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Comment by losteverything | Hacker News Reader

Help me bound things.

# times in a year a Deere requires repair?

My point of reference is my car. I can go several cars and not have to get a "repair" as long as I trade in about yr 4 or 5.

Is Deere the Yugo of tractors wrt visits to the shop?

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The number of hours a normal person puts on his car in a year is minuscule compared to what a average farmer would put on his tractor. Tractors are made to be used every day all day for years and years. If you did something similar with a car, you would quickly wear it out. The tractor we had on my parents farm when I grew up is still running and used, and it has to be at least 30 years old. It isn't used as much as when I was a kid but it is still in use. It has broken down a few times during that time, but nothing that couldn't be fixed. The cars we had at the same time are all worn out scraped a long time ago. I don't follow what happens in the farm field as much as when I lived on one, but John Deer is and was one of the popular brands, and afaik. it hasn't a worse or better reputation than any of the other brands.

It's difficult to get a $750,000 machine with a top-speed of 25mph to a repair shop, so even if the frequency of those visits is low, it can be a massive burden. This assumes you can drive it there.

Also, farming is a seasonal thing with (sometimes) small windows to do certain things. If weather is great and your tractor is in the shop you might miss a good planting opportunity -- it could rain by and you might need to wait a few weeks before you can get in and work that field.

This kinda blew my mind when I first thought about it -- a farmer really only has like 50 chances (crop years) in their life to perfect their craft. One bad year can be devastating.

It's not the number of repairs, it's the sheer impact of repairs. Farming is a 48 weeks of relative calm. With 4-6 weeks a year of sheer, balls to the wall, 24x7, all out GO GO GO. Having a core piece of equipment fail in those 4-6 weeks can ruin an entire year. With farming margins being lower all the time, losing a year's crop, or even losing a percentage of that crop will bankrupt a farm.

So this brings in the question of "why not have two of everything?". pure cost. Combines easily run 500k USD. That's more then a lot of folks can afford for an idle piece of equipment.

> as long as I trade in about yr 4 or 5.

If you mean you buy brand new or almost brand new and sell at year 4 or 5, then you're spending a lot more than you need to, which is buying you the extra "reliability."

But that reliability isn't even entirely real -- a lot of the repairs you'd expect after about 5 years or 50,000 miles are predictable and listed right there in the maintenance schedule in the manual, so as long as you do them proactively rather than roll the dice, a modern car should easily be very reliable for at least 100,000 / 10 yrs.

Trading in for a new car is probably costing you a lot more than just sticking to the maintenance schedule and budgetting for the major repairs would. I think a lot of people mistakenly overestimate the pain of those major scheduled repairs because they just don't do them and wait till they need to be towed in to have it fixed (and by then a few other things need fixing too)

Speaking in generalities of course

Anyway, point is, farms are a business, they're not going to piss money away by trading in a tractor that can much more cheaply be maintained -- you trade it in when it costs more to maintain (and abstain from new features) than to replace

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