> Kluthe, for example, uses pig manure to power his tractor, which requires engine modifications that would likely violate John Deere's terms of service on newer machines.
> "I take the hog waste and run it through an anaerobic digester and I've learned to compress the methane," he said. "I run an 80 percent methane in my Chevy Diesel Pickup and I run 90 percent methane in my tractor. And they both purr. I take a lot of pride in working on my equipment."
There's also a chance that this violates EPA laws around Tier IV emissions. Totally sympathize with not being able to repair existing equipment but I think it's important to separate it from things that can have emission implications(much in the same way you can't go dumping tons of RF everywhere over protected spectrum on your router).
That said I wonder if Case IH/Claas/etc has similar agreements.
Not sure about the laws in the US, but my wife works as a chemical engineer at a sewage treatment plant here in Sweden and they run _all_ incoming sewage through a aneorobic digester. This generates enough methane to run all the busses in Stockholm and then some. Our car also (VW Passat) also runs on bio-methane.
Important to note that this is 100% carbon-neutral since it uses carbon already in cycle, as opposed to fossil natural gas which adds carbon to the cycle.
Is it true methane is so much worse a geeenhouse gas than co2 ("20x")? Wouldn't that mean him turning methane into co2 is not just carbon neutral, but great for the environment?
> Is it true methane is so much worse a geeenhouse gas than co2 ("20x")? Wouldn't that mean him turning methane into co2 is not just carbon neutral, but great for the environment?
It's true and it actually has a GWP[0] of ~80 over 20 years (so over 20 years a given mass of methane traps 80 times as much heat as the same mass of CO2), although it degrades back to CO2 and water in 12 years. So yes if you're releasing the carbon into the atmosphere either way, it is much, much better to release it as CO2 than as methane.
From what I understood, they were using methane in internal combustion engines, so they are not releasing methane into atmosphere, rather burning it and producing CO2. I would assume that some of the methane is going to end up in atmosphere (engine efficiency, leaking from gas tank), but compare that to untreated pig manure, which would produce said methane anyhow.
Well, we're probably talking about industrial-scale pig farming here. So yes, the carbon in that manure would otherwise likely end up as atmospheric methane. If you applied it sparingly to the soil, much of the carbon would get incorporated into humus. But large pig farms don't have enough land, so they spread thick, and you get methane.
Another issue is that most of the carbon in that manure comes from feed corn. And most of the energy in feed corn comes from ammonia fertilizer, which is made from fossil methane. But hey, it's still a win compared to field spreading.
The discussion is only about the "outflow". The assumption is that you're releasing a set amount of carbon, but you can release it either as methane or as CO2 (and extract some energy out of it in the process).
If this actually is illegal, then Danny Kluthe is doing the opposite of hiding the fact. He even went out to talk to state legislature about it and is actively doing political work around the subject.
A lot of tools can be used for legal and illegal purposes, but in this case there is a lot of eye balls that had all the possibility in the world to claim a case of violated environmental laws and yet clearly that has not happened.
It doesn't lubricate; also gasoline or alcohol doesn't do much there. 4-stroke engines have oil chamber to do it. Nitrogen emissions from the burning process tend to contaminate the oil a bit but overall, CNG and bi-fuel cars are a long-established technology (e.g. I rode in many taxis running on gas in China around the year 2000).
Great point. This isn't like biodiesel or ethanol, where the co2 would end up in the air anyway. A methane generator actively creates a carbon form that is significantly worse for the environment.
Steve Wing, the UNC-Chapel Hill epidemiologist, says hog operations give off ammonia, methane—a potent greenhouse gas—and hydrogen sulfide, which causes headaches and eye irritation. They also release endotoxin, an allergen, and at least a hundred volatile organic compounds, many of which contribute to the odor of hog farms.
[...]
The result? The covers trap odors, making the operation less smelly. Rain falling on the farm isn't contaminated by lagoon waste. And the farm is transforming waste into electricity-generating enough to power 90 refrigerators.
Anaerobic digestion causes the production of (more) methane rather than co2. Methane is a 100x more potent greenhouse gas than co2 over the short term. Over hundreds of years it breaks down but even a century from now it's 30x worse.
Anaerobic digestion is great as long as leaks are kept below 1%. Doing so is tricky.
Over hundreds of years it breaks down but even a century from now it's 30x worse.
That doesn't sound right. Most sources I've seen[1] say that atmospheric methane has about a 10 year half life. I think the 30x figure you refer to actually represents the sum of methane's annual impact over 100 years. Despite the greater immediate efficacy as a greenhouse gas, the amount of methane remaining after a century should be so small that the impact in the 101st year would be extremely (likely unmeasurably) low.
I understand this doesn't affect EPA laws, but most US states exempt farm vehicles, even things like pickup trucks (that can legally drive on roads even) from state emissions testing.
They also allow exemptions to use untaxed fuel in them, etc.
Basically, there's a sort of exemption ecosystem that might have farmers thinking they are free to do whatever they want around fuel and emissions. Which is only partially true...
Yes, but enforcement is aimed at the manufacturer...that new models rolling off the line meet the requirement. I don't believe there's any enforcement locally, for the buyer of the tractor. As mentioned, US states are very lax about farm vehicles.
No. This process is 100% carbon neutral. It recycles the carbon already in the pig manure as opposed to natural gas which is a fossil fuel and adds to the carbon cycle.
Plus locally produced and consumed, so you're not using diesel trucks/ships to move it over long distances (compared to powering his tractor using diesel or gasoline or whatever tractors normally use).
Any lost methane is significantly worse than the equivalent amount of CO2. Even though it's carbon neutral, the intermediate step converts it to a much more potent greenhouse gas that is very easy to lose to atmosphere. Without a digester, the biomass will be converted to co2 instead. Energy that could have been stored as methane is converted to heat. The best case scenario is to skip biology entirely and throw it into the incinerator, where it can be used to produce heat for power and almost only co2, skipping over methane entirely.
Done right, a digester extracts a little bit more chemical energy from biomass that simply leaving it on the ground. Done wrong it weaponizes the carbon.
"Any lost methane is significantly worse than the equivalent amount of CO2."
...except that methane doesn't persist anything like as long as CO2, so while it's mean and pointy upfront, it's out of the environment faster. This is pretty basic climate science that routinely gets misrepresented by the denier industry, which is why I'm bothering to pick this nit.
It's not like he's dumping the methane in the environment though (e.g. dumping manure on a field): it's ultimately being run through a combustion engine.
Well, he is using an anaerobic bioreactor I believe, so not sure what the exact conversion figures or alternative aerobic products would be. (The methane he extracts vs equivalent farm decomposition)
Ethanol is a bad counterexample. Most ethanol comes from corn, and most energy in corn comes from fossil methane, used to synthesize ammonia fertilizer.
Fertilizer only provides the nutrients (primarily nitrogen). The actual energy in corn comes from photosynthesis trapping the sun's energy in chemical bonds.
> We believe that outside certain conditions in the tropics most ethanol EROI values are at or below the 3:1 minimum extended EROI value required for a fuel to be minimally useful to society.
Well, he burns that, he doesn't emit it, so I don't see why that matters. Once burned it seems like the same old CO₂ is emitted, so what he does is a net win... or? I'm not a chemist.
Farmers are an independent group. They are used to relying on their own skills and hard work to make a living, and they are not going to tolerate this. I think it is an overreach for John Deere and other manufacturers to control what I do with my (my!) devices. I really hope this law gets passed to prevent companies from doing this. Farmers can really help, because everyone knows we depend on them for our food, so anything that messes with them, messes with all of us. I think they picked a fight with the wrong people.
I think you are right, however it kinda seems they already put up with a lot more from companies selling them their 'patented' seeds and the constraints that come with those seeds.
I once saw a doc mentioning a farmer that got 'fined' by a seed company because he had some seeds he did not pay for in his crop, these few plants that grew because the neighboring farmer was using them and the wind blew some on the side of his lot. Also, they are no longer allowed to stock up on the seeds, they need to renew their stock... Has anyone seen this also?
Once again regarding this story: to understand what's happening here, it's very important that you understand that the farmer didn't just acquire Monsanto seeds, but also used glyphospate herbicides on the crops. The point of Monsanto's invention is that it survives Roundup; if you spray Roundup on normal crops, they die.
Most people who see this story play out seem to think that it implies a Monsanto seed could blow onto your field and then get you sued. But of course, if you didn't know you were planting Monsanto seeds, you wouldn't think to try to kill them with Roundup.
You make a decent point, but if you're unhappy with a patented seed variety, you can change that the following season.
When you buy a combine you are making a pretty big commitment. They are many hundreds of thousands of dollars. Not only that, but it's mostly in your best interest to buy the same brand to buy-in to the ecosystem of parts, dealers, knowledge, etc... so sometimes there is inertia to overcome if you want to transition from, say Deere to Case IH.
It would be like switching from Apple/Lightning to Android/USB-C except instead of a few thousand bucks on devices and maybe a hundred on cables, you're talking millions of dollars.
> They are used to relying on their own skills and hard work
Almost universally using machines and seeds designed by engineers and scientists in "The City". (excluding Amish farmers, in which case, my sincerest apologies for the skepticism.)
> I think it is an overreach for John Deere and other manufacturers to control what I do with my (my!) devices. I really hope this law gets passed to prevent companies from doing this.
Agreed. And in return for that legal protection, farmers should concede their subsidies.
> I think they picked a fight with the wrong people.
Definitely. Not because farmers are rugged individualists, but because they have extremely effective lobbying organizations and are very well-connected in DC.
I think there may be a disconnect between individual "farmers", who are perceived as rugged individualists, and well-connected farm companies with deeper pockets and lobbyists. It seems like John Deere's restrictions are more harmful to small family farms than to large agricultural corporations, right?
Would large farm lobbying groups fight against Deere's practices, when harming small family farms drives business to larger agri-businesses?
> I think there may be a disconnect between individual "farmers", who are perceived as rugged individualists, and well-connected farm companies with deeper pockets and lobbyists
Disagree. Small family farms provide the votes, farming companies provide the lobbying $. They're symbiotic, and both benefit from subsidies (to the extent that small family farms own the land they farm, which many do).
In any case, the "rugged individualist farmer" myth is a myth. And as long as my tax dollars subsidize their profits, I'll continue to point out the hypocrisy.
99.9% of farming really is just one more inter-connected industry these days. There's nothing wrong with inter-connectedness and inter-dependency, BTW. But it is extraordinary hypocritical to appeal to one's self-sustenance as a justification for preferential legal/policy treatment when you're working in an industry that relies not only a myriad of other industries, but also huge federal subsidies.
> Would large farm lobbying groups fight against Deere's practices, when harming small family farms drives business to larger agri-businesses?
Sure. Decreasing maintenance costs helps their bottom line too. And decreasing their operational costs is probably a more sustainable and probable way to drive out family farms anyways.
> It seems like John Deere's restrictions are more harmful to small family farms than to large agricultural corporations, right?
Really only in the sense of diminishing marginal utility of money.
(As I said above, I'm not siding with John Deere. So we agree. But I'm also not siding against John Deere because of any level of sympathy for farmers' romantic self image of "independence".)
> Farmers are an independent group. They are used to relying on their own skills and hard work to make a living, and they are not going to tolerate this.
In the increasingly-distant-from-reality world of yeoman farmers rather than corporate agribusiness.
> Farmers can really help, because everyone knows we depend on them for our food, so anything that messes with them, messes with all of us.
Really? Because I'm perfectly happy getting my produce from Mexico and my rice from Thailand instead of American farmers. Farmers as a group feed the planet, but American farmers we don't need at all.
This sort of thing is becoming the norm, and will become the norm with IoT. When every device is connected and has a computer, it can and will have the ability to be locked down, intercepted and monitored remotely.
People don't know or care about privacy, that's been amply proven, they just want rhetoric.
This is basically lending equipment while paying full price. We've gotten used to it with software, phones etc. Its absolutely ridiculous they have to sign agreements that exempt the company from any wrongdoing, and aren't allowed to perform basic repairs.
What you are (accurately) describing is the high end of the IoT space. The low end is almost equally disconcerting but in the other direction: no updates, no responsibility and wildly vulnerable to attack.
I find it cost effective to simply create a 2nd vlan at home for IOT use. It has no gateway for internet access and I can only access it from local devices or over my VPN. This way I can use inexpensive devices without the worry.
I use it currently for security cameras as well as some lighting fixtures and electrical sockets. For the lighting and electrical I use zwave products and VM on my home server with a USB zwave dongle as the controller. This won't work for a product that has a "cloud" access requirement but it works fine for my purpose. I wouldn't buy a security camera that uploaded images of what I'm up to in my home to anyplace, nor would I use lights that required a AWS instance to be up to turn on. It takes some research before buying to know its going to work but Amazon's returns department has been good to me when the description was unclear. Its much more work than you can expect the average consumer to put in but at this point in my career my money is worth more than my time.
That's only a temporary workaround. SoCs with an integrated LTE modem have been available for a while (e.g. Samsung Exynos). In the near future, manufacturers will try to remove even the ability to corral IoT spyw^H^H^H^H"smart" to the local network.
On the other hand, the low end is easily hackable (in both senses of the word) so at least you could fix the problems yourself if you were so inclined.
I have a friend that services and repairs combine harvesters for a living. He tells me that he rarely has to do any welding or heavy lifting any more because the reliability and mechanics of the machines have become very reliable.
He's spends most of his time diagnosing on-board electronics. Which he says is the root of the discord with farmers. They think of their tractor like a hoe, you plonk it in the ground and get going. Where as the modern farm tractor or combine is actually a complex set of computer systems with literally thousands of sensors.
Farmers see the manufacturer as trying to extort on-going revenue, whereas manufacturers are trying to provide a new generation of smart farming. Getting 1 cm precision of sowing and fertiliser spreading is the innovation that the technology is delivering. The problem is that nobody wants to pay for that ongoing data processing.
This is going to happen with cars as well. It seems to me that people should rent/lease rather than buy because of this constant need for updates and servicing.
Renting/Leasing doesn't help, because the real cost of failures that can't be fixed is time. Crops need to be harvested in a small window of time, and if your tractor is broken due to a software bug that you're not allowed to fix yourself, and that you're not allowed to hire a third party repair shop that's "unauthorized" by the manufacturer, and the wait for an authorized repair service is weeks, you've lost your entire season's revenue. As expensive as these tractors are, the cost is insignificant compared to the revenue they generate when they're operating.
If nobody's willing to buy it then it means there's no market for them to sell that offering.
Their strategy will alienate their consumer base which hopefully would make room for other businesses to thrive where there's an actual market (the hoe they plonk in the ground).
Buying has a lot of advantages. My computer and phone need updates too and I buy those. I don't see the problem with being able to buy a gadget and install software on it.
This isn't just something that's limited to John Deere tractors -- even though John Deere is using provisions of the DMCA to 'highly discourage' farmers from screwing with the internals.
Caterpillar also has a fair share of tractor hacking going on -- with dealers in China actively encouraging hacking and modifications of their equipment.
The reality is that if you've ever grew up on a farm, this type of thing is the norm -- smaller farmers don't always have the cash to do costly repairs and if there's a way to make it work in a non-standard way, a lot of times the temporary solution becomes the permanent one. Buy a tractor with a smaller PTO, but, have a larger one available? Cut it out, put the new one on. Diesel tractor but your family also owns a restaurant? Modify it to run on old oil.
"We invite all hackers, designers and forest machine enthusiasts to hack the harvester. We will take you to a visit to the Ponsse’s manufacturing factory, show harvesters in action and provide you with different APIs and data sets from the forest machines and the maintenance process. Now, Ponsse wants to build a community of tech startups and talented developers with whom co-operation can be continued."
For the same reasons I think we all could benefit from an open source firmware on regular cars. I'm still looking into what car manufacturer opens their codes for computers in the car, but can't find any.
I completely agree. I would really love to be able to examine and update the code running my car. It seems like opening up car computers is essential to retaining freedom of transportation. Especially when everything becomes self driving. After I read about the tunnel paradox I started worrying about the life and death decisions that my care might make on my behalf. I wonder what RMS thinks about this?
Has this hurt John Deere's sales? It is not like they are the only game in town and the quality of their product has diminished over the last couple of decades compared to alternatives.
We don't need right to mod legislation we need all companies to know that if you do this we will not buy your products.
They are mostly the only game in town. There are a handful of very large competitors (CLAAS, CASE + New Holland -- which are both Fiat) but the market is very heavily swayed in the direction of Deere.
Also, at least in the field of telematic connectivity (having your tractor 'online' to sync field operations, harvest data, etc...) Deere is leading the pack.
Being the market leader isn't the same as having a monopoly. It seems like you're faulting Deere for out-innovating it's competitors. For what it's worth, I would like to see John Deere become a more open company.
The hypocrisy of John Deer is amazing. On one hand, they forbid modifying the software because it "can endanger machine performance" and on the other hand they accept no responsibility for "crop loss, lost profits, loss of goodwill, loss of use of equipment... arising from the performance or non-performance of any aspect of the software".
So what's the point of not hacking their software if the farmers get no benefit from it, not even the guarantee that John Deer will take responsibility in case of malfunction.
I don't think it's not so much hypocrisy as much as they want to protect their reputation.
They can't control what third party software does so they don't want people loading third party software that negatively effects their products thus negatively affects their reputation.
> I don't think it's not so much hypocrisy as much as they want to protect their reputation.
Wanting to protect a reputation that they refuse to back up by actually providing the guarantees that this reputation represents is exactly the hypocrisy that is being pointed out here.
Claiming a reputation without actually providing what the reputation is for, is ... well it's basically a lie, isn't it?
As someone said elsewhere in this thread, it would be so much more honest if they'd just lease these things. All these controls on repairs, custom software, they make perfect sense for something that is leased, not sold.
As opposed to what their first-party software does to the farmer's pocketbook (and their reputation). I think they're more interested in their service revenues.
The installation of black-market Ukrainian firmware is a potential infosec nightmare. Imagine what a tempting target this would be for Russian intelligence services to backdoor! In the event of open conflict with the United States, they could potentially paralyze a large portion of US agricultural capacity.
Seems like this would require these tractors to have internet connections. Otherwise it wouldn't help much to put a poison pill like this in there because you'd have no way to either activate it at an opportune time, or to not activate it if you don't want to resort to such measures at the current time.
Seems like a great opportunity for Kubota. Or some other tractor company. Or I guess a "startup" that makes tractors though I wonder what the time to market on that would be.
If you think the capital costs for Tesla are bad try getting into a smaller market where tractors start at ~$150k. Kubota has been trying to go upmarket but it's not something that can be done overnight.
I'd be more curious if some of the other players(NH, Case IH, Claas, etc) could use this to their advantage. You see similar things in the CUT(Compact Utility Tractor) segment where LS/Kioti/Mahindra generally offer much more capabilities/features over Kubota and JD.
Yeah this thought occurred to me as well. If I ran one of the other companies, I'd make it a marketing issue that we let farmer's hack all they want on their own tractors.
While John Deere does buy OEM parts, it designs and builds a lot of stuff in house, including engines. It owns and operates foundries and it even designs its own embedded computers (and writes the firmware, operating system, CAN drivers, and application software). It probably takes longer to prepare the factory for a new model-year build of an existing tractor than it takes some software vendors to get an MVP to market. There's lots of inefficiency there, but it's not likely a startup will be disrupting this industry anytime soon (and if they do, it will look more like fleets of small, simple, semi-autonomous drone tractors than conventional equipment).
I'm assuming you mean a metal foundry and not a semiconductor foundry?
Still, the fact that they build their engines in-house is pretty impressive. I believe that many auto makers purchase their engines instead of designing then in-house because they are so complex to get right.
Both. They've operated their own foundries for longer than I've been alive; probably closer to a century. They've since purchased at least one semiconductor company to design and manufacture some of their electronics. And yes, John Deere has built its own engines for a long time; the division is called Power Systems or JDPS, and they build engines in factories all over the world, and they sell their engines to other equipment manufacturers as well.
I highly doubt that John Deere operates any semiconductor foundries. Those foundries aren't your normal run of the mill factories. They are $10B monsters just to get started.
To be clear, I never said anything about "semiconductor foundries" (I can only hazard a guess as to what this might mean), I said "semiconductor company".
Looks like standard electronics manufacturing; nothing state-of-the-art. It's still interesting that they chose to design and manufacture it all in-house.
I didn't mean to imply that it was in some way non-standard or state-of-the-art; only that they do, in fact, manufacture some of their electronics in-house.
I don't see any evidence there that they manufacture semiconductors, only electronics. Manufacturing electronics isn't that hard, depending on what exactly you're doing. Assembling printed circuit boards from components is something you can even do by hand in most cases, and automated assembly equipment isn't really that expensive to set up a small factory, depending on the volume required (small-volume stuff isn't that expensive, high-volume high-speed stuff is more so). Manufacturing semiconductors is something else altogether, and isn't something you can do in a small warehouse with a few hundred $K of equipment; it requires very specialized buildings and equipment.
>I believe that many auto makers purchase their engines instead of designing then in-house because they are so complex to get right.
Citation needed. Engines are one thing the automakers tend to hold onto and not outsource often. There are exceptions, and there's cases of them licensing specific engine tech from each other (like with Toyota's Prius drivetrain). For instance, Mazda has a prototype car where they paired their 2.0L "SkyActiv" gas engine with Toyota's hybrid transmission/motor from the Prius. There's also cases of them doing joint ventures, like when Mitsubishi and Chrysler formed "Diamond Star Motors" back in the 80s/90s, or with the more recent Subaru BRZ/Scion FR-S where Subaru makes the engine/drivetrain/suspension and Toyota makes the body (I think).
The only cases I can think of offhand where automakers simply drop in a purchased engine are with diesel pickups, such as Dodge using Cummins engines. Oh, there was also the Ford Taurus SHO with a Yamaha engine, but that was way back in the late 80s and Yamaha isn't exactly known as a serious engine-builder these days.
Why are you confused? You said "all manufacturers just assemble readily available parts". I demonstrated that this is not the case for John Deere (or probably any other automotive manufacturer), which builds many of its own components and writes much of its own software in-house.
I have generally thought that any black market like this one is a sign of an opportunity for a better product. Is this universally the case? Are there black markets where there is not an opportunity for disruption?
Sometimes black markets are simply a way to get a product cheaper (or free) but the best way to beat the market is a better product and not lawyers. I used to be a heavy user of pirated PC games but have stopped completely now that game developers actively update games for years after their release. Probably a pain for the developers but the shift has lead to much better products and gives a strong incentive to legally purchase products without resorting to "strong arming" your customers.
I agree strongly with the statement about games, and it's not just about service. When I was younger, sometimes pirating was the only way to get a game... it wasn't always easy to find a copy. Music has definitely improved too, unless you use a pure streaming service at least.
Meanwhile... the BBC will make you seriously consider the merits of piracy. It's 2017, and some people really haven't figured out that when you back people into a corner online, they can just pirate their way out of it.
I watched my first home BlueRay disc two days ago.
Someone brought it round and I remembered that my PS4 could play them. To do so it had to connect to the internet. (Tracking/Logging maybe?)
Like the scene in the Sooranos where the wives come round to watch a DVD, it forced me to sit through those "FBI yada yada even though you don't live in America" and "personal opinions of the cast blah blah" disclaimers before for the film would start.
Haven't had to see those since streaming services became available.
Also reminded me that if I'd pirated the film I would have had a better experience than purchasing the legitimate product.
Streaming services are saving the movie industry from itself.
Incredible. At what point in time did the land of the free become the land of undisguised fascist corporatism? Does John Deere actually think they are achieving something positive with their behavior?
First they came for the farmers, and I did not speak out —
Because I was not a farmer.... -- Niemöller
How is this practice even legal? Could auto manafuctirers do the same thing? I'm sure they discourage aftermarket programming and whatnot, but using DRM to prevent DIY repairs is bringing things to a whole new level.
Former John Deere employee here. The company isn't being spiteful or doing this to corner the repair market; they do it to avoid legal liability and fraudulent warrantee claims. They're an extremely risk-averse company.
EDIT: By the way, I favor owner's rights (my family farms with Deere equipment, and I think there's tons of mutual advantage in open sourcing software in this case specifically and in general), but as is often the case, the "greedy corporate oppressor" narrative is too simple.
"...as is often the case, the "greedy corporate oppressor" narrative is too simple."
What part of the things you describe aren't done with the purpose of making the company money? I mean, "we're risk-averse so we force the risk onto you" is kind of the same as "we don't want to spend money so we inconvenience you".
Of course, companies are in business to make money and will tend to use whatever avenues are open. When a company starts using a monopoly position to impose legal restrictions on customers (whether to avoid risk of losing money or just to make money), sympathy for their money-making efforts tends to lessen.
Edit: Note that the approach of Deer is not warranty voiding if someone hacks the software but a license agreement which effectively terminates the ability of the farmer to use the vehicle and thus the defense above is pretty disingenuous.
I don't know if avoiding liability for their products is great way to make money or not. But if they are making a large effort to avoid liability, they are doing that as a way to guarantee profits - ie, make money.
Deere effectively has a monopoly on tractors at the scale discussed in the article. That's why farmers are buying the tractors and illegally moding them rather than buying competing brands - see comments elsewhere on this page.
And, of course, they're leveraging new legal concepts which allow them to sell their tractors while maintaining control over them through software licenses.
Well, I just want to put out that the "greedy or not" discussion frame is just terrible for discussion of issues in a liberal capitalist democracy.
Of course, most companies exist to make money. A few companies might other do good things in the mean time (go out of their way to hire under-privileged youth or something). But the assumption of liberal capitalism is that following market forces will usually do good and when it won't there are or should be laws saying otherwise.
So the "bad" companies aren't the "greedy companies" but rather those companies which either break the law or "pervert" the law - find their ways around laws that should be there or use their influence to create laws that shouldn't be there. That is, unethical corporations but not necessarily more greedy that a company hoping to make lots of money fully in the bounds of the law.
But despite this, "Corporate Greed" is shouted on the left as an objection (an objection that really makes no sense for left, right or center damn it).
And with this weak argument on the left, comes the equally disingenuous argument, "not bad because not greedy" which winds-up being a content-less defense. "What you're abusing those people but even aiming to profit by it, tell me again why this makes it OK?"
I'm not following. At which scale does John Deere have a monopoly?
Anyway, There's nothing nefarious about protecting your profits by avoiding liability. You seem to want Deere to be this evil corporation, which simply doesn't resonate with my experience in any way.
The problem which bothers many is that JD gives no warranty and at the same time forbids analyzing and modifying the firmware. It's perceived as a conflict - just like avoiding liability in this case is viewed as a way to increase profits.
JD does warrantee their equipment. I understand the perceived conflict, and I personally think JD should become more open. I'm only saying that this article is obviously sensationalized (no surprise coming from Vice).
From that perspective, it does start to look dicey in terms of "offer a lengthy and full service warranty" + "allow the end user to make modifications", so I understand that perspective.
But I do think there's a lot of room for detecting what changes were made and honoring / invalidating the warranty depending on them. Rather than simply saying "something was changed, therefore we invalidate the whole warranty."
The warrantee issue I mentioned was fraud--that is, sinking costs into investigating additional warrantee claims which turn out to be due to user manipulation. I suspect this is less of a concern compared with the legal liability of injury resulting from modification--I imagine it behooves the company to be able to point to the EULA and say, "look, we're doing everything we can to make sure this doesn't happen". This is complicated by the fact that they have to comply with laws in virtually every second and third world country, not just the US. It's just easier to be conservative with a blanket EULA. They could probably devise a more nuanced approach, but it would probably be costly and they probably have better (read: higher customer value) things they could put that money toward.
In that case, just write the license contract to say "If you change the firmware, John Deere accepts no liability". Make people sign that if they want the unlock key. Presumably John Deere aren't liable for other kinds of misuse - e.g. if you crash it.
It's not that simple. A corollary is with cellphone firmware for the radio. They have to answer to the FCC. Updating the firmware will let you broadcast with more wattage, for example. FCC doesn't like that.
Automakers have to answer to the EPA too. That doesn't stop regular joes from changing their own oil in their garage and buying parts at Autozone. Most cars are not designed to make it impossible for car owners to do regular maintenance or simple repair jobs themselves.
Doing so would actually be illegal for the Automakers, who tried similar things in the early days of the Auto Industry and several laws and regulations were passed to protect consumers for Highway vehicles
It is highly unlikely this will work out very well for JD.
That was one, but not the only Regulation passed as a result
Things like ODBII Regulations, which do only Apply to Highyway Vehicles, and all of the regulations that come out of the USDOT for Highway rated Vehicles.
As I understand, those contracts aren't legally binding, but they exist as evidence a company can point to in a trial to show that they tried to keep the user from doing X. An even more credible kind of evidence is actually making X technically difficult. Obviously they can't protect themselves against everything or they would go out of business (to use your example, they won't profit from selling stationary tractors). It's all risk management, and I'm not even saying I agree with their choices, only that their motives probably aren't as nefarious as Vice might want you to believe.
My dad is a mechanical engineer who loves cars. I spent my youth listening to him lamenting the fact that modern cara have too many electronics and DIY protections. That you can't even make an oil change without also notifying the computer, the interface for which is proprietary and only sold to licensed dealers, or the car would refuse to run because it would think its oil is bad.
He reminisced about the good old days when all you needed was a wrench and a hammer and you could fix anything on a car.
This was 10 years ago. I imagine it's only gotten worse since.
Coincidentally he grew up on a farm where they would hack and build from scratch all sorts of farm equipment.
There is no vehicle on the market (that I know of) which will refuse to run without an oil change.
On my 17 year old BMW and 2 year old VW, the oil service indicator is just a reminder, a courtesy. On the BMW I can reset it with a paper clip. On the VW I can reset it on the screen on the dash.
Honestly, most of the major things that go wrong with cars these days are still mechanical, and are still fixed in the old-fashioned way. I've done countless brake jobs, oil changes, suspension changes, fluid changes, cooling system swaps, and never once been stymied by a computer.
While it is tied to the ECM, and requires specialized tools to recalibate or change, they are required to operate on the ODBII standard which means 3rd parties can and do create these tools (and aftermarket parts), it also means independent repair shops can and do make the repairs
Here John Deere is not simply accused of making it more complex, but prohibiting any and all repairs not authorized by their own propriety computer software.
Tying elements like radios to VINs is actually a result of extremely rampant theft in 90s and early 00s, and I would never consider it a bad thing. Annoying, yes, but it has eventually led to dramatic decrease in car break-ins and theft over the last 10 years.
I think it's still an issue that starts when the first radio gets damaged. That creates a secondary market for replacement radios, so theft occurs. Then, the person owning the car where the radio was stolen is now looking in that same secondary market for a replacement...and the chain never stops.
Similar for things like 3rd row removable seats and tailgates on trucks. Craigslist and eBay have more of these for sale than would make sense if they weren't being stolen.
On my Smart the service reminder is similarly easy to reset. All i need to do is press and hold two buttons that are too far apart to be pressed by one hand while turning on the ignition on the center console.
I usually do it by pressing the indicator with my feet and turning the key by hand.
I completely agree, until you have a problem that requires you hook a scan tool up to that diagnostic link.
I have a snap-on mt2500, and two other generic scan tools. I can get hard codes on most vechicles. I can't get certain codes or repair information on many newer vechicles.
The problem arises when you have an intermittent problem, and need access into those propriatiatry systems. The dealerships get software updates, but automotive companies are not required to inform anyone that there's been an change to the existing software.
In states like CA, which are very strict with emissions; failing a smog check because you have on old version of firmware is beyond frustrating. Most people have no idea that the reason they failed is due to an older software. Most smog shops don't even have information the dealerships have. It's a lot of trial and error to get that vechicle to pass those smog checks. It's not right. It should violate The Sherman Anti-Trust Act?
There are many indepent Auto Shops that are hobbled.
They need access to at least the dealership scan tool. I believe Massachusetts is the only state that enacted a "Right to Repair" law. If you live in that state, you can buy expensive dealership repair manuals, and get the opportunity to spend thousands on their scan tools. Just to find out what system/lazy sensor/etc. is broken in a vechicle you bought?
Having to take you vechicle to only the dealership is---un-American?
I hope that you see this. Your comments have been being autokilled for the past 6 months, you've been shadowbanned. Going through your history - I wasn't able to quite figure out why, except the lengthiness of your replies. Perhaps you got flagged as a spammer by the system?
My dad was a mechanic by trade, and he used to say that people always complained about cars getting harder and harder to repair. When direct fuel injection was introduced, people who were used to working with carborateurs complained about "end of automotive industry" - yet now any mechanic can work with this. Same when high-pressure common rail system was introduced for diesels - initially, massive negative reaction from the auto repair industry, now everyone knows how to work with it.
I know people who bought brand new 2016 BMWs and Mercs, and the first thing they did was mod them - and the computer seems to work fine with whatever silly things they did with the engine.
>That you can't even make an oil change without also notifying the computer, the interface for which is proprietary and only sold to licensed dealers, or the car would refuse to run because it would think its oil is bad.
Honestly I'm really sick of hearing idiotic stories like this. You need to demand that he tell you exactly what car is like this (basically, "citation needed").
My 2015 Mazda is the easiest car to change oil that I've ever seen. There's a service panel on the bottom of the car that comes open with two screws, and inside is the drain bolt and the filter right next to it (hanging down, so it won't pour oil all over when you unscrew the filter). It really couldn't be any easier. Drain the oil, replace the filter, replace the crush-washer on the drain bolt and put it back on at ~35 lb-ft, pour more oil in the fill hole on top of the engine. Then, on the infotainment system, you just navigate to the "maintenance" section where the oil-change reminder is, select "Reset" and you're done. The system even has flexible oil change intervals and will tell you when to change it based on your driving habits; mine lets me go 7500-10000 miles between changes.
This canard about "proprietary interfaces only sold to licensed dealers" is either total bullshit, or is only on certain (likely high-end luxury) cars that are easy to avoid.
(Edit: to be fair there is some of this for certain things and certain cars. But it doesn't exist as far as I've seen for basic maintenance tasks, it just seems to be something created in the minds of old people and passed around as rumor until it became accepted as truth. One example of something that really is like this I've heard of is some high-end cars with electrically-adjustable suspensions, requiring a special dealer-only service tool to calibrate it in case of repairs. But you're not going to see this on a $20K Honda any time soon; regular cars these days still have the same ol' completely mechanical MacPherson strut suspensions they've had for ages.)
>He reminisced about the good old days when all you needed was a wrench and a hammer and you could fix anything on a car.
That's bullshit too. Cars have always needed all kinds of specialized tools. Disc brake spreaders, steering wheel pullers, spark plug gap tools, feeler gauges, torque wrenches (try replacing a con-rod without one and see how long your engine lasts), cylinder hones, I could go on and on.
Tesla already does. If you have an accident in a Tesla, it will shut down its computer and you can't reactivate it without bringing it to a Tesla dealership. While I understand why they want to do it that way, it's inherently customer-hostile, because Tesla can refuse to re-activate the car. Imagine if you have a 15 year old Tesla that gets into a minor fender bender, and Tesla says that they won't reactivate your car because it's not supported anymore - but they are super happy to sell you a new one.
ODBII regulations for Highway Vehicles are what prevents the bulk of it today. ODBII does not apply to non-road vehicles like Tractors.
However Automanufacturers are moving anything that is not required by ODBII (which was passed in 1996 so it very out dated) to CANBUS and disallowing 3rd parties access. This makes is harder for Independent shops to service some of the non-mechanical parts of the car like the GPS, Radio, power seats, etc
ODBII has to be the greatest planned obsolescence scheme ever perpetrated. Want to continue driving that older car that is running perfectly fine? Sure go ahead and rip apart the dashboard to get at that sensor that happens to fail perfectly around 100k mile mark at a cost of about half the value of the car at the repair shop because it takes half a day for their tech to complete.
If it was about greenhouse gasses they'd let you keep the "dirty" car because the extra pound or two of emissions per gallon compared to a new car doesn't offset the carbon cost of building a new car from scratch.
When the OBD system was created auto manufactures (via dealership trade organizations that are extremely powerful in some states due to the large sums of taxes paid on new vehicles) pushed for state regulations that don't allow cars to be used that have the check engine light on. Often the sensor not functioning has no effect on the use or safety of the car (also the sensors themselves are designed to be needlessly difficult to replace). In effect causing the use of older cars to not be cost effective. In my state emissions are measured at the tailpipe, you can be well within standards but fail simply because a sensor reports that it needs to be changed.
This is essentially a highly regressive tax scheme that subsidises auto makers and dealerships at the disproportionate expense of poorer working Americans. It gives auto manufactures a "replace car" light that they can activate and have enforced by law and thus, planned obsolescence.
As someone who grew up poor and has spent time not having access to food in order to replace a useless sensor in a family vehicle (or paying a fine related to not having a valid inspection sticker) and knowing many other families who have been in the same situation. I have seen first hand the issues with this policy.
Oh please. An OBD-II scan tool these days costs $50, and will tell you what's wrong. You can buy parts cheaply at Autozone or online. Working on cars these days is simpler than ever in many cases. There's even YouTube videos showing you how to do all kinds of stuff.
As for "ripping apart the dashboard" to get to the "useless" sensor, what kind of car was this?
Your expectations based on consumer law may not apply in this case as the "farmer" purchasing the equipment is operating as a business not a private individual.
1. John Deere is right and protecting themselves and trying to be risk averse.
2. The farmers are rightfully indignant about being locked out of their own machines. Farmers are risk averse too.
Never the twain shall meet.
It's the tech and scale that is wrong.
The field of ag isn't suitable because of the nature of work especially during harvest.
Maybe all smart machines should only be leased out. It is logical but that would never sit well with farmers because that is trusting someone who doesn't understand farming.
'Smart farm machinery' isn't useful unless it can be repaired by 'the cloud'(as it were).
Your life will/can go on without your iPhone. Without farm machinery(800-1000 acres is a 'small farm'), you are toast. The farm is toast. Income is toast.
Although, I wonder how farm insurance treats smart machines.
Smart farming machinery isn't really all that smart. Yet.
The number of hours a normal person puts on his car in a year is minuscule compared to what a average farmer would put on his tractor. Tractors are made to be used every day all day for years and years. If you did something similar with a car, you would quickly wear it out.
The tractor we had on my parents farm when I grew up is still running and used, and it has to be at least 30 years old. It isn't used as much as when I was a kid but it is still in use. It has broken down a few times during that time, but nothing that couldn't be fixed.
The cars we had at the same time are all worn out scraped a long time ago.
I don't follow what happens in the farm field as much as when I lived on one, but John Deer is and was one of the popular brands, and afaik. it hasn't a worse or better reputation than any of the other brands.
It's difficult to get a $750,000 machine with a top-speed of 25mph to a repair shop, so even if the frequency of those visits is low, it can be a massive burden. This assumes you can drive it there.
Also, farming is a seasonal thing with (sometimes) small windows to do certain things. If weather is great and your tractor is in the shop you might miss a good planting opportunity -- it could rain by and you might need to wait a few weeks before you can get in and work that field.
This kinda blew my mind when I first thought about it -- a farmer really only has like 50 chances (crop years) in their life to perfect their craft. One bad year can be devastating.
It's not the number of repairs, it's the sheer impact of repairs. Farming is a 48 weeks of relative calm. With 4-6 weeks a year of sheer, balls to the wall, 24x7, all out GO GO GO. Having a core piece of equipment fail in those 4-6 weeks can ruin an entire year. With farming margins being lower all the time, losing a year's crop, or even losing a percentage of that crop will bankrupt a farm.
So this brings in the question of "why not have two of everything?". pure cost. Combines easily run 500k USD. That's more then a lot of folks can afford for an idle piece of equipment.
If you mean you buy brand new or almost brand new and sell at year 4 or 5, then you're spending a lot more than you need to, which is buying you the extra "reliability."
But that reliability isn't even entirely real -- a lot of the repairs you'd expect after about 5 years or 50,000 miles are predictable and listed right there in the maintenance schedule in the manual, so as long as you do them proactively rather than roll the dice, a modern car should easily be very reliable for at least 100,000 / 10 yrs.
Trading in for a new car is probably costing you a lot more than just sticking to the maintenance schedule and budgetting for the major repairs would. I think a lot of people mistakenly overestimate the pain of those major scheduled repairs because they just don't do them and wait till they need to be towed in to have it fixed (and by then a few other things need fixing too)
Speaking in generalities of course
Anyway, point is, farms are a business, they're not going to piss money away by trading in a tractor that can much more cheaply be maintained -- you trade it in when it costs more to maintain (and abstain from new features) than to replace
I really hope that legislature passes that invalidate these TOSes. Farming is hard work and they shouldn't make it harder for people already scraping by in some cases. I think where their TOS makes sense is for corporate farming where a larger corporate entity has to manage a fleet of these tractors. Unfortunately, John Deere does not make any distinction on their licensing based on who is using their product. I think it's time to send John Deere a... Dear John? :P
Just as a guess, not at all likely. The GOP has always been a big-business friendly party, and anti-little-guy. They manage to get the "little guys" to vote for them by spouting socially conservative and religious rhetoric, which rural, conservative people just love, so they're perfectly happy to vote against their own economic interests for this.
In a nutshell, if the GOP came out and said, in all seriousness, "Vote for us and we'll ban abortion, let religious people discriminate against gays, and eliminate gun laws, but in return we're going to make you all dirt-poor serfs who have to work in company towns and when you get sick, we're just going to let you die", they would still get almost all the votes they get now.
Isn't it crazy that certain new tractors (eg John Deere) and cars (eg Tesla S) come with dongled software? Just to destroy the reseller and after market, such evil things got introduced. If one buys a good, it should be his very own, like the law reads. Though this concerning movement is destroying the very fundament of owning goods. (Owning avgood is a lot cheaper in the long run. Also you can buy a good, when you have the money and still continue using it when you don't, because you own it. You can even sell the good to get some value of it back - well not anymore if you buy a good a dongled software with a kill switch - than you might own just a very expensive brick)
We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable; that all machines are created equal & independent, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent & inalienable, among which are the preservation of open source firmware, operating systems, & the freedom to connect via open standards.
This comment breaks the HN guidelines by crossing into incivility. We ban accounts that do that, so please don't do that.
More generally, this site is for intellectual curiosity, not ranty indignation. That makes this whole subthread off-topic. If you have a substantive point to make, please make it thoughtfully; otherwise please don't comment until you do.
It's a shame you're being ridiculously hostile, because I'm more interested in hearing from people who used to work at JD than I am in hearing people yelling at them.
> "I take the hog waste and run it through an anaerobic digester and I've learned to compress the methane," he said. "I run an 80 percent methane in my Chevy Diesel Pickup and I run 90 percent methane in my tractor. And they both purr. I take a lot of pride in working on my equipment."
There's also a chance that this violates EPA laws around Tier IV emissions. Totally sympathize with not being able to repair existing equipment but I think it's important to separate it from things that can have emission implications(much in the same way you can't go dumping tons of RF everywhere over protected spectrum on your router).
That said I wonder if Case IH/Claas/etc has similar agreements.