Tractors Are Getting Smarter | Hacker News Reader

Tractors Are Getting Smarter

money.cnn.com

41 pointsPTPells14 comments

My family run John Deeres with Starfire and greenstar. With our neighbours we have several RTK stations to get centimetre accuracy.

When we got our first auto-steer in 2001 it changed my school holidays.. Instead of having to drive mind numbingly slowly I was able to read books, and then progressively shift onto movies etc with the first video iPods etc. awesome. Huge increases in productivity and reduced inputs.

On the other hand, our neighbours who have often got seasonal workers to drive tractors have lost several tractors due to the workers not paying attention and running into power poles etc.

I have heard that the biggest obstacle to self driving machines has been the legal implications of having a tractor with no driver. It would be great to overcome this but there's still a way to go because at the moment no system I have seen can handle obstacles, specially if they haven't been programmed in (at the moment you can place a mark near trees, and it will beep when you near the end of your run to alert you to turn around) - also each implement requires very précise monitoring that may change markedly in the same field depending on the conditions in terms of ground speed, implement height and a host of other factors.

Awesome technology

My uncle was an early adopter of these sorts of things for his rice farm. When I saw the movie "Cars" for the first time and the film portrayed Tractors as "dumb" I thought to myself, if you really knew what went into a modern tractor you would not portray it as "dumb" in an animated movie.

But to be fair, the tractors in cars weren't modern at all, they were from roughly around the 1950s/1960s

Deere's recent patent filings point to a totally autonomous managed fleet of farm equipment. They've had a long standing relationship with NREC out of CMU to develop autonomous and semi-autonomous systems.

In terms of accuracy, here's a metric to think about: due to fewer overlaps and misses, yields were up 7.6% and cost savings were up 6.8% - and this was with just recent tech advances.

Where are you getting those numbers from? Surely such improvements would be fairly isolated to an acre or two, rather than hundreds of acres. Those numbers (6.8% and 7.6%) aren't in the article.

At an acre or two, you'll be doing most of the work by hand, with using push tools -- rototillers and the like -- for the occasional tough part. These sorts of process improvements are one of those economies of scale things that really only start making sense when you're dealing with an amount of land that you can't just eyeball.

Yes, I agree completely. That's exactly why I'm suspicious of the numbers the parent quoted.

I remember when having an air conditioned cab was considered to be high end farming... Then it was 8 track stereo, and microwave ovens. The tractors were over $100,000 before the advent of the personal computer. I wonder what the cost of a smart tractor is now?

> Most people don't don't realize that an 8000 series tractor has more computing power than the first space shuttle...

So does my $200 cell phone...

Hell, so did my N64.

Their GPS steering is really cool. I think they get better accuracy through multiple GPS receivers spread out across the entire tractor.

Some vendors use multiple receivers, but Deere uses one, with possibly one or more on the implement(s) being towed, depending on the configuration. RTK provides centimetre level accuracy with the single receiver.

It's complicated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarFire_%28navigation_system%...

Tractors may be getting smarter, but the entire notion of large-scale monocrop farming is basically forkin' stupid.

Through recent research I developed the distinct impression that anyone who has managed land for an extended period+ with and without modern industrial farming methodology seemed to say that the general outcome of such was dependence on external entities for seeds, technology, energy, fertiliser and pesticides... and this seems to include both academia and government bodies in charge of agricultural knowledge dissemination.

The most lucid illustrations of this quandry I have yet encountered are Masanobu Fukuoka's One Straw Revolution (a few decades ago) and the USDA's Alley Cropping instructional video series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8Kwb5yInPM

Basically, the claim is that higher yields with lower maintenance are possible through non-industrialised methods that rely on crop diversity and natural systems.

My impression is that the US (and Europe) heavily subsidise or artificially protect a lot of their agriculture whilst burning loads of fossil fuels to plant, maintain and harvest them which is a situation that has partly evolved to cater to vested interests in government and energy sectors.

China wastes loads of food, leads the world in agricultural research, and certainly does not yet have anything like a food crisis. Not only that, but their population is stable or dropping.

Overall, this article is pretty FUD.

+ Not I!

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