points, I don't think that's the primary reason -- and maybe we're actually saying the same thing.

This tractor will last 50 years (and maybe more). Your grandchildren will be able to still use it. That longevity is the primary reason farmers would be super interested in this.

Some jobs (like mucking a barn for example) don't require a high-tech tractor. Sometimes you just need a workhorse that you can trust will start, run and do the job. Every single time. I still see farmers running old minneapolis-moline tractors from 100 years ago!

That’s part of the issue. But packing a tractor (or car) with electronics and computers does make it inherently harder to work on—even if it’s not locked down.

It goes much deeper than that. The John Deere ecosystem is designed to trap farmers using a combination of the closed ecosystem and financing. They've been at it for years, selling precision agriculture advances as the thing that will maximize all yields and turn profits, and then following up with economic manipulations to create what amounts to tech-enabled sharecropping.

It's so bad the FTC and states had to sue Deere over just the right to repair. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2025/01/...

Note that that OEM would still have to deal with the minefield of patents created by the John Deere's of the world. I once worked for a company that had to work around an electronic circuit patent to detect a pulse. That was it, that was all it did. But if you used a standard differentiator circuit to detect the pulse created by a optical sensor watching for falling seeds you would violate the patent.

So a prerequisite might involve fixing the patent system...

Do you work in the agricultural industry? Farm equipment is expensive, farmers will maintain the equipment as long as possible, which is a long time. Manufactures such as John Deere have tried to make it not possible for farmers to do self repair.

https://youtu.be/EPYy_g8NzmI

John Deere has lost so much good will among farmers due to their lock-in efforts, it's wild. Unfortunately, many farmers are stuck with them because the only tractor dealership within a reasonable distance is John Deere.

>> However, the tech exists for a reason and is not inherently bad, the issue is the lock-in, the lack of choice and interoperability.

The marketing excuse for the tech might be features or efficiency, but the reason for the tech is lock-in and minimising product lifetime.

The days when manufacturers had friendly, cooperative relationships with their customers are long gone :( Can we bring them back? I hope so, but am not hopeful.

> However, the tech exists for a reason and is not inherently bad, the issue is the lock-in, the lack of choice and interoperability.

The problem is computers and software enable lock-in, because of their flexibility and communications capability. Get rid of them, and you make lock-in much more difficult (or even impossible if you use "standard" parts).

Also, computers and software are complex, and that complexity is not physically visible. If you want something you can completely understand, it's probably a good choice to simplify by cutting them out completely.

I don't know anything about tractors but our modern world is full of useless and inherently bad "tech" that only exists for the flashy factor.

People are just tired of being mislead and abused by corporations, which is why there is now a market for non-tech products.

Just call it what it is, greed. The idiots at John Deer thought strangling their customers to death was a good business model.

Ultimately the “lock in” boils down to “when this breaks someone has to pay to fix it”. Automation and tech makes the galaxy of things that can break much larger, and the pinpointing of “who should pay to fix this” much harder. “Lock in” feels like an attempt to simplify toward “only we can fix it”, with the downsides of cost and time.

Maybe not inherently bad, but clearly not inherently necessary or useful if they're already getting so many inquiries from farmers. Could just be that the tech doesn't offer enough meaningful value when the core mechanical functionality can be achieved at a lower price.

If you add a bunch of tech to, well, anything you have to go out of your way to make it not locked down.

The fact tractor isn't locked in means 3rd party equipment have a chance instead of having to sit in locked in garden of a given vendor.

Not sure they needed to go all the way to mechanical injection tho, this is just literally burning money away

What if an OEM did the IBM thing and published open specs and software, spawning a whole industry? It's a shame the incentives don't seem to be there for it.

And there's also a place for OEMs who make the bare machines like this, and other people sell electronics to add!

Software or hardware, the lock-down for dollars will blow back.

Framework tractor when

It's not only the lock-in, as the document says, its about limiting the downtime.

Sailboats have the similar issue:

When are are in the middle of the pacific and get an egine problem, you want the engine to be low tech enough to be able to fix, or at least patch, yourself with minimum parts.

Yanmar switched its whole lineup of engines to ECU around 2014, but the one without ECU are very much sought after for the above reason.

Unfortunately it's doomed as soon as you read "startup". Why? There are two possible outcomes:

1. This fails, goes away and we're back where we started; or

2. They take the bag and sell to John Deere, who then locks down the tractors in the same way to force you to buy support, official parts and so on. And that'll happen. It's a bait-and-switch so somebody can get rich.

The only solution to this is collective ownership or some other non-profit structure so a handful of owners can't sell out and cash in.

Look to Spain's Mondragon Corporation [1] for inspiration.

[1]: https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/how-mondragon-be...

For the farmers I know the price tag is the first thing they were looking at. So much grumbling about how Deere is using software to egregiously pad the price tag. Looking at a tractor that is going to take 5 or 6 years to pay off instead of 15 is tempting. Sadly Trump is absolutely going to slap a 400% tariff on these if they are even allowed to be imported.

The tech is inherently more expensive though. So if you want to undercut on price you have to cut costs somewhere.

Whom tech benefits is worth keeping in mind.

Tech for improvement for customers vs tech for moats/enshittification, especially when imposed by one side on the other.

The latter is never very good.

I'd love this. I really don't want my car to be an iPhone with "apps" and random background software on it. The car touchscreen was perhaps the worst design choice in the history of the automobile, and is likely the cause of countless crashes. It's insane when I see car UIs that have the 'cancel / go back' button located in DIFFERENT areas depending on the screen context.

One example: https://www.caricecars.com (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45823186)

it seems like Slate might be trying that but there's no real cars from them yet so they're just renders at this point. but yes, same concept but printers is my wish.

There is a golden era of cars, say 5 to 10 years ago that have things like heated seats but no tracking.

Personally I have a 2019 Mazda 3 which has camera vision all around, radar cruise control and heated seats but no lane assist bumping you around or a cellular connection relaying any information.

The only anti feature it has is that stupid idle stop, but that’s easy to permanently disable. It also has car play but doesn’t have a touch screen.

Anyway I’m not saying you should get this car specially but there are cars out there that are like what you want.

As much as I and (probably) most other consumers agree with you, I don't think the car insurance industry does. Very similarly to how governments being buyers of data from adtech companies makes it an impossibility for governments to enact good privacy laws, there are massive perverse incentives here that place too much money on the table for good things to ever happen; car manufacturers want to gatekeep the sale of our data to insurance companies and governments, insurance companies want to lobby for laws that mandate data collection so that more claims can be denied and profit can rise, and governments are happy to enforce data collection because it strengthens their surveilance mechanisms.

FWIW: Hyundai EVs have physical buttons for everything important. It has a screen for CarPlay but it’s small compared to competitors. (I got the Kona for these reasons)

The problem is that the difference between a low tech and a high tech diesel tractor is mostly emissions and some loss of efficiency. The difference between a low tech and a high tech electric car is a 25 mile range and a 250 mile range, a top speed of 35 mph and 100 mph, carrying capacity and so on.

I recently did a lawn tractor conversion from gas to electric and what I got was in my opinion significantly better and more reliable than a commercial option at 20% of the price but it is limited to 4mph. Scaling it to 5 would require a lot of custom fabrication and a much more expensive drive motor. Once this tech is significantly better and cheaper to the point of being a commodity it will be a different story. For now it just isn’t.

https://www.telotrucks.com/ is pretty much that

Cheap, fast enough, practical, goofey looking.

Modern cars evolved in terms of safety, this includes active safety too. All the safety features require OEM hardware/software that locks you in, for example replacing windshield in many models requires dealership calibration.

And with all the distracted drivers looking into their phones while driving, I want more and more cars to get at least emergency breaking systems.

People who says this never even consider Nissan Leaf. "Because the charging..." or whatever.

So consumers DO want all-touchscreen disposable cars like Tesla - it's similar to how disposable phones had replaced phones with removable batteries(even among IP rated phones). Wallets vote strongly against consumers.

I've been dreaming of doing an EV conversion on my 2008 Honda Civic that I barely even drive. No cellular radio, no OTA updates, no touchscreen. I lack the mechanical skills and time though, and I'm not aware of people in my area that do conversions as a service for anything but like high end classic cars(which a Honda sedan is not).

I own a base model 2020 Suzuki Swift GL, which I specifically bought because it has no touchscreen. It has a radio with Bluetooth and dials - that is it.

No issues so far.

Check out Slate auto

I wonder if we'll see a repeat of what happened in the 60's and 70's: American car companies didn't want to make small and cheap fuel efficient cars, so an upstart (Japanese automakers) came in with exactly that and stole their lunch money.

These days, the big foreign manufacturers are all in the same game as the domestic ones - software nonsense. Tariffs are keeping other foreign competition out at the moment, so it'd have to be a new domestic manufacturer, or an existing one who deviates from the standard auto playbook.

So a Dacia?

It can be built but it wouldn't be legal to sell commercially. Closest thing would be a kit car (which I've always felt haven't scaled as much as they theoretically could)

So slate.auto?

Sounds like you just want a car from the year 2000.

That's the pitch behind the Slate truck right? Just the basics to make it a functional vehicle and then you add only what you want.

a 2010-16 corolla is basically this

Honestly, all the modern tech, except the tracking and touchscreens, is pretty freakin' awesome.

I honestly don't care about power windows (or seats), do you really? I guess one advantage is being able to easily open windows other than your own.

Heated seats and stearing wheel, yes please.

But yep what I want is a Saab 900 "cockpit" car -- everything can be focused on and manipulated (physically!) without my eyes leaving the road or my hand having to explore too much.

But, yeah, electric.

I can only applaud it, however the challenge will be to make it meet modern standards / requirements for things like emissions and safety.

> maximize shareholder dividends

This is the whole reason why middle class is dying and power and wealth are being consolidated amongst the rich.

The disincentive to provide a durable product is unfortunate. Ideally businesses pair high-ticket one-time sales with low-cost recurring sales of related products and services.

Must we sell more than 10,000? That seems like a reasonable check for a small business to take home and go solve some other problem for someone.

The thing is, your reputation will get out there. Folks will want to work with you because of who you are; it'll be profitable (in many ways) even if it isn't a 100-year dynasty.

Farming is a way of life for a lot of people, not just a business. That’s what is missing from your picture. And by population, small time farmers significantly outnumber industrial outfits, regardless of how much they spend. Sure you can make more money selling the most advanced tech to the biggest spenders. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a market for affordable, reliable equipment that gets the job done. Add on the risky nature of farming and its untenable to trap yourself in high 6 figures of debt and pray that you can optimize your way to enough profit to pay the interest.

Fancy gains in ROI come from smart seeder/sprayer attachments and combine harvesters (a completely different piece of machinery), not from the tractor that's pulling those equipment. At best there's the ROI from less seed overlap, but plenty of GPS systems integrate well into any tractor and the gains are really marginal. I don't think tractor electronics are as important as they're hyped up to be.

i have a farmall hand cranked tractor, going on 90 years old, so far its been rubber parts, and clutch pads.

as far as auto mation goes, thats how implements used to work. it was a tracter/thresher/combine. then a bale counter is slapped on then maybe row sighting or guidance, etc.

if your really snazzy, the implement is actually mapping the soil for moisture, or rough composistion and holding data to use in reformulating or notating your current cultural plans, i.e. supplemental spot feeding and irrigation.

actual agricultural needs, not just fluff.

This is what a "bobcat" has become for UGV startups. It's a low tech proven platform that you can basically modify with attachments to do a lot of UGV work.

I was assuming the same. This might be fine for a small setup but I'd imagine all the digitization shenanigans was done so efficiency could increase. I imagine for large scale operations this would be like replacing your steam engine with a horse.

Could even nationalise the base tractor factory...

They're using an absolutely ancient engine from Cummins that has probably paid off its r&d and assembly line costs at least 10x over. It has virtually no pollution controls on it like DEF or DPF. That alone is saving a fair amount of money.

You are seeing the price cuts of simplicity.

There’s very little R&D cost. Possibly little cap-ex as the infra to build exists.

You can buy a used car and get it converted to electric.

Huh? Aren't the tractors using a loophole to avoid emissions regulations?

You can do a lot of things if you don't care about the spirit of the law and your negative externalities.

It's also got half the power output.

You’re rounding down the Kibota price (starts at 109k) and mixing in Canadian $.. You get a cummins 12v with more power than an m6 (and bigger more capable chassis) for ~10k less than the kubota.

Mine comes in tomorrow. When researching, I was amazed at the simplicity of these machines. The engine is essentially available at Harbor Freight, then it’s basically just a hydraulic pump and valves. When things break, I’m sure I can find a replacement part or hack something together.

There was a blender that uses a printed or CNC case and basic repair parts for all the mechanicals… Open Funk re:Mix blender https://www.openfunk.co/pages/re-mix

Maybe for "motorcycles" like Aptera.

Large car manufactures will lobby to avoid competition of barebones, cheap cars.

Using my friends Speed Queen washer/dryer was such a revelation. I hate my Samsung washer/dryer.

> Some Chinese companies should take this niche or maybe not-niche field, sell at a premium

A friends dad sold his existing business and has been making $$$ in semi-rural texas importing and selling Chinese skid loaders. This market already exists.

Very punny :P

That's most of it. It gets lost in the right to repair conversation, I think because many of the same individuals who care about that also tend to be very pro-environmental-regulation, but one has to take a step back and acknowledge the fact that the EPA made it illegal to build this tractor new instead of with a rebuilt truck engine from the 90s. You literally cannot build a legal diesel tractor in the US that doesn't involve an ECU, sensors, DEF, and all the proprietary electronics to go along with those systems.

If it was legal to build these at industrial scale, we'd already have it in the US because there's blatant market demand for it. This is functionally no different from the shops putting 30 year old diesel engines in modern pickup trucks for the same reasons.

The emissions are so unreliable that the only legal market for vehicles without them in the US is... the federal government.

Anyone who actually has to use their equipment to get shit done dislikes DPF/regen. It's like Windows Update --- you might be in the middle of a serious task but screech "time for a scheduled update! we dgaf what kind of critical task you were just doing, you want updates!"

Modern diesel systems equipped with DPF tech (which consumes DEF, the fluid) require a regen cycle which is kinda like an oven cleaning itself - they get super hot and burn away particulate before they can be used again. Farmers are more frustrated by the system than the fluid. In fact, DEF is really just piss (urea) which is the same kind of product that they use for fertilizer. Although the prices for urea have skyrocketed recently so perhaps they truly do hate DEF too.

The awesome thing about these 'older' Cummins engines is yes they lack DEF systems and also have mechanical fuel injection. As is commonplace with diesel, there are no spark/glow plugs either. So ostensibly once you have the engine started, it requires zero electricity or computer systems to operate. The RPM of the engine dictates everything else mechanically through gearing. This is a big win for equipment that needs to "just work". Of course they still have sensors and all kinds of systems that are kinda layered on top... but they're not strictly required. This is also why the "runaway diesel" problem exists. You cannot stop an engine like this without starving it of air or fuel.

That’s exactly what I was thinking. And it makes me wonder if the future is manufactures repurposing older engines in new shells to bypass the increasingly more regulatory environments they operate in. Kind of a funny thing to think about.

> Precision tech helps reduce operator fatigue and increases efficiency with respect to equipment operation time and material used

That’s the kind of MBA speak a giant corporate food production facility loves to hear, but not a farmer.

Sounds like a big gap. Figures.

Cessna 172s are great if you are learning to fly. But most people using these things for actually getting from A to B will be looking for something with a bit more range, speed, etc. That still might be sixty year old plane but one with a bigger engine; or two of them even. And if you want to go really fast you get something with a turbo prop or even jet engines. The newer ones are a bit more efficient with the fuel but also more in demand and therefore more expensive. You get what you pay for.

My understanding of the aviation market is that there are some bargains to be had with planes that are old but still very servicable. But if you are flying longer distances regularly, you kind of gravitate towards the more expensive ones. Because they go faster, use less fuel, are more comfortable, have more useful load, etc.

The point of a tractor is that is used to do useful work by farmers who earn their living working these things hard. If they break down, work stops until that can be fixed. The value of being able to fix these machines yourself is that you get them back in action quickly. But the value of a newer one is that it presumably wouldn't need a lot of fixing to begin with. And maximizing power while minimizing fuel usage means the job gets done quicker and at a lower cost. And that's what modern manufacturers sell of course.

IMHO, electric is going to revolutionize farming. Diesel is expensive (a lot more lately). And farmers burn a lot of it. Electric motors are small, reliable, quiet, etc. They have loads of torque. And if you are a farmer, you have plenty of space to harvest your own electricity with solar panels and maybe a wind mill and some batteries. There is a growing amount of high end stuff available in this space but also very affordable low end stuff. And this technology can be very simple and tinker friendly. Buy some old EV batteries wire them up and you can make anything with wheels move. Including really old tractors, pickup trucks, etc. Anything from the largest mining trucks to the smallest lawn mower can already be powered by batteries. And everything in between. With battery cost dropping, there are very few obstacles that prevent adoption left. Mostly import tariffs in the US.

These tractors are not new, they are rebuilt.

In Queensland, Australia SwarmFarm might be worth a look - they're already deep into driverless automated agriculture .. making a non John Deere tech stack.

https://www.swarmfarm.com/technology/

- West Australian grain farmer (4,500 hectares, barley, grains) reviews a fully automated driverless swarm bot in boom spray configuration:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljEKN7CsjnM

> if there is some real competition

They can't scale this model up because they legally have to use rebuilt engines from the 90s to do it to get around modern diesel emissions regulations. It's illegal to build this kind of engine in the US new, there's no way to compete with Deere's scale.

"old" tractors from 10+ years ago and new tractors are really ... not different at all. mechanically and structurally they are all the same. you can get a 20 year old deere/kubota tractor that might even be better than a new one because of the decline in manufacturing, cost cutting across materials etc. if well maintained they last forever, and the older gear is easier to work on.

dictatorship is anticompetitive practice(slaves work is cheap) and relying on its produce to produce essentials is national security issue.

I don't know if distrust is the right word, because it's right out there in the open: a significant amount of technology is objectively not used for improving your life. It's used for improving a CEO's bank account. Technology has been actively and intentionally weaponised against consumers to strip more and more of their rights away in the name of the almighty dollar, and anyone with eyes can see it.

Sadly it will also burn other stuff around. If it would only eat itself, I would watch with glee. But when it eats the life-sphere and our lifesupport before, I feel less gleeful

You'd need steering, throttle and braking actuators as well as radar to get comma.ai working with it.

The energy balance just does not work with current agricultural paradigm. For example, plowing is really energy intensive and electric tractors just can't carry the required amount of batteries. Too heavy tractors compact the earth and sink in bad weather conditions.

For electrification to really proceed in ag, we need a revolution in the paradigm, something that removes most of the energy heavy processes.

Electric excavators are there, as they are low duty cycle, see sibling comments for details, but high load percent for long time is a killer for battery tech.

I could imagine tethered tractors with power line tensioned in the air, but the grid building cost will be quite high for intermittent usage. Only some land usages and plot shapes would work economically.

the battery in a tesla would run a medium tractor for less than an hour. The tesla can produce more power - but soon it is up to speed and so making a lot less. Tractors are expected to produce their full rated power for 10 hours without stopping.

A tractor does actual work like pulling an implement like a plow or spinning the PTO to power a machine like a wood splitter or well drill.

Airplane engines are rebuilt every 5,000ish miles because they’re constantly running at like 50% load, it’s much harder on the engine than moving a car, a tractor is very similar.

Car engines do very little work once you’re up to speed, it only takes a fraction of the max power available to keep the car moving. This is why EVs are possible.

Running a tractor engine under load requires a lot of energy, battery density isn’t quite there yet, diesel has around 50x more energy by weight than a battery.

There's been a few. The big manufacturers don't really want to make them, and for the last decade just show off expensive concepts at industry shows and that's it. The small companies only get investment by making a VC play for "autonomous" and "smart" agriculture; they soak up investment, make very expensive product, then go out of business.

I think Monarch tractor just folded up and sold their assets, for example. They were a nice looking product but did what I described above.

Innovation here will happen in Europe and China, not here in North America. "Tractor" here in North America means big giant machine that is owned in a fleet by a giant corporation that manages multiple properties, and works over a dozen fields in a few days.

Every time I've looked into it for my hobby farm, a compact utility tractor that is electric ends up either being vapourware or twice to three times the price and missing features.

What Slate is hyping that they'll do with small trucks.

We'll see what, if anything, actually becomes available.

Why not buy a used one?

They get used in burst cycles -- like 10 days straight at harvest time, other times not started for months. Battery cost per kwh used is very low amortized over its full lifespan, but if you only use it to 1% of its capability your costs are now 100x higher.

Now, hang a high voltage wire down from a big-ass catenary, so you don't need batteries, and it'll be cheaper upfront and in use, but nobody does that because of 1. safety 2. if everybody did it the grid would need upgrades

October to April in Saskatchewan.

Almost certainly it's energy density for long running, high load usage.

If a family car energy usage is 1x, then a light duty truck is about 1.5x, and a heavy duty truck doing hauling or towing is about 4x. A medium sized farm tractor would probably be 20x or more.

In that light, it's not hard to see how cars and light trucks could fare well with today's battery energy density, while heavy duty trucks are at the limits. For a tractor, it's not even close.

I do think we'll see smaller tractors going electric in about 10-15 years.

Are you looking for a monitor? xD

> My assumption are farmers are trying to skirt the eco rules for vehicles in some way.

They're using remanufactured 90s cummins for this reason. They're pre-DEF. Modern regulations have killed the diesel engine as a reliable workhorse. It's easy to write off the woes of this segment as corporate greed, but we've made it illegal to build a simple reliable tractor like this.

> The Kubota M5-111 is a 105.6 HP utility tractor that uses Diesel Exhaust Fluid (DEF) to meet Tier 4 emission standards, with common issues including Code 202A, DEF sensor failures, and clogged injectors. The system includes a dedicated tank and filter (Part #1J508-19660). Owners often report issues with the DEF system causing power derates, leading some to consider deletion or repair, though these issues can cause significant downtime

105hp va 150hp is not a “comparable class”…

Also, the ursa tractors have warranties too…

Can't, cars have mandatory emissions standards that pretty much need electronicially controlled fuel injection and a bunch of other crap to meet.

this is what happens to every publicly traded company

That to me just seems like the inevitable result of capitalist market economy.

This seems almost completely untrue?

The new models have engines that are smaller turbos, that part is true — but they get >30% better fuel economy, and they output more power.

The reliability might become an issue down the road especially in hybrid engines but the data so far don’t seem to support your assertions. The one exception is maybe the Tundra 3.4L but that seems to still be ambiguous as to the root cause, and may just be mfg process error.

> overstrain them, and put huge turbos on the engines

This doesn't really mean anything. You can build an engine at any point of the spectrum from naturally aspirated to turbocharged, to turbo-compound, to actually not having any pistons at all (e.g. the "turbofans" that we put on airliners). What you want is to match the engine to the machine and build it out of the right materials.

Most people don't know shit about engineering and have weak intuition about materials, stress and physics in general. What the common person thinks about a random engineering topic literally does not matter, because they are 90% wrong about everything. Regarding cars, it's more like 99%. People still recite torque figures like they mean anything, ffs. That bad boy with 200 Nm at the crank? Cool, I make 150 Nm pedalling a bike.

My previous car before an EV had a 1-litre 3-cylinder engine, a 1.0 TSI. Pure gas, not a hybrid. That's an engine that's rated for 81kW (it actually delivers a bit more than that) and that can do 60 mpg on country roads (regularly). When it came out in 2015, "car enthusiasts" were laughing hysterically at the idiots who'd buy the car and have to replace the engine every 2-3 years. 11 years later, the cars are driving around just fine. The 1.0 TSI, just like the entire EA211 family, is a good engine with no major reliability issues.

what Toyota has a 'huge turbo'

tl;dr engines today are not the same as an early 2000s Subaru EJ25 with a massive turbo bolted on.

> they overstrain them

Debatable. Materials science and engine construction science have advanced significantly since the V6 and V8s of the 1980s and 1990s Toyotas. Almost every auto manufacturer on earth is capable of getting >100hp/L out of a gas engine reliably. Toyota is certainly not the only OEM doing this reliably at scale. This stuff is no longer exotic. Gas engines today are designed from the ground up to be turbocharged and direct injected (and in Toyota's case, both direct and port injected), and built with the cooling systems to match.

> The outcome is a strictly worse engine

No one makes or has made a perfect engine but there's a lot of romanticizing engines from the past. These newer engines make more peak torque, their torque curves start much lower in the RPM band and remain more useful through whole rev range, they burn significantly less fuel when not under load, and the hybrid electric drivetrain mean the gas engine spends less of its life idling or lugging at low speeds and high loads. Whether some of these tradeoffs are worth it is debatable, but in no way are these engines "strictly worse".

If you're mechanically inclined, the compacts of yesterdecade are still out there. Popular brands like Ford or Massey Ferguson have amazingly good supply chain for 50 year old models. I run my hobby farm with a 1975 MF135, and I just sold a 1947 Massey Harris Pony that ran like a top doing pasture/arena dragging duties. I've put a ton of hours on the 135 and only done basic maintenance like replacing a few hydraulic lines and changing fluids.

You may want to check out Siromer tractors depending where you are. Similar idea.

I have a Kubota L3010 HST (late '90s-early '00s) and it's fantastic. Fuel efficient, quiet, comfortable, minimal electronics, pretty easy to work on. It's a little underpowered (30hp/24 pto hp), but not egregiously. It'll run a 9" post auger or chip 6" logs if you feed them slowly enough. I'll have to split it this summer, unfortunately, it's developing a hydraulic leak from the clutch housing which almost certainly means the front driveshaft seal is failing.

Yeah though about the snow plow market in rural areas.

I wonder about a hybrid version of this though, maybe Edison motors should collab

Those buying new don't care about repairs. They were never going to do the warrantee work themselves anyway. Those buying on the used market have more reason to care about repairs, but used buyers are beholden to what new buyers purchased in the past.

> What that means is everything I "enhance" with "smarts" should still work the old way that people are accustomed to.

Also the easiest way to achieve high WAF. I added an internet-connected (but self-hosted) garage door controller. My wife instantly got defensive about things when I said I was going to do this until I said that nothing at all that works now would change. It would add a new feature, not subtract anything. The old remotes work. The wall buttons work. It's just that you can do it from your phone, too. Been very handy, actually.

Earlier thread on the same tractors but article with less focus on John Deere BS. [1]

The problem for farmers isn't actually just the idea of one company that's decided to make $$$$ on servicing even for unlocking a repair that's even been carried out for by a third party - it's just many newer tractors have not been suitably robust or farmers are finding the specialised parts come at premium prices or those in countries that are a bit remote to tractor production, international delivery times are not exactly thrilling. It's not just electrics, but electronics is the more notable short coming.

The biggest issue in an agricultural setting is robustness - wiring is one element that is prone to being pulled out transiting a rough paddock or pasture or chewed via mice and rats. After wiring is the quality of switches available for hostile environments - in my locale tractor owners had come to accept every so often they'd be replacing a switch every so often.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47842770

> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

Yep. She gonna sell out Albertan business interests so fast.

Then again, she probably loves the idea of tractors with poor fuel efficiency and no exhaust cleaning tech.

The other day they blocked me from accessing Kagi's web site because I was using Kagi's web browser.

Cloudflare is increasingly a problem in terms of blocking huge geographic regions, often without the website operators even being aware this is happening. All in the name of "security."

I second this. Clownflare is agressively blocking: Fennec v149.0.2 - Germany

"The myth of consensual website use"

User: "I consent"

Website: "I consent"

Cloudflare: "I don't"

Isn't there someone you forgot to ask?

Here's an alternative source:

https://www.thedrive.com/news/new-tractor-with-12-valve-cumm...

Mobile Safari has been giving me a complete loop on these in the past couple months, I have to switch browsers to get through. Anyone else?

Yeah, I also wanted to comment on this, though I think it’s technically against the rules.

I hit this first on my VPN, so I disconnected, then got asked again from my home wifi. I dunno why I look like a bot to Cloudflare. I hate these prompts and it’s too bad they’re all over the web.

On HN, I often see comments like this, complaining about Cloudflare blocking access to pages. It makes me wonder if it’s due to a particular setup that triggers bot detection – like Tor or no-JS – that HN readers often use, or if Cloudflare has too many false positives.

Those tests are funny in a way because we as humans have to prove that we’re human to a robot

Coming soon:

This article requires Age Verification. Please hold up your passport to the sensor on your device to continue.

Try a browser MCP and ask it to bypass the captcha. Works for me most of the time