Up until a year ago I was regularly using a Massy Fergusson 135 [0] (Perkins Diesel version), made sometime in the 1970s. It was wonderful! So amazing to drive and use. Clunky and heavy, but you really really felt like you were using a machine. In low gears, if you put you foot down on the accelerator the engine would roar, and your speed would barely change!
And there was no fancy technology in it at all. If I was in the forest and had forgotten the key, I'd just reach behind the dashboard and hot-wire it. The air filter was basically a shisha-pipe that bubbled the incoming air through wire wool and engine oil.
Its fuel gauge didn't work either. You just had to take a look in the tank, or quickly react as soon as the revs started dropping. I ran it dry a few times and had to sit there with a spanner in one hand and YouTube into the other, while trying to bleed all the fuel lines. But they were all on the outside of the vehicle, which made it comparatively easy I imagine.
I've never actually driven a modern tractor, so don't know how it compares. I imagine the clutch is easier on the knees these days!
Anyway, this just felt like the place to share this.
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)
Honestly, I still had to practically stand on the clutch with mine!
I'd teach someone to drive it and say, "now push down on the clutch". They they would heave and struggle, then eventually succeed and look victorious. I'd say, "well done, it is now half way down! But that's all you need for now!"
EDIT: To fully explain: It has a two-stage clutch. You half-press it and it disconnects the wheels from the engine. If you fully depress it all the way to the floor, it additionally disconnects the power-take-off shaft (PTO) from the engine. The PTO shaft is a spindle on the back of the tractor which drives things like your flail mower, wood chipper, etc.
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.
> 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.
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.
Any technology from before the time of your grandparents, and often parents, is usually perceived to be "not fancy". Because then those elders can't tell you in your childhood what life was like before that technology. So in your lived experience that technology was always there. Reading history later on, doesn't change your emotional experiences.
An internal combustion engine may be complex, but it's not fancy. I can see and touch and understand every part of it. I can maintain and modify and repair it. This is not true for fancy electronics and certainly not locked-down proprietary firmware.
The magic of an engine is less in how it operates, and more in how it was built. At least around the time they started showing up, manufacturing lots of precision metal parts was not trivial.
Although modern electronics take this further, with both operation and construction being utterly complex.
I learned how engines worked by taking apart, cleaning and reassembling an ancient lawnmower engine so I could use it on my go-kart. I then learned how cars worked by taking one apart and putting it back together again.
Neither of those machines had a transistor in them. It was all basic electricity.
I think this is a reaction to the incredibly locked down ecosystem that most of these mfgs are pushing.
However, the tech exists for a reason and is not inherently bad, the issue is the lock-in, the lack of choice and interoperability.
IMO, there is plenty of space for an OEM who can play nice with others, offer an open (and vibrant ecosystem), and keep users coming back by choice, not by lock-in.
> 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.
This was my take as well. How many 3rd parties might be able to bring on upgrades/modifications to a "dumb" tractor to make it smart vs only being able to buy a "smart" tractor from one vendor and be forced into it's rules/restrictions/prices
But there's more to agtech than driving a tractor around, a lot of what these big integrated systems do (at the high end) is very data driven -- determining where and how to plant, irrigate, fertilize, etc. There's a lot of integration work beyond just making the tractor drive.
> But there's more to agtech than driving a tractor around, a lot of what these big integrated systems do (at the high end) is very data driven -- determining where and how to plant, irrigate, fertilize, etc.
How difficult is this to implement outside of big ag-tech? I feel that a community of experienced farmers and programmers (or programmer-farmers) could tackle this.
Is suspect most farmers would prefer the diy add-on version of these than the single manufacturer integrated one. A modern smartphone and stay of I/o sensors send like it could do pretty much the entire job
Right, but that has nothing to do with a vendor making a dumb tractor. Why do we need to dismissively move the conversation from TFA. The data driven approach is made up of several parts, and we're looking at a specific part
Making a dumb tractor for the use-case of dumb tractor is obviously a winning idea.
I just don't think you're going to effectively compete with big agtech by putting a bunch of parts in a box, shaking it, and hoping you end up with a beautifully integrated solution. Integration hell is the reason big commercial firms dominate when it comes to large integrated systems.
admittedly, i'm not a farmer nor an expert in data driving farming. but getting a farmer the ability to precisely drive a tractor in a field so that planting seeds, applying fertilizer, and any of the other steps would be a huge win. The settings used when doing that can easily come from bigFarmData gained from other sources. Can it be used even more precisely when everything is gathered/integrated by one company? That's a question that I'm not by default saying yes to, but it seems like you do think that is true. Even if it is true, does that mean the difference from a farmer going broke because his DIY tractor behaved slightly differently than your solution? I'd posit that a farmer only being allowed to play the bigFarmData game by only being allowed to buy from one vendor that is expensive while also forcing any repairs to be expensive will cause farmers to financially unnecessarily struggle.
The beauty here is even beyond experimentation the tech will change repeatedly over the life of the equipment, and you can cheaply adapt to that. There is very little advantage to the modern tractors, beyond luxuries and the finish of a self contained package. Farmers rarely ime prioritize either of these
There are already open source auto pilot and cruise control implementations for cars. (Not all cars are supported obviously!) so to have this in place for tractors off the road seems very doable.
Well open source AutoSteer exists it has a lot of features like rate control built in to it. The system is called AgOpenGPS it’s very popular for retrofitting older equipment with modern technology.
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".
Now is especially a good time for Canada to do it. Cory Doctorow had a fantastic CBC interview about this. Scrapping anti-tampering protections would harm anti-Canadian tech companies while also building rapport with American farmers who would be able to use Canadian software on their tractors.
Ever-more-restrictive government regulations are what allows these OEMs to ‘leverage’ their market power this way. I am not sure that a new regulation can solve it, as these sorts of mandates don’t seem to have worked in any other market.
The argument isn't 'more' regulations or 'less' regulations, it is the right regulations. The problem is that big companies slowly allow regulations that don't hurt them but do block competition by aggressively fighting regulations that help the startup (their competition) or help the consumer in ways that make them less money. It isn't hard to be evil and create regulatory capture. You don't actually have to be active in crafting regulation, just be active in blocking the right regulation. General statements that are 'against regulation' play into big companies making things worse.
These big companies absolutely allow regulations that "hurt" them. Deere doesn't want to deal with farmers who are pissed off that emissions stuff results in a service call at a bad time and can't be overridden, or obnoxious safety stuff that make products less useful outside of their "textbook" application, or something that forces them to expensively certify their product is XYZ or something.
Buuuuut, the cost of implementing that stuff hurts the competition way more, so Deere and friends don't really fight it.
They're trading absolute market size for stronger control over market share. Less people are going to buy their products at the margin if the products are made worse. But those that do will buy it from them, so more profit.
Those are load-bearing quotation marks: you're saying the regulation doesn't hurt them, only "hurts" them. If the regulation hurt them, they wouldn't allow it.
That's a double edged sword. Investors demand a return regardless of what IP law is. They'll invest in the companies that find some way to protect their investment -- NDAs, stronger technical protections, services-models, etc.
Remember that those regulations are written by the OEMs they benefit and whom bribe legislators to pass those regulations.
Any argument made without acknowledging this is purely in bad faith. The problem is not regulation that benefits OEMs. The problem is that you can simply purchase regulations that benefit you.
There are many regulations, written by a variety of actors, often in strange alliances. Safety, environmental, and disclosure regulations are often the culprits behind industry consolidation and oligopolization.
It looks like magic because it works like magic. Surprisingly it is also possible to believe in the magic of "government intervention" though it looks less like magic and more like unintended consequences.
There's no magic necessary. TFA highlights the exact mechanism by which markets can fill a gap or need via entrepreneurship when incumbents fail to deliver what customers want. It's not guaranteed to happen or work in every case, but there's money to be made by giving people what they actually want.
A lot of electronics is useful, it can reduce fuel use or help with more accurate driving.
Farmers are just pissed they lose the ability to repair the vehicle easily or get stuck with monthly subscription because tractor company has changed the terms and you are praying they don't change it further.
A modern John Deere tractor with a robust right-to-repair would still be a pain to do maintenance on. A big part of the reason people want old tractors is because they don't have these additional computer controlled systems which break and require time and effort to fix.
It's almost as if freedom only exists for those with the money to hire lawyers to make it happen. Farmers are basically screwed in that their location at the bottom foundation level of society really ties their hands in what they can get away with before things start getting tumultuous. Yet get a few factories under your belt and enshittify, and suddenly it's all "your way or the highway". Odd that.
But the company in the article isn't filling the gap. Farm owners want the technology. They don't want to be held hostage over the technology when it needs maintenance, repair, or adaptation after the initial sale.
It would be nice if this could happen more smoothly and rapidly, without some random people having to become experts in tractors from the ground up, and that's what regulations could help with. Say, if it was legal to copy from the best.
Government regulations weren't necessary for Framework to make the most open laptop product line in history which includes a the 'Pro' 13" laptop chassis which is both backwards and forwards compatible with components that were sold 5 years ago on day 1.
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...
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!
My in-laws use a Farm-all H around the yard for a lot of tasks. I don’t know what year it was made, but it looks like they were made from 1939-1954. It just… runs. We basically just do oil changes on 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.
Reminds me of how I don’t ever want an infotainment system in my car. I want the peripherals: a touch screen and speakers. I’ll supply my own phone to do the rest.
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.
You need electronics and computers for cost-effective compliance with emissions requirements. Emissions limits have been one of the most positive government policies in my lifetime, saving millions of QALYs.
There's lots of other electronics in most modern vehicles, but the public manufacturer rationales for electronic lockdowns almost always point back to emissions concerns because they're so defensible. How do you separate them?
Perhaps this is naive, but I would imagine that farm equipment is a rounding error in terms of global emissions. Compare the number of tractors to the number of trucks...
I would have expected policy to be pragmatic here, with (relatively) relaxed emissions requirements, since an affordable and reliable food supply is in the national interest? Sounds like that's not the case
Emissions regimes are complicated, but US tractors fall into the much less restrictive off-road category. As a result, they're a disproportionately significant contributor to things like NOx. A long time ago the off-road category was >20%, and I'm sure that percentage has only grown as regulations have forced emissions reductions in onroad vehicles.
I'd imagine it depends what kind of emissions you're measuring? Are we talking air quality or climate change?
Two stroke engines are pretty terrible in terms of unburned hydrocarbons and are disgusting for local air quality, which is why I'm glad they're being phased out in many areas.
I'd expect these tractors with I6 diesel engines to run pretty efficiently. I'd bet that the CO2 emissions from tractors are tiny in comparison from the emissions from trucks, fertiliser, and transporting the food.
Lawnmowers are usually four-stroke, with two-stroke engines reserved for lighter tools like string trimmers and chainsaws.
I would still guess that lawnmowers produce more emissions overall, given that there are so many more mowers than tractors. But they get used less often than tractors, so who knows? Either way, I agree with your thinking process, that the most economical way to reduce overall emissions is to focus on what are actually producing the bulk of emissions.
I don't know how much better cars and trucks can get, and for mowers maybe electric is the answer. Mine is gas-powered, and I know it runs rich. I would love to come inside after mowing and not smell like fuel, so I'm in favor of better emissions controls on mowers.
How do you define "electronics" and "computers"? Is a general-purpose computer running Java in the same category as a microcontroller running a tight loop with lookup tables for fuel and spark?
The problem: Once you have a microcontroller running a tight loop with lookup tables for fuel and spark, it's very tempting to make it run a tight loop with lookup tables for fuel, spark, and time since license renewal - and there's no outward difference between the two microcontrollers until one of them stops working. This is where regulations can help: if a manufacturer is afraid of a zillion dollar fine, they won't do that, even if the chance of getting caught is low.
While I agree in principle, we went two or more decades with cars powered by microcontrollers, and I don't recall any manufacturers trying to charge for licenses until more recently. There is something fundamentally different about the economy we are now in, I suspect.
Mandate common interfaces and open hardware. I shouldn't have to buy a $10k dongle to sniff codes. I certainly shouldn't have to buy a different one for each manufacturer.
The legislation has to be robust. No dice if the dongle is generic and $20 like OBD2 in cars, but that on top of that there's a per-manufacturer set of codes that only licensed dealers have access to the software to read those special codes.
The situation today is at least better than it used to be before OBDII. I much prefer using a scanner to get codes then having to count flashing lights. And back then you'd still have to pay a lot for the manufacturer's code reader. The only advantage was the ROM was small enough to disassemble and reflash with new features. I would not want to do that on a car made in 2026.
Exactly. Electronically controlled unit injectors are expensive--like 10x the price of mechanical ones. They're super cool, they can produce like 10 separate metered injection events per cycle. This is great for efficiency, noise, emissions, etc. But I can rebuild mechanical injectors with a bottle jack pop tester I made from $100 worth of parts and a bench vise. There's no wiring harness, no computer.. If the injector is getting fuel, has decent spray pattern, and is popping at the right pressure I know for certain the fuel system is good. With an electronic common rail system I need some expensive proprietary computer equipment to diagnose it, and there's no way I can build a test bench to rebuild those injectors.
You can't build a test bench to rebuild current OEM's electronic common rail injector systems that rely on expensive proprietary computer equipment, but there's no reason that has to be the case.
With a $20 CAN transceiver, documentation and/or config files from the manufacturer, and a bit of Python or something, you could absolutely bench test those electronic injectors. You might even be able to pick your injection events and adjust the metering, supporting the equipment as it ages. I'd love to see Ursa Ag put in a Megasquirt engine controller [1] or Proteus [2] or similar. You can run TunerStudio on a Raspberry Pi and show it on a touchscreen on the dash.
It's possible to build user-friendly, inexpensive and open engine and vehicle controls. You don't need to have zero electronics to not have locked-down proprietary electronics, you just need to build the electronics in the right way.
Surely there’s room for a middle ground. There are plenty of 1990s-era engines that were excellent designs, had no meaningful connectivity to anything except their own ECUs, and could be produced new for not very much money. Some of them were quite modular, too — I know someone who took the drivetrain out of a salvaged Honda Civic and built an entire car (with no resemblance whatsoever to a Civc) around it.
If a tractor with a clean-burning, efficient $7500k engine could be purchased and were designed around the theory that, in 20 years or so, the owner could reasonably quickly replace the entire engine (with a first-party or aftermarket solution), would that be a good solution?
The common tech that has solved these problems nicely (IMO) is network transceivers: SFP and similar modules are built according to multi-source agreements. They contain all kinds of exotic tech, and they are not intended to be serviced at all, but (unless your switch or NIC has an utterly stupid lockout) you can pull it out and replace it with an equivalent part from a different vendor in seconds, and those parts can be unbelievably inexpensive considering what’s in them. (Single-mode bidirectional 1Gbps transceivers are $11 or less, retail, in qty 2. This is INSANE compared the the first time I lit up a 1Gbps SMF link. To be fair, this particular tech may require one to replace both ends if one fails, but if you can spare a second fiber, the fully IEEE-spec-compliant interoperable ones are even less expensive.)
Eh to henerate a decent nozzle takes some precision lazer drilling (e.g.trumpf) or edm drilling (e.g posalux)and some grinding + a quality test bench. Its not that easy having good lowtech solutions either.
> 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.
There's some nuance here. If you care about fuel consumption or emissions, then EFI is the current best way to reduce both, and that requires "computers and software" to operate on the timescales required. I put scare quotes around those terms because you can do EFI on an Arduino, which is at least an order of magnitude more powerful than what automakers shipped in the 80s.
In any case, EFI gives you more control over the engine and vastly simplifies the overall product. I don't know if you've seen the mechanical fuel-injection pumps used by tractor diesels; they are basically tiny engines unto themselves, with their own little block and camshaft [0]. There is an entire world of diesel performance modding with a subset of it dedicated to modifying the Bosh P1700 mechanical fuel-injection pump to change timings, handle higher RPMs, and run higher pressures. I would not call it, or its carburetor cousin in the gasoline world, "simple" compared to computer-controlled fuel delivery.
An open-source ECU project, on the other hand, enabled a hacker to implement Koenigsegg's Freevalve tech on a Miata [1].
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I want this for cars but to keep the modern powertrain. So an EV without the tracking/touch screens, etc etc. Or an internal combustion engine car that is just simple and efficient (and again, no tracking). I'll take the low-tech but nice features like heated seats and power windows still thank you.
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.
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.
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.
Seeing all the gigantic and very-high-priced Pavement Princess Pickups clogging dealer lots, it's plain that the auto industry in general didn't learn a damn thing. It's easy to point fingers in all directions, but it always ends up that we get the worst outcomes.
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.
> The farm equipment industry spent 20 years adding complexity and cost. Ursa Ag is wagering that a significant number of farmers never wanted any of it.
Nice tag line but not a complete picture. The "significant number of farmers" in terms of actual market spend driving the equipment industry is not mom-and-pop outfits but rather agri-industrial complexes with machines to match. What they want is (1) availability and (2) ROI. For (1), that is first and foremost subject to legal stipulations like EPA etc, then secondly subject to production availability. For (2), electronics are the name of the game if you are looking to turn a profit with farming because counting every seed, measuring every drop of chem, and tracking every inch of plotted ground leads to better ROI.
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.
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."
My guess is that this is a direct response to all the claw stuff running on macs. I used to never get cf captchas from a mac + home IP (while getting plenty on my linux ws + work vpn). Now i've gotten 2 sites in the past week that not only show the captcha, but also loop once I click the human thing. Most likely mac + resIP is not a good signal anymore...
Worked for me just now on mobile safari. You get the cloudflare human test but I just clicked the box and was in. This was despite accessing the site while vpn’d from home and using multiple adblockers.
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.
This is the way if we can ensure manufacturing of the parts. It won’t catch on but it would be awesome to have “base” tractors that are mechanical and predictable. Then you slap on whatever software on top that helps (automation, etc). But they need to be decoupled imo.
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.
And how many acres are you farming on it? Today's world of agriculture is much higher tech-based (for many good reasons, primarily yield) than back in the horse and buggy days of farming.
I know of a forklift that's pushing 80 and still used in a lumber yard (i.e. a material handling centric workplace)
Other than ~30min it takes to teach an employee to drive manual it doesn't do anything worse than the modern ones it works alongside and it does a handful of minor things much better by virtue of predating OSHA.
I still got a farmall 230, super easy to fix and maintain and works perfect for my small bit of land. An electric starter addon is really nice for winter starts though instead of killing your arm.
While I’m not at all surprised that they’re still running, I am a little surprised at how many Farm-all owners are on HN. Farm-all H owner checking in :)
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.
> The 150-horsepower model starts at $129,900 CAD, about $95,000 USD. The range-topping 260-hp version runs $199,900 CAD, around $146,000.
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the MTZ Belarus 82.3 can be had for the equivalent of $50k.
It's a simple machine for a simpler time, so obviously doesn't meet any emissions regulations. But at least in my region farmers went to great lengths to acquire them - even illegally. By the time the tractors are confiscated, they'll more than pay for themselves.
This sounds good until you remember that we have all these electronics precisely to avoid the 1955 smog situation and climate change. Going back to 1990-era cars isn't solving anything. What we need is a patent and intellectual property reform. My personal opinion is that the same company shouldn't be allowed to sell both the hardware and the software. Open source ECU, anyone?
I wonder by what mechanism they plan to import these into the US. This seems like a emissions regulation end-run like glider trucks, but my understanding of the EPA import rules doesn't really leave any room for this type of game.
Yes, a lot of modern tractors are locked down due to predatory dealer service lock-in, but they're also complex and locked down due to emissions regulations, which are ostensibly a net societal gain. The classic HN "everything should be totally open and free" conversation really needs to happen through this lens IMO.
That's what I always want -- all of my appliances should look like the ones we got in the 90s/2000s. Some Chinese companies should take this niche or maybe not-niche field, sell at a premium, which hopefully is still cheaper than smart ones.
This is great, if there is some real competition, then we can see John Deere will have to figure out how to compete. Either with lower prices or less lock in.
A friend is an organic farmer in Saskatchewan who has been buying specifically older mechanical only tractors; after a heart attack that will require him to sell off his farm, he’s finding lots of potential buyers.
"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.
Is part of the appeal due to the fact that being remanufactured engines they don't need modern emissions control, aka Diesel Exhaust Fluid (DEF)? Farmers hate DEF.
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.
DPF (Diesel Particulate Filter) and SCR (Selective Catalytic Reduction, which uses DEF, Diesel Exhaust Fluid) are two mostly different systems. DPF traps soot in a filter which then burns the soot off into gas later (regen). SCR reduces NOx using urea.
This is important to know in the context of tractors because in the US, 25-74hp tractors generally need only DPF without SCR (there are basically three bins depending on horsepower level). This makes these midsized tractors a bit of a sweet spot for a lot of tasks; of course, you still have to deal with regen (which is where the DPF gets heated up to convert trapped soot into gas), which is annoying, but you at least don't have to fill up with DEF or risk the DEF injection system failing.
The market for used tractors went through the roof years ago--20 to 40 year old tractors with tens of thousands of miles on them sell for not so far from new prices because farmers value being able to fix them without paying $$$
I feel this. I've been looking at ADV bikes and everything on the market has a cellular modem for always on cloud connectivity, and multiple vendors, including Zero (the electric internet darling) are offering paid feature unlocks via apps.
On top of this, I looked at Zero's job postings and they're desperately trying to hire a firmware lead to get the team to use Claude Code (precisely what I want managing a 100hp motor under my ass).
Not only are we in a world where everything is locked down with software, the software is about to get way worse and there's nothing you can do about it.
I wish someone would do something similar for TVs. Just a really fantastic panel with only the tech needed to decode HDMI or whatever and show it on the screen. No other tech whatsover: no telemetry, no smart anything, nothing.
No. Monitors are small, and suited for one person working close up. I am looking for a television without the "computer" inside of it.
Yes, of course, it needs to have a computer to decode and display images, but I don't want it to be running a stripped back version of Android, that shipped out of date and hasn't received any updates, with apps that are laggy and often not current relative to other "smart" providers, that also takes pictures of my screen once every thirty seconds to tell the manufacturer what I'm watching and for how long, to build a better marketing profile on me.
I want a big OLED panel with enough smarts to drive the screen. I will plug my own computer into the television, if the need should arise.
> Pre-war EIA forecasts projected U.S. diesel prices would average $3.47/gallon in 2026. As of late March, the national average hit $5.37/gallon, roughly 55% above where it was expected to be.
Diesel prices will continue to rise so it's not clear what these farmers are actually signing up for.
This makes me think of the new toyotas, the rav4s, 4runner, and land cruiser. Through government regulations, they were forced to create smaller more fuel efficient engines. To get the same power, they overstrain them, and put huge turbos on the engines. The outcome is a strictly worse engine, that essentially uses the same fuel as older engines.
The demand for older vehicles in certain segments is actually increasing
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.
I wonder if this notion comes from the 80s, when engines with turbos had lower compression ratios for reliability. Today's turbocharged motors have higher compression ratios than in the malaise era, and the turbos have a lot less lag. Turbos no longer mean you have to sacrifice fuel economy for performance (unless you have a lead foot).
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".
Good. There should be an option for a straightforward mechanical machine. This also has trickledown effect where hopefully regular town mechanics can fix things based on their historical knowledge of engines. Instead of not wanting to touch anything because of the all the electronics involved.
Also, I know this is a strange parallel, but it feels similar to what Dell and HP did to their servers. They made the BIO so complicated that it takes 5-10 minutes for their severs to boot up. Using an older Dell server with a straightforward BIOS that boots up in 30 seconds feels awesome.
What is it with American companies that eventually always try to sell crap and low moral products/services. As if the people are educated in luring people into traps to only benefit themselves.
Wish they sold something in the compact utility segment. 40-60hpish. I'd love an affordable Canadian made tractor for property maintenance / smaller farms.
(Though these days I've love something electric. I don't need long run time, I'm not doing row crops. Just market gardening and property maintenance stuff. All the electric stuff I see out there is aiming up at the high end and for autonomy / "smart" tractor stuff which I don't care about.)
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.
Can you share more about your hobby farm? I would love to learn more about how you got into that? My family had a small farm growing up and my parents are still actively working on the farm everyday and I would like to take that up at some point. So curious to hear what you farm and how much involved you are in the process.
Good. The John Deere monopoly is wild, but if you talk to a farmer they say they can’t handle the repairs. Sure, John Deere gets to make more expensive and complex machines and convince their customers that it’s “the future”.
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.
Yes because thy live in the John Deere future. This was not always the case, surely. You used to be able to take high school classes to learn how to fix a combustion engine, even a new one!
Keep in mind that tractors are also getting massive.
The economics of row-crop agriculture is "you gotta farm more land". That means spending as much time in the field as you can with as big a machine as you can.
So not only is time you spend fixing your tractor yourself time you're not spending on your primary job, it's also working on a machine that's just monstrously huge. Delegating that work to a specialist with specialized tools is a very reasonable way to live.
The issue is that the specialized employees is not someone you hire on payroll who has access to tools you purchase. They must be a John Deere employee who comes from out of state and costs you $$$$$$ to calibrate a sensor that could just be a simple menu button and a 20 second wait
I mean, sure, right to repair and all that, but to be clear, unless you have like 50+ tractors to maintain, it's not going to make economic sense to have a full time employee to repair them. You still want to call out, you just want the option of calling someone local with more competitive rates and a faster response time.
Exactly! The old image of a guy on a Deere 4020 pulling an eight row implement is just unsustainable in today's agricultural system. Whether that system is sustainable is a different question.
Exactly. A 4020 is fun! It may not have as much torque and ground pressure may not be as good as a quad belt tractor, but for a lil farm where you just want to grow hay or screw around?
You're pretty confident for someone who fundamentally does not understand the issue. During harvest season even hours of delay can be disastrous for farms that are barely solvent in the first place. When your only option is to call the dealer and hope and pray they deign to visit your farm in a timely fashion it doesn't matter how good the warranty is or is not. Farmers need to be self sufficient because time is money and money is survival.
It may be true that I do not understand whatever nondescript fundamental issue it is that you mention but don't elaborate on, but I most definitely understand the constraints of farming. Being a farmer, I live it each day.
And as a farmer who owns equipment from across all the major brands (and some unheard of brands to boot), you are right that John Deere is most reliable for having parts in stock. I've been burned by the others having to wait a week on parts to be delivered from who knows where. That is not a fun position to be in. Repairability is where John Deere has the clear advantage. That is, just as you point out, why they are most popular. Nothing else matters if your equipment doesn't work.
You pay a lot more for that luxury, but when the clock is ticking...
What early demand are you seeing, exactly? The article does indicate that they plan to ramp up production in 2026, but no mention of actual sales. It is quite possible that they are increasing production thinking that they need to roll them out to dealer lots to gain any traction.
In fact, their TractorHouse profile shows that they are still struggling to sell last year's models. If there was demand, why hasn't that demand already gobbled up the stock? "I guess it would be cool to own one if it was given to me for free" isn't demand.
They need to swing the pendulum back, the current problem is that there is now a whole generation about to take over from the previous and the new gen has never had to use a non-John Deere a tractor. If they could evangelize their product as the “smarter farmer that doesn’t need all that tech” then they might have success.
Oh hey, do you happen to know if there's any tool incompatibility in the modern electronics?
The other thing about tractors is that the three point hitches, PTOs, etc etc, have been standardized forever, so there's very little lock in in terms of, swap out your JD for and IH and away you go, so I'm curious if eg modern seed drills have any fancy tech which locks you in.
The short answer is yes... As you mentioned, the physical side is generally standardized to some degree, but everyone I know tends to just use branded gear that's known to fit. Now if you like to resurrect old gear, then you become a shade tree mechanic pretty quick. I don't think that any farmer will survive more than a few seasons without being pretty smart at just getting stuff to work...
> if there's any tool incompatibility in the modern electronics?
Technically there are standards, but you know how that goes in the real world... Funnily enough, a friend bought a new tractor and planter, both from John Deere, and they weren't even compatible with each other. The tractor needed to have the cab removed to install the necessary hardware (ethernet) to be compatible with the planter.
> have been standardized forever
Hydraulic hose couplers didn't find common adoption until the mid-80s/early-90s, which is surprisingly late.
Yeah, I hate when I go to connect something and have to dig around for a hydraulic adapter. If I was smart, I'd just spend the winter making sure everything was matching, but I'm cheap and there's always something else that seems more urgent.
The farmer who doesn't want or need tech already buys from the likes of Versatile, Kubota, or maybe even Massey Ferguson if more towards the middle of the road. "Low tech" is already a serviced market. That's not to say there isn't room for another competitor, but there isn't much indication that Ursa is becoming one. When you can't even sell the product you produced last year... The bit in the article about them not wanting to really scale up is telling.
It is not like John Deere actually has a monopoly. There is just as much CNH (CaseIH, New Holland) seen out in the fields, and even when you want all the bells and whistles, Fendt is rapidly becoming understood to be the true king of tech. What John Deere does have going for it is that they generally do better than everyone else at keeping parts in stock where the parts are needed; local to the farmer. Ironically, repairability is where John Deere finds the win at the end of the day.
That's not true for commercial users the way it is for private cars.
Even if you have a service contract you're still gonna be pissed at the downtime cost of having a tech drag their ass out to wherever you are to initiate a forced regen or something.
I don't think the issue is "smarts" in our cars/tractors/light-switches/etc but the lock-in and "authorized repair" bullshit.
On the topic of Smart Home stuff (which is the only topic I'm even slightly qualified to talk about) I've heard about people wanting "dumb houses" after initially people wanting "smart houses". It's my opinion that this desire is driven mainly due to bad experiences and doing smart homes the "wrong way".
What do I mean by that? Either they got burned by XYZ Smart company going under and all their cloud-dependant devices dying/bricking. they had a system like Control4 which required authorized resellers to make even basic changes [0], and/or they were overwhelmed with juggling 5 different apps/platforms that don't talk to each other. That doesn't mean smart homes are bad, just that the hardware/software was bad. I fully recognize that for the "normal" person the only options are currently "bad hardware/software" or "dumb house" but there _are_ better alternatives.
My philosophy for "Smart Home" is one of progressive enhancement (and graceful degradation). What that means is everything I "enhance" with "smarts" should still work the old way that people are accustomed to. Every light in the house can be controlled via "Alexa|Siri|Google turn off the Kitchen Light" but they can also be turned off/on by walking over to the wall and flipping a switch [1]. This means Smart Switches _not_ Smart Bulbs [2]. If my Home Assistant (yes, I'm one of those people) server goes offline, everything still works, the switches work, the door lock works with a key, the garage still opens. My "smart-ifying" of the house is not replacing the way to do something, it's only adding additional control.
In addition to that, and something that should come as no surprise, I refuse to use a cloud, or at least depend on a cloud for my smart home. For this reason I prefer Z-Wave/Zigbee devices. If the manufacturer goes out of business it doesn't matter (no pun intended [3]). While I can, and have, used cloud integrations with Home Assistant, I try to make sure that's just a stopgap to decide if I want to go all-in. I own a few Z-wave devices from companies that don't exist anymore and they have been chugging along without issue for years. I love that stability.
There is nothing in my house where you have to walk over to a wall tablet to control something or open an app on your phone, I would consider that a failure. Everything flows through Home Assistant, it's the brain, I don't want multiple apps fighting or different ecosystems that don't mesh (radio-wise or functionality-wise).
What does this have to do with tractors? Glad you asked! I see this as the same for tractors, they should absolutely be "dumb" with the ability to control/query parts of it and add the "smarts" through an external system. Whatever the equivalent of Z-wave would be for monitoring/controlling the device, not something built-in or required for functionality. A modular, non-locked-down system. I'm sure we are nowhere near that point but I write all this as a "don't throw the baby out with the bathwater", I think John Deere was wrong in how they went about adding "smarts" but I don't think the idea is without merit either. They went down the greedy, anti-right-to-repair route which is clearly wrong.
I'd love to see a combo of Ursa Ag's tractor as a base platform where smarts can be added to it without compromising it's repairability. A take on the "naked robotic core"-idea if you will.
[0] And each time you have a authorized reseller come out they try to sell you on an expensive upgrade because they make (most) their money on selling you stuff, not maintaining it. I really dislike Control4 and things like it.
[1] Point of clarification, I use Decora style paddles as is common on smart switches. The only downside (IMHO) to my system is they always "rest" in the middle orientation so they are "worse" than "dumb switches" in that you can't look at the switch and see the state it's in. That said, 3-way switches have already eroded this ability and I feel like this is an acceptable trade off. Maybe in the future people will care enough to make the switch represent the state correctly (with little servos flipping it) but I don't feel like I'm missing much. You may disagree.
[2] My exception to this rule is I will allow a Smart Bulb as long as there is also a Smart Switch. Maybe you can't change to color temperature via hardware on the wall but you can always still turn it on/off at the wall. Graceful degradation.
[3] My information might be out of date but I have very little interest in Thread/Matter, I don't want my smart devices to _ever_ talk to the cloud. Which is why I love Z-wave/Zigbee, they talk to my hub, my hub talks to whatever I want/approve. I never want my devices updating (or more likely, bricking) due to the cloud. I understand that Thread/Matter do not immediately mean "cloud" and in fact might even require local control but I'll believe it when I see it. So far Thread/Matter have been a massive nothing-burger IMHO. Maybe in a few years I'll be all-in on it but so far, I don't find it compelling at all.
> 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.
> 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.
Exactly! If I'm doing my "job" correctly then I should be able to add "smarts" without anyone noticing at all. It's purely additive. It lowers my stress levels immensely as well since there is a never a "P1" emergency of "The lights won't turn on" or "I can't open the garage door" (unless something lower-level is broken, like the power is out or the garage opener burned out).
I want guests to be able to come to my house and not even notice it's "smart". They should be able to stay in the guest room and not think twice about it. Yes, there will be laminated sheet in the side table telling them what the lights/fan are called if they want to talk to the Echos to control it and there will be a labeled remote (Z-Wave) on the bedside table so they can toggle the fan/lights from the bed but none of that is required. They can control it all from the switches on the wall if they want.
Up until a year ago I was regularly using a Massy Fergusson 135 [0] (Perkins Diesel version), made sometime in the 1970s. It was wonderful! So amazing to drive and use. Clunky and heavy, but you really really felt like you were using a machine. In low gears, if you put you foot down on the accelerator the engine would roar, and your speed would barely change!
And there was no fancy technology in it at all. If I was in the forest and had forgotten the key, I'd just reach behind the dashboard and hot-wire it. The air filter was basically a shisha-pipe that bubbled the incoming air through wire wool and engine oil.
Its fuel gauge didn't work either. You just had to take a look in the tank, or quickly react as soon as the revs started dropping. I ran it dry a few times and had to sit there with a spanner in one hand and YouTube into the other, while trying to bleed all the fuel lines. But they were all on the outside of the vehicle, which made it comparatively easy I imagine.
I've never actually driven a modern tractor, so don't know how it compares. I imagine the clutch is easier on the knees these days!
Anyway, this just felt like the place to share this.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massey_Ferguson_135
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.
My grandpa was a high school principal to support his love of farming, not because he wasn't dedicated, but because they wanted to survive
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)
Honestly, I still had to practically stand on the clutch with mine!
I'd teach someone to drive it and say, "now push down on the clutch". They they would heave and struggle, then eventually succeed and look victorious. I'd say, "well done, it is now half way down! But that's all you need for now!"
EDIT: To fully explain: It has a two-stage clutch. You half-press it and it disconnects the wheels from the engine. If you fully depress it all the way to the floor, it additionally disconnects the power-take-off shaft (PTO) from the engine. The PTO shaft is a spindle on the back of the tractor which drives things like your flail mower, wood chipper, etc.
He knew :)
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.
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.
Mine and a pedal and steering column lever, so I guess I got one of the fancy ones!
The fancy ones had an accelerator pedal, but most just had the lever 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.
> The air filter was basically a shisha-pipe that bubbled the incoming air through wire wool and engine oil.
What is a shisha-pipe?
Basically a fancy bong.
Also known as hookah or just waterpipe.
> 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.
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?
I do, but a friend is taking care of the farm now. I moved back to the big city lights (Munich, as fate would have it).
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
> 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"
Any technology from before the time of your grandparents, and often parents, is usually perceived to be "not fancy". Because then those elders can't tell you in your childhood what life was like before that technology. So in your lived experience that technology was always there. Reading history later on, doesn't change your emotional experiences.
Freeze LLM progress right here and the future is still totally inconcievable. Humans who have only ever known being able to talk to machines...
Any sufficiently mundane technology is indistinguishable from... furniture?
Nice one. Added to https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup
We also don't call a hoe fancy technology, but it is.
I don't know about you, but my mother is definitely not technology
An internal combustion engine may be complex, but it's not fancy. I can see and touch and understand every part of it. I can maintain and modify and repair it. This is not true for fancy electronics and certainly not locked-down proprietary firmware.
The magic of an engine is less in how it operates, and more in how it was built. At least around the time they started showing up, manufacturing lots of precision metal parts was not trivial.
Although modern electronics take this further, with both operation and construction being utterly complex.
Yeah, I was introspecting as I wrote that!
Maybe it is fancy to you now, but with a few primitive hand tools and no docs at all, a HS graduate can take it apart and figure out how it works.
Try doing the same on the ECU in your car. I'll wait.
I learned how engines worked by taking apart, cleaning and reassembling an ancient lawnmower engine so I could use it on my go-kart. I then learned how cars worked by taking one apart and putting it back together again.
Neither of those machines had a transistor in them. It was all basic electricity.
I think this is a reaction to the incredibly locked down ecosystem that most of these mfgs are pushing.
However, the tech exists for a reason and is not inherently bad, the issue is the lock-in, the lack of choice and interoperability.
IMO, there is plenty of space for an OEM who can play nice with others, offer an open (and vibrant ecosystem), and keep users coming back by choice, not by lock-in.
> 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.
This was my take as well. How many 3rd parties might be able to bring on upgrades/modifications to a "dumb" tractor to make it smart vs only being able to buy a "smart" tractor from one vendor and be forced into it's rules/restrictions/prices
Plenty of options for putting auto steer on a dumb tractor already exist.
Cheap ones too -- aliexpress has them.
But there's more to agtech than driving a tractor around, a lot of what these big integrated systems do (at the high end) is very data driven -- determining where and how to plant, irrigate, fertilize, etc. There's a lot of integration work beyond just making the tractor drive.
> But there's more to agtech than driving a tractor around, a lot of what these big integrated systems do (at the high end) is very data driven -- determining where and how to plant, irrigate, fertilize, etc.
How difficult is this to implement outside of big ag-tech? I feel that a community of experienced farmers and programmers (or programmer-farmers) could tackle this.
Is suspect most farmers would prefer the diy add-on version of these than the single manufacturer integrated one. A modern smartphone and stay of I/o sensors send like it could do pretty much the entire job
Right, but that has nothing to do with a vendor making a dumb tractor. Why do we need to dismissively move the conversation from TFA. The data driven approach is made up of several parts, and we're looking at a specific part
Making a dumb tractor for the use-case of dumb tractor is obviously a winning idea.
I just don't think you're going to effectively compete with big agtech by putting a bunch of parts in a box, shaking it, and hoping you end up with a beautifully integrated solution. Integration hell is the reason big commercial firms dominate when it comes to large integrated systems.
admittedly, i'm not a farmer nor an expert in data driving farming. but getting a farmer the ability to precisely drive a tractor in a field so that planting seeds, applying fertilizer, and any of the other steps would be a huge win. The settings used when doing that can easily come from bigFarmData gained from other sources. Can it be used even more precisely when everything is gathered/integrated by one company? That's a question that I'm not by default saying yes to, but it seems like you do think that is true. Even if it is true, does that mean the difference from a farmer going broke because his DIY tractor behaved slightly differently than your solution? I'd posit that a farmer only being allowed to play the bigFarmData game by only being allowed to buy from one vendor that is expensive while also forcing any repairs to be expensive will cause farmers to financially unnecessarily struggle.
The beauty here is even beyond experimentation the tech will change repeatedly over the life of the equipment, and you can cheaply adapt to that. There is very little advantage to the modern tractors, beyond luxuries and the finish of a self contained package. Farmers rarely ime prioritize either of these
There are already open source auto pilot and cruise control implementations for cars. (Not all cars are supported obviously!) so to have this in place for tractors off the road seems very doable.
Edit: specifically thinking of https://comma.ai/
Well open source AutoSteer exists it has a lot of features like rate control built in to it. The system is called AgOpenGPS it’s very popular for retrofitting older equipment with modern technology.
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".
Now is especially a good time for Canada to do it. Cory Doctorow had a fantastic CBC interview about this. Scrapping anti-tampering protections would harm anti-Canadian tech companies while also building rapport with American farmers who would be able to use Canadian software on their tractors.
Something tells me that the best tractor software would be free, not nationalized.
Ever-more-restrictive government regulations are what allows these OEMs to ‘leverage’ their market power this way. I am not sure that a new regulation can solve it, as these sorts of mandates don’t seem to have worked in any other market.
The argument isn't 'more' regulations or 'less' regulations, it is the right regulations. The problem is that big companies slowly allow regulations that don't hurt them but do block competition by aggressively fighting regulations that help the startup (their competition) or help the consumer in ways that make them less money. It isn't hard to be evil and create regulatory capture. You don't actually have to be active in crafting regulation, just be active in blocking the right regulation. General statements that are 'against regulation' play into big companies making things worse.
These big companies absolutely allow regulations that "hurt" them. Deere doesn't want to deal with farmers who are pissed off that emissions stuff results in a service call at a bad time and can't be overridden, or obnoxious safety stuff that make products less useful outside of their "textbook" application, or something that forces them to expensively certify their product is XYZ or something.
Buuuuut, the cost of implementing that stuff hurts the competition way more, so Deere and friends don't really fight it.
They're trading absolute market size for stronger control over market share. Less people are going to buy their products at the margin if the products are made worse. But those that do will buy it from them, so more profit.
Those are load-bearing quotation marks: you're saying the regulation doesn't hurt them, only "hurts" them. If the regulation hurt them, they wouldn't allow it.
You're right, the solution is getting rid of swathes of intellectual property legislation, not adding more.
That's a double edged sword. Investors demand a return regardless of what IP law is. They'll invest in the companies that find some way to protect their investment -- NDAs, stronger technical protections, services-models, etc.
Remember that those regulations are written by the OEMs they benefit and whom bribe legislators to pass those regulations.
Any argument made without acknowledging this is purely in bad faith. The problem is not regulation that benefits OEMs. The problem is that you can simply purchase regulations that benefit you.
There are many regulations, written by a variety of actors, often in strange alliances. Safety, environmental, and disclosure regulations are often the culprits behind industry consolidation and oligopolization.
> instead of believing in magic of "free market"
It looks like magic because it works like magic. Surprisingly it is also possible to believe in the magic of "government intervention" though it looks less like magic and more like unintended consequences.
There's no magic necessary. TFA highlights the exact mechanism by which markets can fill a gap or need via entrepreneurship when incumbents fail to deliver what customers want. It's not guaranteed to happen or work in every case, but there's money to be made by giving people what they actually want.
A lot of electronics is useful, it can reduce fuel use or help with more accurate driving.
Farmers are just pissed they lose the ability to repair the vehicle easily or get stuck with monthly subscription because tractor company has changed the terms and you are praying they don't change it further.
A modern John Deere tractor with a robust right-to-repair would still be a pain to do maintenance on. A big part of the reason people want old tractors is because they don't have these additional computer controlled systems which break and require time and effort to fix.
It's almost as if freedom only exists for those with the money to hire lawyers to make it happen. Farmers are basically screwed in that their location at the bottom foundation level of society really ties their hands in what they can get away with before things start getting tumultuous. Yet get a few factories under your belt and enshittify, and suddenly it's all "your way or the highway". Odd that.
But the company in the article isn't filling the gap. Farm owners want the technology. They don't want to be held hostage over the technology when it needs maintenance, repair, or adaptation after the initial sale.
It would be nice if this could happen more smoothly and rapidly, without some random people having to become experts in tractors from the ground up, and that's what regulations could help with. Say, if it was legal to copy from the best.
Honestly do you even need to build a lowtech alternative? Just anounce you will and retire on cartel kickbacks to slow it down?
Government regulations weren't necessary for Framework to make the most open laptop product line in history which includes a the 'Pro' 13" laptop chassis which is both backwards and forwards compatible with components that were sold 5 years ago on day 1.
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...
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!
My in-laws use a Farm-all H around the yard for a lot of tasks. I don’t know what year it was made, but it looks like they were made from 1939-1954. It just… runs. We basically just do oil changes on 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.
Reminds me of how I don’t ever want an infotainment system in my car. I want the peripherals: a touch screen and speakers. I’ll supply my own phone to do the rest.
Same for Smart TVs.
Always better short and long term to bring and maintain your own smarts.
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.
You need electronics and computers for cost-effective compliance with emissions requirements. Emissions limits have been one of the most positive government policies in my lifetime, saving millions of QALYs.
There's lots of other electronics in most modern vehicles, but the public manufacturer rationales for electronic lockdowns almost always point back to emissions concerns because they're so defensible. How do you separate them?
Perhaps this is naive, but I would imagine that farm equipment is a rounding error in terms of global emissions. Compare the number of tractors to the number of trucks...
I would have expected policy to be pragmatic here, with (relatively) relaxed emissions requirements, since an affordable and reliable food supply is in the national interest? Sounds like that's not the case
Emissions regimes are complicated, but US tractors fall into the much less restrictive off-road category. As a result, they're a disproportionately significant contributor to things like NOx. A long time ago the off-road category was >20%, and I'm sure that percentage has only grown as regulations have forced emissions reductions in onroad vehicles.
> but US tractors fall into the much less restrictive off-road category.
Sometimes. Above 26HP tractors do have to have emissions controls like diesel particulate filters now. Below that they don't.
Compare the number of tractors to the number of gas-powered lawnmowers. Which do you think gets better emissions?
I'd imagine it depends what kind of emissions you're measuring? Are we talking air quality or climate change?
Two stroke engines are pretty terrible in terms of unburned hydrocarbons and are disgusting for local air quality, which is why I'm glad they're being phased out in many areas.
I'd expect these tractors with I6 diesel engines to run pretty efficiently. I'd bet that the CO2 emissions from tractors are tiny in comparison from the emissions from trucks, fertiliser, and transporting the food.
Lawnmowers are usually four-stroke, with two-stroke engines reserved for lighter tools like string trimmers and chainsaws.
I would still guess that lawnmowers produce more emissions overall, given that there are so many more mowers than tractors. But they get used less often than tractors, so who knows? Either way, I agree with your thinking process, that the most economical way to reduce overall emissions is to focus on what are actually producing the bulk of emissions.
I don't know how much better cars and trucks can get, and for mowers maybe electric is the answer. Mine is gas-powered, and I know it runs rich. I would love to come inside after mowing and not smell like fuel, so I'm in favor of better emissions controls on mowers.
How do you define "electronics" and "computers"? Is a general-purpose computer running Java in the same category as a microcontroller running a tight loop with lookup tables for fuel and spark?
The problem: Once you have a microcontroller running a tight loop with lookup tables for fuel and spark, it's very tempting to make it run a tight loop with lookup tables for fuel, spark, and time since license renewal - and there's no outward difference between the two microcontrollers until one of them stops working. This is where regulations can help: if a manufacturer is afraid of a zillion dollar fine, they won't do that, even if the chance of getting caught is low.
While I agree in principle, we went two or more decades with cars powered by microcontrollers, and I don't recall any manufacturers trying to charge for licenses until more recently. There is something fundamentally different about the economy we are now in, I suspect.
> How do you separate them?
Mandate common interfaces and open hardware. I shouldn't have to buy a $10k dongle to sniff codes. I certainly shouldn't have to buy a different one for each manufacturer.
The legislation has to be robust. No dice if the dongle is generic and $20 like OBD2 in cars, but that on top of that there's a per-manufacturer set of codes that only licensed dealers have access to the software to read those special codes.
The situation today is at least better than it used to be before OBDII. I much prefer using a scanner to get codes then having to count flashing lights. And back then you'd still have to pay a lot for the manufacturer's code reader. The only advantage was the ROM was small enough to disassemble and reflash with new features. I would not want to do that on a car made in 2026.
Exactly. Electronically controlled unit injectors are expensive--like 10x the price of mechanical ones. They're super cool, they can produce like 10 separate metered injection events per cycle. This is great for efficiency, noise, emissions, etc. But I can rebuild mechanical injectors with a bottle jack pop tester I made from $100 worth of parts and a bench vise. There's no wiring harness, no computer.. If the injector is getting fuel, has decent spray pattern, and is popping at the right pressure I know for certain the fuel system is good. With an electronic common rail system I need some expensive proprietary computer equipment to diagnose it, and there's no way I can build a test bench to rebuild those injectors.
You can't build a test bench to rebuild current OEM's electronic common rail injector systems that rely on expensive proprietary computer equipment, but there's no reason that has to be the case.
With a $20 CAN transceiver, documentation and/or config files from the manufacturer, and a bit of Python or something, you could absolutely bench test those electronic injectors. You might even be able to pick your injection events and adjust the metering, supporting the equipment as it ages. I'd love to see Ursa Ag put in a Megasquirt engine controller [1] or Proteus [2] or similar. You can run TunerStudio on a Raspberry Pi and show it on a touchscreen on the dash.
It's possible to build user-friendly, inexpensive and open engine and vehicle controls. You don't need to have zero electronics to not have locked-down proprietary electronics, you just need to build the electronics in the right way.
[1] https://diyautotune.com/products/ms3357-c?_pos=2&_fid=69f494...
[2] https://rusefi.com/index.html#proteus
Surely there’s room for a middle ground. There are plenty of 1990s-era engines that were excellent designs, had no meaningful connectivity to anything except their own ECUs, and could be produced new for not very much money. Some of them were quite modular, too — I know someone who took the drivetrain out of a salvaged Honda Civic and built an entire car (with no resemblance whatsoever to a Civc) around it.
If a tractor with a clean-burning, efficient $7500k engine could be purchased and were designed around the theory that, in 20 years or so, the owner could reasonably quickly replace the entire engine (with a first-party or aftermarket solution), would that be a good solution?
The common tech that has solved these problems nicely (IMO) is network transceivers: SFP and similar modules are built according to multi-source agreements. They contain all kinds of exotic tech, and they are not intended to be serviced at all, but (unless your switch or NIC has an utterly stupid lockout) you can pull it out and replace it with an equivalent part from a different vendor in seconds, and those parts can be unbelievably inexpensive considering what’s in them. (Single-mode bidirectional 1Gbps transceivers are $11 or less, retail, in qty 2. This is INSANE compared the the first time I lit up a 1Gbps SMF link. To be fair, this particular tech may require one to replace both ends if one fails, but if you can spare a second fiber, the fully IEEE-spec-compliant interoperable ones are even less expensive.)
Eh to henerate a decent nozzle takes some precision lazer drilling (e.g.trumpf) or edm drilling (e.g posalux)and some grinding + a quality test bench. Its not that easy having good lowtech solutions either.
> 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.
There's some nuance here. If you care about fuel consumption or emissions, then EFI is the current best way to reduce both, and that requires "computers and software" to operate on the timescales required. I put scare quotes around those terms because you can do EFI on an Arduino, which is at least an order of magnitude more powerful than what automakers shipped in the 80s.
In any case, EFI gives you more control over the engine and vastly simplifies the overall product. I don't know if you've seen the mechanical fuel-injection pumps used by tractor diesels; they are basically tiny engines unto themselves, with their own little block and camshaft [0]. There is an entire world of diesel performance modding with a subset of it dedicated to modifying the Bosh P1700 mechanical fuel-injection pump to change timings, handle higher RPMs, and run higher pressures. I would not call it, or its carburetor cousin in the gasoline world, "simple" compared to computer-controlled fuel delivery.
An open-source ECU project, on the other hand, enabled a hacker to implement Koenigsegg's Freevalve tech on a Miata [1].
[0]: https://blessedperformance.com/ddp-cummins-hot-street-p-pump...
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9KJ_f7REGw
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...
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
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
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.
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.
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!
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.
I want this for cars but to keep the modern powertrain. So an EV without the tracking/touch screens, etc etc. Or an internal combustion engine car that is just simple and efficient (and again, no tracking). I'll take the low-tech but nice features like heated seats and power windows still thank you.
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)
Sounds like you just want a car from the year 2000.
https://www.telotrucks.com/ is pretty much that
Cheap, fast enough, practical, goofey looking.
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.
They have plenty of running/driving mules out there already:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6_9_HHLOSY
(Not for sale yet though.)
But they have merch! Hats, apparel!
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.
Seeing all the gigantic and very-high-priced Pavement Princess Pickups clogging dealer lots, it's plain that the auto industry in general didn't learn a damn thing. It's easy to point fingers in all directions, but it always ends up that we get the worst outcomes.
So a Dacia?
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 still often think of my old Saab 900’s Black Panel button—physical dark mode.
Danielle Smith never met a corporate shill she could say no to
I predict 6 months before John Deer gets the Alberta UCP on the line and gets a law passed that bans "unsafe tractors" (or the like)
Then again, she probably loves the idea of tractors with poor fuel efficiency and no exhaust cleaning tech.
An anti-right to repair bill + a carbon tax (except this time it taxes you for not emitting).
Better photos are found on their site: https://ursa-ag.com
Video the press are taking stills from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDR6g9iG9Ds
Interview with more details on trade show floor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9QxeNyKbB4
> The farm equipment industry spent 20 years adding complexity and cost. Ursa Ag is wagering that a significant number of farmers never wanted any of it.
Nice tag line but not a complete picture. The "significant number of farmers" in terms of actual market spend driving the equipment industry is not mom-and-pop outfits but rather agri-industrial complexes with machines to match. What they want is (1) availability and (2) ROI. For (1), that is first and foremost subject to legal stipulations like EPA etc, then secondly subject to production availability. For (2), electronics are the name of the game if you are looking to turn a profit with farming because counting every seed, measuring every drop of chem, and tracking every inch of plotted ground leads to better ROI.
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.
Thank you Cloudflare for making it impossible to read news, and yes I am a human.
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."
Here's an alternative source:
https://www.thedrive.com/news/new-tractor-with-12-valve-cumm...
I second this. Clownflare is agressively blocking: Fennec v149.0.2 - Germany
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?
My guess is that this is a direct response to all the claw stuff running on macs. I used to never get cf captchas from a mac + home IP (while getting plenty on my linux ws + work vpn). Now i've gotten 2 sites in the past week that not only show the captcha, but also loop once I click the human thing. Most likely mac + resIP is not a good signal anymore...
Worked for me just now on mobile safari. You get the cloudflare human test but I just clicked the box and was in. This was despite accessing the site while vpn’d from home and using multiple adblockers.
Maybe it’s the blocking of 3rd party cookies, because I experience similar issues with Chrome on desktop from time to time.
I occasionally get those loop even on chrome.
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.
Non-Chrome browsers constantly require Robot check
I don't have that _particular_ problem, but I often gripe about how no website seems to be able to remember that I've used this device before ...
... and only briefly pause to wonder if it's because of all the anti-cookie, anti-tracking stuff in Safari.
Try a browser MCP and ask it to bypass the captcha. Works for me most of the time
Coming soon:
This article requires Age Verification. Please hold up your passport to the sensor on your device to continue.
Those tests are funny in a way because we as humans have to prove that we’re human to a robot
This is the way if we can ensure manufacturing of the parts. It won’t catch on but it would be awesome to have “base” tractors that are mechanical and predictable. Then you slap on whatever software on top that helps (automation, etc). But they need to be decoupled imo.
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.
And how many acres are you farming on it? Today's world of agriculture is much higher tech-based (for many good reasons, primarily yield) than back in the horse and buggy days of farming.
I know of a forklift that's pushing 80 and still used in a lumber yard (i.e. a material handling centric workplace)
Other than ~30min it takes to teach an employee to drive manual it doesn't do anything worse than the modern ones it works alongside and it does a handful of minor things much better by virtue of predating OSHA.
5.75; 7.5; and 42.6.
I still got a farmall 230, super easy to fix and maintain and works perfect for my small bit of land. An electric starter addon is really nice for winter starts though instead of killing your arm.
While I’m not at all surprised that they’re still running, I am a little surprised at how many Farm-all owners are on HN. Farm-all H owner checking in :)
My father was a Farm-all partisan. Even though I never took up farming, it's one of the things I remember him for.
Easy to maintain, great engine, just a bit rough to use on a larger field.
the 5-speed is nice, good consistent pull, had it power plumeing in a seldge pull contest, its rare that i call on it to do that much work.
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.
UGV?
From AI
> A UGV (Unmanned Ground Vehicle) is a robotic vehicle that operates on the ground without a human driver onboard.
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...
Whoa there, M{r,s}. Socialist! Can’t have any of our democratic infrastructure near that crazy idea! (/s)
Love to see repairability prioritized.
The HN crowd would enjoy the Global Village Construction Kit's work on an open-source tractor
https://www.opensourceecology.org/gvcs/
https://www.opensourceecology.org/portfolio/tractor/
https://www.opensourceecology.org/microtractor-workshop/
And their other open source machines they deemed "critical for civilization"
https://www.opensourceecology.org/gvcs/gvcs-machine-index/
> The 150-horsepower model starts at $129,900 CAD, about $95,000 USD. The range-topping 260-hp version runs $199,900 CAD, around $146,000.
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the MTZ Belarus 82.3 can be had for the equivalent of $50k.
It's a simple machine for a simpler time, so obviously doesn't meet any emissions regulations. But at least in my region farmers went to great lengths to acquire them - even illegally. By the time the tractors are confiscated, they'll more than pay for themselves.
This sounds good until you remember that we have all these electronics precisely to avoid the 1955 smog situation and climate change. Going back to 1990-era cars isn't solving anything. What we need is a patent and intellectual property reform. My personal opinion is that the same company shouldn't be allowed to sell both the hardware and the software. Open source ECU, anyone?
"From whence this barbarous animus?" tweeted the technologist from the cauldron in which he boiled.
I wonder by what mechanism they plan to import these into the US. This seems like a emissions regulation end-run like glider trucks, but my understanding of the EPA import rules doesn't really leave any room for this type of game.
Yes, a lot of modern tractors are locked down due to predatory dealer service lock-in, but they're also complex and locked down due to emissions regulations, which are ostensibly a net societal gain. The classic HN "everything should be totally open and free" conversation really needs to happen through this lens IMO.
If the original article is of interest to you, this project might be too:
https://www.opensourceecology.org/
https://wiki.opensourceecology.org/wiki/Open_Source_Ecology
That's what I always want -- all of my appliances should look like the ones we got in the 90s/2000s. Some Chinese companies should take this niche or maybe not-niche field, sell at a premium, which hopefully is still cheaper than smart ones.
Using my friends Speed Queen washer/dryer was such a revelation. I hate my Samsung washer/dryer.
I bought a LG one back in 2018 and so far it's working fine. I hope it can last more than 10 years.
Shows the attractiveness of “right to repair.” People want to own their stuff and not be forever beholden to the manufacturer.
This is great, if there is some real competition, then we can see John Deere will have to figure out how to compete. Either with lower prices or less lock in.
Ha - “Wilson saw the gap and drove a tractor through it.”
Sounds like a big gap. Figures.
Wait? No electric tractors yet? Swappable batteries would be perfect.
I love that the 5.9 lives on
ursa-ag.com For (a little bit) more info
farmers still need tech, they should try provide software (not too much). just the prefect amount and don't become evil like deere.
What prevents these no tech tractors to be electric?
October to April in Saskatchewan.
A friend is an organic farmer in Saskatchewan who has been buying specifically older mechanical only tractors; after a heart attack that will require him to sell off his farm, he’s finding lots of potential buyers.
"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.
Is part of the appeal due to the fact that being remanufactured engines they don't need modern emissions control, aka Diesel Exhaust Fluid (DEF)? Farmers hate DEF.
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.
DPF (Diesel Particulate Filter) and SCR (Selective Catalytic Reduction, which uses DEF, Diesel Exhaust Fluid) are two mostly different systems. DPF traps soot in a filter which then burns the soot off into gas later (regen). SCR reduces NOx using urea.
This is important to know in the context of tractors because in the US, 25-74hp tractors generally need only DPF without SCR (there are basically three bins depending on horsepower level). This makes these midsized tractors a bit of a sweet spot for a lot of tasks; of course, you still have to deal with regen (which is where the DPF gets heated up to convert trapped soot into gas), which is annoying, but you at least don't have to fill up with DEF or risk the DEF injection system failing.
Sounds like Gliders (truck) though those are usually to avoid emissions requirements.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glider_%28automobiles%29#Glide...
That is honestly probably a bit too far. Going back to pre-ecu times is literally burning money for the owner in form of lower fuel efficiency.
No-tech tractor seems to be a bit of an oxymoron.
This is pretty cool! Kinda similar to what Slate is doing with cars.
What Slate is hyping that they'll do with small trucks.
We'll see what, if anything, actually becomes available.
Agreed. Hopefully something materializes but who knows. These tractors actually exist.
Why not buy a used one?
The market for used tractors went through the roof years ago--20 to 40 year old tractors with tens of thousands of miles on them sell for not so far from new prices because farmers value being able to fix them without paying $$$
Why not having options?
I feel this. I've been looking at ADV bikes and everything on the market has a cellular modem for always on cloud connectivity, and multiple vendors, including Zero (the electric internet darling) are offering paid feature unlocks via apps.
On top of this, I looked at Zero's job postings and they're desperately trying to hire a firmware lead to get the team to use Claude Code (precisely what I want managing a 100hp motor under my ass).
Not only are we in a world where everything is locked down with software, the software is about to get way worse and there's nothing you can do about it.
I wish someone would do something similar for TVs. Just a really fantastic panel with only the tech needed to decode HDMI or whatever and show it on the screen. No other tech whatsover: no telemetry, no smart anything, nothing.
Are you looking for a monitor? xD
No. Monitors are small, and suited for one person working close up. I am looking for a television without the "computer" inside of it.
Yes, of course, it needs to have a computer to decode and display images, but I don't want it to be running a stripped back version of Android, that shipped out of date and hasn't received any updates, with apps that are laggy and often not current relative to other "smart" providers, that also takes pictures of my screen once every thirty seconds to tell the manufacturer what I'm watching and for how long, to build a better marketing profile on me.
I want a big OLED panel with enough smarts to drive the screen. I will plug my own computer into the television, if the need should arise.
Do they do cars?
> Pre-war EIA forecasts projected U.S. diesel prices would average $3.47/gallon in 2026. As of late March, the national average hit $5.37/gallon, roughly 55% above where it was expected to be.
Diesel prices will continue to rise so it's not clear what these farmers are actually signing up for.
This makes me think of the new toyotas, the rav4s, 4runner, and land cruiser. Through government regulations, they were forced to create smaller more fuel efficient engines. To get the same power, they overstrain them, and put huge turbos on the engines. The outcome is a strictly worse engine, that essentially uses the same fuel as older engines.
The demand for older vehicles in certain segments is actually increasing
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.
I wonder if this notion comes from the 80s, when engines with turbos had lower compression ratios for reliability. Today's turbocharged motors have higher compression ratios than in the malaise era, and the turbos have a lot less lag. Turbos no longer mean you have to sacrifice fuel economy for performance (unless you have a lead foot).
This is what toyota marketing says
Toyota marketing says that they're selling you a worse engine?
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".
Good. Simplicity should win out over enshittification in the end.
I would have thought would be 2x price
John Deere gonna send fucking assassins after them. Or probably engage them in some endless lawsuit.
Now let's do washing machines and refrigerators
Good. There should be an option for a straightforward mechanical machine. This also has trickledown effect where hopefully regular town mechanics can fix things based on their historical knowledge of engines. Instead of not wanting to touch anything because of the all the electronics involved.
Also, I know this is a strange parallel, but it feels similar to what Dell and HP did to their servers. They made the BIO so complicated that it takes 5-10 minutes for their severs to boot up. Using an older Dell server with a straightforward BIOS that boots up in 30 seconds feels awesome.
What is it with American companies that eventually always try to sell crap and low moral products/services. As if the people are educated in luring people into traps to only benefit themselves.
That to me just seems like the inevitable result of capitalist market economy.
this is what happens to every publicly traded company
Hell yeah 12V 5.9 Cummins. The one in my pickup has 250k hard miles on it, some blowby, and it starts right up at -10°F no problem.
Wish they sold something in the compact utility segment. 40-60hpish. I'd love an affordable Canadian made tractor for property maintenance / smaller farms.
(Though these days I've love something electric. I don't need long run time, I'm not doing row crops. Just market gardening and property maintenance stuff. All the electric stuff I see out there is aiming up at the high end and for autonomy / "smart" tractor stuff which I don't care about.)
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.
Can you share more about your hobby farm? I would love to learn more about how you got into that? My family had a small farm growing up and my parents are still actively working on the farm everyday and I would like to take that up at some point. So curious to hear what you farm and how much involved you are in the process.
You may want to check out Siromer tractors depending where you are. Similar idea.
Yeah though about the snow plow market in rural areas.
I wonder about a hybrid version of this though, maybe Edison motors should collab
Good. The John Deere monopoly is wild, but if you talk to a farmer they say they can’t handle the repairs. Sure, John Deere gets to make more expensive and complex machines and convince their customers that it’s “the future”.
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.
> Those buying new don't care about repairs.
Yes because thy live in the John Deere future. This was not always the case, surely. You used to be able to take high school classes to learn how to fix a combustion engine, even a new one!
You still can. My 26-year-old took automotive shop when he was a Junior in HS. Of course, we live in a rural school district...
Keep in mind that tractors are also getting massive.
The economics of row-crop agriculture is "you gotta farm more land". That means spending as much time in the field as you can with as big a machine as you can.
So not only is time you spend fixing your tractor yourself time you're not spending on your primary job, it's also working on a machine that's just monstrously huge. Delegating that work to a specialist with specialized tools is a very reasonable way to live.
The issue is that the specialized employees is not someone you hire on payroll who has access to tools you purchase. They must be a John Deere employee who comes from out of state and costs you $$$$$$ to calibrate a sensor that could just be a simple menu button and a 20 second wait
I mean, sure, right to repair and all that, but to be clear, unless you have like 50+ tractors to maintain, it's not going to make economic sense to have a full time employee to repair them. You still want to call out, you just want the option of calling someone local with more competitive rates and a faster response time.
Exactly! The old image of a guy on a Deere 4020 pulling an eight row implement is just unsustainable in today's agricultural system. Whether that system is sustainable is a different question.
Incidentally, the 4020 is like the tractor to me.
One of these days I'm going to buy one to restore, the way other men but the cars of their youth.
Exactly. A 4020 is fun! It may not have as much torque and ground pressure may not be as good as a quad belt tractor, but for a lil farm where you just want to grow hay or screw around?
> Those buying new don't care about repairs.
huh, why not?
You're pretty confident for someone who fundamentally does not understand the issue. During harvest season even hours of delay can be disastrous for farms that are barely solvent in the first place. When your only option is to call the dealer and hope and pray they deign to visit your farm in a timely fashion it doesn't matter how good the warranty is or is not. Farmers need to be self sufficient because time is money and money is survival.
It may be true that I do not understand whatever nondescript fundamental issue it is that you mention but don't elaborate on, but I most definitely understand the constraints of farming. Being a farmer, I live it each day.
And as a farmer who owns equipment from across all the major brands (and some unheard of brands to boot), you are right that John Deere is most reliable for having parts in stock. I've been burned by the others having to wait a week on parts to be delivered from who knows where. That is not a fun position to be in. Repairability is where John Deere has the clear advantage. That is, just as you point out, why they are most popular. Nothing else matters if your equipment doesn't work.
You pay a lot more for that luxury, but when the clock is ticking...
The existence of this startup and their early demand seems to refute your point.
What early demand are you seeing, exactly? The article does indicate that they plan to ramp up production in 2026, but no mention of actual sales. It is quite possible that they are increasing production thinking that they need to roll them out to dealer lots to gain any traction.
In fact, their TractorHouse profile shows that they are still struggling to sell last year's models. If there was demand, why hasn't that demand already gobbled up the stock? "I guess it would be cool to own one if it was given to me for free" isn't demand.
They need to swing the pendulum back, the current problem is that there is now a whole generation about to take over from the previous and the new gen has never had to use a non-John Deere a tractor. If they could evangelize their product as the “smarter farmer that doesn’t need all that tech” then they might have success.
The problem with your argument is that the smarter farmer does indeed need all that tech if they're expecting high productivity.
You should know that there are alternatives to green machines; Case, Massey Ferguson, Fendt etc.
Oh hey, do you happen to know if there's any tool incompatibility in the modern electronics?
The other thing about tractors is that the three point hitches, PTOs, etc etc, have been standardized forever, so there's very little lock in in terms of, swap out your JD for and IH and away you go, so I'm curious if eg modern seed drills have any fancy tech which locks you in.
The short answer is yes... As you mentioned, the physical side is generally standardized to some degree, but everyone I know tends to just use branded gear that's known to fit. Now if you like to resurrect old gear, then you become a shade tree mechanic pretty quick. I don't think that any farmer will survive more than a few seasons without being pretty smart at just getting stuff to work...
> if there's any tool incompatibility in the modern electronics?
Technically there are standards, but you know how that goes in the real world... Funnily enough, a friend bought a new tractor and planter, both from John Deere, and they weren't even compatible with each other. The tractor needed to have the cab removed to install the necessary hardware (ethernet) to be compatible with the planter.
> have been standardized forever
Hydraulic hose couplers didn't find common adoption until the mid-80s/early-90s, which is surprisingly late.
Yeah, I hate when I go to connect something and have to dig around for a hydraulic adapter. If I was smart, I'd just spend the winter making sure everything was matching, but I'm cheap and there's always something else that seems more urgent.
I know but for the sake of timeliness I’m not writing out every tractor company. Further John Deere has led the way on the current state of tractors.
The farmer who doesn't want or need tech already buys from the likes of Versatile, Kubota, or maybe even Massey Ferguson if more towards the middle of the road. "Low tech" is already a serviced market. That's not to say there isn't room for another competitor, but there isn't much indication that Ursa is becoming one. When you can't even sell the product you produced last year... The bit in the article about them not wanting to really scale up is telling.
It is not like John Deere actually has a monopoly. There is just as much CNH (CaseIH, New Holland) seen out in the fields, and even when you want all the bells and whistles, Fendt is rapidly becoming understood to be the true king of tech. What John Deere does have going for it is that they generally do better than everyone else at keeping parts in stock where the parts are needed; local to the farmer. Ironically, repairability is where John Deere finds the win at the end of the day.
That's not true for commercial users the way it is for private cars.
Even if you have a service contract you're still gonna be pissed at the downtime cost of having a tech drag their ass out to wherever you are to initiate a forced regen or something.
I don't think the issue is "smarts" in our cars/tractors/light-switches/etc but the lock-in and "authorized repair" bullshit.
On the topic of Smart Home stuff (which is the only topic I'm even slightly qualified to talk about) I've heard about people wanting "dumb houses" after initially people wanting "smart houses". It's my opinion that this desire is driven mainly due to bad experiences and doing smart homes the "wrong way".
What do I mean by that? Either they got burned by XYZ Smart company going under and all their cloud-dependant devices dying/bricking. they had a system like Control4 which required authorized resellers to make even basic changes [0], and/or they were overwhelmed with juggling 5 different apps/platforms that don't talk to each other. That doesn't mean smart homes are bad, just that the hardware/software was bad. I fully recognize that for the "normal" person the only options are currently "bad hardware/software" or "dumb house" but there _are_ better alternatives.
My philosophy for "Smart Home" is one of progressive enhancement (and graceful degradation). What that means is everything I "enhance" with "smarts" should still work the old way that people are accustomed to. Every light in the house can be controlled via "Alexa|Siri|Google turn off the Kitchen Light" but they can also be turned off/on by walking over to the wall and flipping a switch [1]. This means Smart Switches _not_ Smart Bulbs [2]. If my Home Assistant (yes, I'm one of those people) server goes offline, everything still works, the switches work, the door lock works with a key, the garage still opens. My "smart-ifying" of the house is not replacing the way to do something, it's only adding additional control.
In addition to that, and something that should come as no surprise, I refuse to use a cloud, or at least depend on a cloud for my smart home. For this reason I prefer Z-Wave/Zigbee devices. If the manufacturer goes out of business it doesn't matter (no pun intended [3]). While I can, and have, used cloud integrations with Home Assistant, I try to make sure that's just a stopgap to decide if I want to go all-in. I own a few Z-wave devices from companies that don't exist anymore and they have been chugging along without issue for years. I love that stability.
There is nothing in my house where you have to walk over to a wall tablet to control something or open an app on your phone, I would consider that a failure. Everything flows through Home Assistant, it's the brain, I don't want multiple apps fighting or different ecosystems that don't mesh (radio-wise or functionality-wise).
What does this have to do with tractors? Glad you asked! I see this as the same for tractors, they should absolutely be "dumb" with the ability to control/query parts of it and add the "smarts" through an external system. Whatever the equivalent of Z-wave would be for monitoring/controlling the device, not something built-in or required for functionality. A modular, non-locked-down system. I'm sure we are nowhere near that point but I write all this as a "don't throw the baby out with the bathwater", I think John Deere was wrong in how they went about adding "smarts" but I don't think the idea is without merit either. They went down the greedy, anti-right-to-repair route which is clearly wrong.
I'd love to see a combo of Ursa Ag's tractor as a base platform where smarts can be added to it without compromising it's repairability. A take on the "naked robotic core"-idea if you will.
[0] And each time you have a authorized reseller come out they try to sell you on an expensive upgrade because they make (most) their money on selling you stuff, not maintaining it. I really dislike Control4 and things like it.
[1] Point of clarification, I use Decora style paddles as is common on smart switches. The only downside (IMHO) to my system is they always "rest" in the middle orientation so they are "worse" than "dumb switches" in that you can't look at the switch and see the state it's in. That said, 3-way switches have already eroded this ability and I feel like this is an acceptable trade off. Maybe in the future people will care enough to make the switch represent the state correctly (with little servos flipping it) but I don't feel like I'm missing much. You may disagree.
[2] My exception to this rule is I will allow a Smart Bulb as long as there is also a Smart Switch. Maybe you can't change to color temperature via hardware on the wall but you can always still turn it on/off at the wall. Graceful degradation.
[3] My information might be out of date but I have very little interest in Thread/Matter, I don't want my smart devices to _ever_ talk to the cloud. Which is why I love Z-wave/Zigbee, they talk to my hub, my hub talks to whatever I want/approve. I never want my devices updating (or more likely, bricking) due to the cloud. I understand that Thread/Matter do not immediately mean "cloud" and in fact might even require local control but I'll believe it when I see it. So far Thread/Matter have been a massive nothing-burger IMHO. Maybe in a few years I'll be all-in on it but so far, I don't find it compelling at all.
> 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.
> Also the easiest way to achieve high WAF.
> 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.
Exactly! If I'm doing my "job" correctly then I should be able to add "smarts" without anyone noticing at all. It's purely additive. It lowers my stress levels immensely as well since there is a never a "P1" emergency of "The lights won't turn on" or "I can't open the garage door" (unless something lower-level is broken, like the power is out or the garage opener burned out).
I want guests to be able to come to my house and not even notice it's "smart". They should be able to stay in the guest room and not think twice about it. Yes, there will be laminated sheet in the side table telling them what the lights/fan are called if they want to talk to the Echos to control it and there will be a labeled remote (Z-Wave) on the bedside table so they can toggle the fan/lights from the bed but none of that is required. They can control it all from the switches on the wall if they want.