How Big Tech Ruined Farming 

Companies like John Deere are the reason we have to pass Right to Repair ASAP. Not being able to repair your smartphone, laptop or TV is one thing. Not being able to repair the machine that your livelihood depends on another.

DRM ruined farming. Not allowing a farmer to fix the equipment they "own".

I've seen a huge uptick in the popularity of Kubota in North America over the last few years, particularly with small and medium sized farms, and it's obvious to see why.

John Deere: We're a tech company. Everyone: No you're not. John Deere: Our tractors require several subscriptions to run. Everyone: Oh you ARE a tech company.

You seriously underestimated the cost of the see and spray system. As a farm that just ordered a 612r with the camera spraying system I can tell you there isn't much change out of $1.2m

As a farmer whose family has ran Deere for 100+ years I must say this was very well done. We love Deere for their quality, reliability and resale value. We hate Deere because they are out of touch with the backbone of their customer base. Our local Deere dealer is empty of customers while full of tractors and combines. Their business model serves the biggest of customers first, almost cutting the medium to small farmers out completely. The profit first approach has alienated almost everybody, big farmers included. Instead of the dealer approaching the customer relationship as a relationship, they stab us in the back with overpriced parts, overpriced service and conflict as soon as an issue arises. They are also famous for poorly treating employee’s, which are our neighbours and friends. In the profit first attitude, they fired the trained staff then rehired new staff, trained them but cut the pay by 1/3. Not a good situation.

John Deere has effectively turned their own products into the same servicing model as the ice cream machines at McD's. Key diff being that McD's franchises generally don't have to go out of business and close entirely whenever they have to wait literal weeks for the ice cream machine repair tech to finally show up and fix it.

It's easy to understand why Kubota's appeal has skyrocketed in North America in recent years, especially among small and medium-sized farms.

Former Deere engineer. I left the company in 2021 when May became CEO and all this "Tech" company stuff really took off, as I felt there was no longer a place for me. I enjoyed my time with Deere &Company and I made a lot of money there, but there was no longer a place for me as an old-school gear, beam, truss, lever-loving mechanical engineer. Many of my peer group have left the company as well. While I have no ill will towards Deere as a company, I'm not a software or AI guy, I'm a internal combustion engine and hydraulic cylinder guy. I feel like, going forward Deere will outsource more and more of the mechanical aspects of their equipment, as they focus on "solutions".

0:40 really is a competition of "how many corporate slogans can you fit into one sentence". It literally checks all the boxes: AI, vision, solutions, compute, machine learning, analytics etc...

Newer sprayers BTW aren't anywhere close to $50K, try $500K!! A 2024 408R sprayer with all the bells and whistles including "see and spray" is gonna be at least $750K!! Plus once see and spray becomes prolific and everyone has it, chemical companies will raise the cost of spray, and it'll work out to roughly the same cost to the farmer anyways.

The family lost their warranty because we made repairs on our tractor. If we waited for the technician it would have taken three weeks. The alternator had to be programmed to the tractor so we still had to wait.

Deere has pushed small farmers almost completely out of the scene. Costs get unreasonable very quickly. Have watched many of my childhood friends have to bag the farming life in one way or another. Some end up working for the big neighbor that buys them out, some lease out to the big guy, but the story repeats itself all too often.

At my agricultural engineering faculty a company got to introduce us to their new software before the prof began his lecture. It was about tractor and driver management and seeing when and where the driver stops, when and where fertilizer or pesticide is sprayed etc, all on your phone. This real life ad had been presented to us the year prior as well, with mostly quiet disgruntlement from us students. But this time one student got so pissed off that he stood up and actually yelled into the huge lecture hall about how we do not need companies to help us breath down a tractor drivers neck about the piss breaks he takes and that was all it took for every other student to let lose their frustration. The prof and the company reps looked seriously intimidated and concerned and in the end the company reps got (quite literally) yelled out of the lecture hall. Didn't even manage to finish their talk, just took their stuff, a quick bye to the prof, and fled. Afterwards we kept talking about it and how we didn't like precision farming and how pissed off we were about the repair bans, the dying out of small farms (particularly 2018, in Germany we had a drought and so many small farmers had to sell everything, still a tear jerker topic) etc. Agriculture is very frustrating when you are in it. I could talk for hours about it, about how my indigenous home village thousands of km away is dying out, about the water shortages, the big ag companies outpricing everyone, produce rotting in the fields bc it is too expensive too harvest it and people do not come out to collect it. So many miseries, so many stories, and in the end city folk wont know a lick about it, but get to complain about everything. It's complicated to say the least, but there are so many good farmers out there doing their best.

(23:35) One key is missing on the keyboard

John Deere had genius marketing at CES because they got the press without having to bring anything new to the table. A couple coworkers and I went to CES this year and were laughing. We work for a GNSS (GPS) company and have been automating tractors and construction equipment for about two decades. So, this is nothing new. Deere was just brilliant enough to take it to CES. CAT was also there the last couple of years showing off their tech.

John Deere are becoming the new Boeing....and that is going to be an unmitigated disaster.

John Deere feels like a franchiser with the farms as the franchisees. The farmer pays their royalties to John Deere, is restricted to approved equipment and supplies, and regardless of whether they profit or loss, JD wins.

I worked for JD for several years, and I worked on the see-and-spray platform. I feel like the tech is solid and it seems like it provides value. I do not like how JD runs the business side though. I think they abuse the DMCA to prevent loading modified software on hardware that the user ostensibly owns (copyright and voiding warranties should be sufficient). I think they should contribute back much more to open source projects that they use. And they're definitely trying to be a Microsoft (e.g. locking in users) in the ag world.

A big concern for farmers is that if JD can see your crop yields, they can change the cost or loan terms on the equipment. They also can apply leverage on farmers that already have loans with JD.

The original john deere: "farming is too fuckin hard" 2024 john deere: "farming is too fuckin easy"

THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR TALKING ABOUT RIGHT TO REPAIR! This is so important. The industrial revolution is the most important thing to happen to humanity. . . And the very nature of it was studying other people's inventions and improving upon them. The nature of these founding companies keeping this technology proprietary is a hindrance to the scientific goal of improving society that all these inventors are supposed to have. Of course they're entitled to compensation, but at what specific cost compared to the handicap it creates?

I worked for a John Deere dealer in service back in 2018. The technology then was fascinating but also crippling, one sensor malfunction and your machine was going nowhere and dealer diagnostics were about the only way you could find out what was actually wrong. A dealer is almost guaranteed required for sure now on any high end equipment from Deere

50k new sprayer? Sign me up!

John Deere might have been the first tractor company to produce a GPS guidance system, but they certainly were certainly not the first to do it. In 1999 I started working for an Australian company that was steering tractors with 2cm accuracy and had already been doing so for several years using Canadian made GPS receivers.

They say solution because that is how B2B sales go. You don't sell products in B2B you sell solutions. Find a problem and sell a solution to that problem double points if that solution is also a subscription.

And this is why Open Source is so important. The company here is actually limiting your potential to be what they have devised.

Deere squeezed the consumer product division dealers years ago. Deere promised consumer product dealers to never sell products in Lowe’s and Home Depot’s across the country, I know I was there when President of the company said so at their corporate headquarters. What Deere says and what they really intend to do is two different things. A company in which has lost integrity and consumer trust, driven by only profit.

I worked for an electro - mechanical company and we sold a lot of electronics to farm equipment manufacturers. This was 2015-2020. I was surprised how advanced farming equipment had become. The use of gps, automated driving, apps, etc really made me realize farm equipment manufacturers were becoming (hybrid) tech companies

When I was living in a small German town you could see how tractors were important to the farmers, there was lots of small old tractors, very well maintained, and they used them for everything, from farm work to towing, and with different modules to mount on the axle, I saw them with small sawmills connected to the engine to cut wood then just discconect it and drive away, very fascinating, and I didn't see a single modern tractor, just real old tractors that were real clean and well maintained :)

I work in the industry, while not a farmer but in the spare parts, accessories and other gear for farming industry. It's not just technology, it's also regulations and a side effect of reducing impact of farming on the environment. We see this across the western world. More regulation on pesticides etc. that force farmers to use high-tech solutions and GPS to ensure they comply. While this is beneficial for the environment it of course means the farmer needs better tools to comply. The problem is not the technology in itself, but the closed eco-systems of Deere and others. The closed eco-systems these companies create force farmers to stick with one brand, just like apple does. It also affects their ability to fix their machinery themselves increasing costs, that we the consumers ultimately pay for at the grocery stores. And the extra you pay for your food does not go to the farmers but to Deere etc.

All my tractors are old, I mean from the 60s and 70s the implements 80s and 90s and I'm kinda glad because it's good well built stuff and I can fix it myself. People complain about finding parts sometimes but if you look you can find almost anything. Then again I'm small and only plant around 40 acres of corn for silage so it's not a big deal. The rest of it is putting up hay.

I so miss those July days in the combine cab, listening to the Rockies on KOA, loading on the go, and making lines laser straight.

This isn’t just about the right to repair, is it. It’s also about the right to innovate and build and to choose our suppliers in the first place.

"Competitive gamers with their meta builds, minmaxing, and pay-to-win items take all the fun out of gaming." Deere: 🥴

Farming is quickly going the way of all other industries; The big ones are taking over making it very hard for smaller farms to sustain themselves. Increasingly strict regulations and less affordable equipment on the market doesn't help either.

So what your saying is we are moving back to Tenant Farmers working for huge land barons, just like 100 years ago

As someone that grew up with a wheat field right behind my house, a John Deere dealership just down the road, and now works as a software engineer, this video hit me hard. (The field was literally right there, there wasn’t even a fence between it and our yard.) I grew up in one of the towns that he said is dying. I see it when I go back to visit. The next town over, where I went to school, has gone from about 650 people to about 550 in about ten years. When I was in high school there were about 64 students. Off the top of my head I can think of about 10 where were farmer’s kids. Many would miss most of the first couple weeks of class to help during wheat harvest. Knowing that the industry I work in and I find so fascinating (tech) is crushing the community I grew up in is devastating. What happens when we automate farming to the point where the farmers have nothing left to do? Who will be left that remembers our roots, and has a connection to our Mother Earth like no one else has? What do California tech bros care about the people whose livelihood they’re destroying? I’m all for new tech. Like I said, I work in the industry! But I do believe we can bring new tech to the table without crushing the family farm. Is growing one company’s profits really more important than people?

JD Tractors can drive themselves for hundred of acers and plant a row in exactly the same place it did 5 years ago. Even remember how hard the soil is and plant whole fields of seed at precise depth...which is important for sprouting and harvest yields.

We need more companies providing problems instead of solutions, as their sales pitch.

eh, the "death of the family farm" has been a thing for as long as i've been alive, and probably for the entirety of the 20th century. big tech ain't new on this. we shouldn't romanticize mom and pop small farms; farming is brutal work and if lots of people really wanted to do it, generations of hard-working parents wouldn't have scrimped and saved to send their kids to school or to better opportunities off the farm (a phenomenon that continues all across the world). at a big picture, yields on mom and pop farms are going to be worse, and are not going to be adequate at feeding people at scale in a modern society. corporate consolidation and the economic gutting of rural america are real concerns though, and i wish this otherwise well-produced video had focused even more on that as opposed to moments of misplaced--albeit self-acknowledged--nostalgia and big tech scapegoating.

16:36 did you just say "subscription"??? I can already see where this is going. Gross

There are plenty of Farms that run Case IH and Agco. Market forces work because we used to be Green. Our Farm is now mostly Case and Agco.

Ever since I learned that farmers had to deal with these practices, I can't stop thinking about how a whole community's food supply-not to mention that farmer's livelihood-is upheld by a software glitch or whatever the case is. Praise to the farmers out there for not only feeding all of us, but dealing with all the headaches. Appreciate you!

My family produced corn and soybeans from a farm that topped out around 2200 acres, for four generations. My dad and my uncles are probably going to be the last traditional farmers in the family. My brother and I don't have anything to do with it, and our cousins will likely be the end of our farming line. I remember talk about Starfire in the early 2000's when I was in gradeschool, and my grandfather was vehemently against it. We had no GPS or auto anything until about 2013, and at this point it's not really worth doing for as little land as the family manages. Those economies of scale offsetting upfront cost are real.

Efficiency is indeed a big hurdle but the biggest yet is logistics. No matter how cost efficient it is to grow crops in Iowa, it is still cost prohibitive to ship them to North Dakota. Until there is a breakthrough in the freight, the USA will remain in regional markets.

22:20 Feudalism II: Electric Boogaloo

Farmers. 🤝 Computer Nerds Right to Repair

This situation reminds me of the early transition into the Industrial Revolution, where consolidation of farmland by increasingly few large property owners drove a major element of the migration of people into British cities, providing plentiful cheap labor for rapid growth of factories. With technological changes to agriculture like automation , the number of hands needed is likely to plummet, and this may result in an acceleration to urbanization for job opportunities in other industries, largely services. This is to say nothing of the potential of urban vertical agriculture and lab-grown meat, which could vastly reduce the need for huge swathes of land.

Wageningen has entered the chat...

In "Take back the Earth from the Machines", from the "Peasant Workshop", we see how destructive the mechanisation of food production has been. It rests on ever more energy, supply chains, pollution, soil degradation, community disintegration, insect and biodiversity loss, water contamination, methane emissions, standardisation of food optimized for machine harvesting and trasport instead of taste and nutrition. In contrast, we could grow a lot more food per acre in exchange for more human-time, restoring soil and biodiversity, if we switched to local permaculture. We'll have no choice anyway once the energy is more expensive or starts to get more scarce, once the topsoil erodes completely, once there's no more water that can be pumped.

Every day, I grow to despise modern technology more and more. When I was a teenager, I used to dream about having a high tech house with smart interconnected devices everywhere. But as I use modern smart tech more and more, and learn more and more about big tech under capitalism, my dream shifts further away from that and closer to a small cottage in a mountain range by a lake with a little vegetable garden and as little tech as possible. I've had so many Bluetooth earphones break, garbage software for physical hardware and phones that break after a couple years while my medicore 8 year old Bluetooth speaker still works, my dumb technology just plugs in and functions and my iPhone se still chugs along, that I've come to realise that after around 2015, tech stopped getting better and started going 1 step forward, 2 steps secretly back. Products that are designed to stop working after a certain amount of time became the norm, and new useful features cropped up less and less.

What's so interesting is that John Steinbeck delves into this through his novel _Grapes of Wrath_ . Especially the fact that instead of human hands plowing the fields and finding pride in their work, the lifeless machines take over.

I live outside the quad cities We have a major road called John Deere Ave. I can walk on my porch and see a corn/soy field, and I see so many random farming equipment. EVERYTHING IS DEERE. Talk to any farmer... despite them being great at farming implements, they're pissed that they can't repair them themselves. Also the corn and soy we grow here is for cattle feed, ethanol & other random shit. It's sprayed with so much anhydrous ammonia you'd get deadly sick if you ate an ear of corn. It's wild.

John Deere was once a force for good, the good they have done cannot be overstated, and its what allowed them to gain their current monopolistic position But now that they have achieved dominance and are spending significant resources on maintaining it, they have become a net negative for humanity. Their unassailable position cannot be fixed by the free market, and government intervention is required Right to repair and modify objects is necessary for a start. And while subscription fees for things are an unfortunate necessity in some cases, corporations must be forced - in the case of nonpayment- to lock out only remotely maintained features that cost them money, not things that only run locally, and/or use publicly available services. For a start, their autotrac needs to have a free mode that uses public gps.

John Deere is a joke ever since they've been on this tech kick. They're too expensive and take forever to get fixed. Where I live everyone used to buy Deere's but now most i mostly see Kubota for utility and Case for row crops.

To combat this, we need standards (like usb-c) for farming equipment such that any tractor can use any equipment from any vendor. Want a new nav system. Plugin a new nav system. Want a new sprayer, plug that in too

"If they hand over the keys, their machines might get used and altered in ways they shouldnt". I mean yeah, but also, they bought the machine and own it. They should be able to do whatever they want with it...

17:54 A farmer is out of their depth, is like saying a repair tech can't fix an I phone. This is on the same level as pumping your own gas only to find you need a special code from XYZ

19:45 I thought we already produce more than needed. The problem is with wasting what we produce and not distributing it correctly to those that need it

At 16:00 you say that to buy a newer sprayer to equip see and spray to your own sprayer it would cost 50,000. That is a joke to buy a 5-7 year old used sprayer it would cost about 180,000 to 230,000 because you need to buy a John Deere sprayer for it to work and as far as I know you need the carbon fiber boom on it as well.

19:35 It's hard for me to believe agricultural land is peaking... Also a lot of food is thrown away which could easily be used if there were more people.

If buying isn't owning, then pirating isn't stealing

Ah capitalism, where every sector eventually ends up working for the richest 1%.

If this is really reducing waste and improving application efficiency so much...this sounds like a good argument for shorting fertilizer companies over the next few years.

When a CEO says "We quickly became a leading company in Robotics and AI" ... be prepared for smoke selling

It feels like the music in your videos has become increasingly louder. It's quite distracting. Your videos are great but I had to drop out 3 mins in because I wasn't listening to a word. Also the epic music doesn't really fit the context many times. This could be improved! Cheers.

There is a complication. See & Spray need accuracy is supposedly not higher than 99%. For grains, the accuracy has to be higher than even six sigma. The problem is data gathering and training is hard because you can only plant one/two crop a year over a given area. You cannot use video training because there is no manual version of it. Its not as hard as self driving but its hard if you have to get the edge cases out to say 1 in a hundred thousand or 1 in a million.

John Deere is one of the biggest sponsors of scholastic robotics competitions

Open source.

The presupposition behind this whole video is that a machine visual interface can 'know' what a plant needs, misses the whole point of what plants really need- which is an intact soil ecology, one that is destroyed by plowing, harrowing, spraying with poisons and adding salts called fertaliser to the dirt they plant into. I don't call what they do farming in soil, as soil is alive, unlike the wasteland that is created by modern farming practices.

What's more disgusting is that this indirectly raises the prices of food. If it costs more money for a farmer to repair his equipment, then that added cost is going to have to be paid for downstream. That means you.

This is one reason why i want to be a no till farmer on only 1-3 acres of land. Its very profitable if you do it sustainably and with conservational practices. I'll be ahead of lots of farmers when it comes to it.

I may be totally off, but a lot of this seems like *relatively* easy tech that, these days, could be developed by a fairly small team. Perhaps we'll see startups competing with large corps like John Deere in the near future.

The defining feature of a tech company is offshoring manufacturing. During recent solar storm created auroras, gps tractor guidance was unusable for canadian and northern US farms. (Plowing turns out to be an unsustainable method - the solution is clearly to plow faster)

@21:21 "A ton of food" you killed me.

Monsanto much?

I just want to correct sam on 1 thing. farmers are incredibly tech savvy. many of them could fix their equipment or take it to a friend to fix it for them if only John Deere didn't put software locks. They also prevent some of their providers from selling parts.

Big tech. Corporations. Government. All have contributed to the destruction of healthy, sustainable farming. And we, as a society, let them do it. This is on all of us.

I’m watching this video while I run the John Deere see and spray

This is in Short a pioneering as well as Classical Case of Hyper Commercialized Hi Tech Feaudalism in What were Once Autonomous Agricultural Systems.

In almost every clip shown of planting corn, the row marker arms are being used. This indicates that a guidance system isn't being used because the row markers are a visual aid to line up the next pass. RTK GPS makes these row markers unnecessary.

6:53 then another shift later in the 2000 happaned forcing customers to repair thier tractors at a licenced dealer.... and not allowing owners to fix it themselves.

Any chances of you doing another season of Extremities? Loved that show!

It's always hilarious watching non-farmers talk about agriculture. Strong mary's room vibes with this one.

John Deere: Guys, our tractors have AI. Farmers: But you doubled the price. John Deere: Yes, we told you it has AI. Farmers: What does the AI do? John Deere: Double the price.

I Was briefly phone 'tech support' for Massey's robot tractors. They gave us the manual and gave us a ride in one for about 10 minutes. So happy when I got canned.

The loss of autonomous farms to big absent landowners cripples the remains of the Roman Empire to this day

You said a new sprayer costs $50k 😭😂😂 try $700k.

Honestly i can forsee 1 of 2 things happening or possibly both. 1. Deere becomes what peterbilt is to semi's (the top of the line in farm equipment in the case of Deere) and they lose ground to Kubota and competitors that dont do planned obsolescence. Or 2. The government institutes right to repair laws.

Private equity has made short term profit margins the objective. Management gets the bonuses. The stock price goes up and private equity dumps the stock. Short termism is killing once great American companies. It is exactly what they did to Boeing.

John Deer helped farmers to destroy the soil lol. Look how dry and sandy the soil is, no nutrient at all. Without fertilizer and pesticides, nothing grows on this bare land.

Embrace technology to try to make your life easier; teach the machine how to do your job better than you ever could; be replaced by that technology you helped teach

21:21 more like 50,000 tons (it's about 5 tons per acre in the most productive regions of the US I think)

Way more than 50 grand for a new sprayer lol. A golf course spray along rig can run you a 100k or more!

It's access to protocols and data dictionaries that prevents you from repairing this trash, it's either CAN, ETHERCAT or just plain ETHERNET the rest is data and prtocols.

@20:28 uh, no. Even the B-roll you showed contradicts that statement. Corn and soy are grown packed tightly into rows with just enough gap for the plant to grow and no more.

5:32 The tractor shown is an Allis Chalmers model WC.

Here is a novel idea to consider, quit wasting food. " In the United States, people waste 92 billion pounds of food annually, equal to 145 billion meals. They throw away over $473 billion worth of food annually. Shockingly, they waste 38% of all the food in America." ( Sometimes we can't see the forest because of the trees in the way )

I feel this hard, my family has been farming starting with my great grandpa. Luckily in small towns like ours dealers are good and we aren’t exactly a poor community, a.k.a. We Farmers do make enough money for this