{"id":177006,"date":"2020-01-23T20:17:00","date_gmt":"2020-01-24T01:17:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2020\/01\/23\/agricultures-amazing-high-tech-future\/"},"modified":"2020-01-23T20:17:00","modified_gmt":"2020-01-24T01:17:00","slug":"agricultures-amazing-high-tech-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2020\/01\/23\/agricultures-amazing-high-tech-future\/","title":{"rendered":"Agriculture’s Amazing High Tech Future"},"content":{"rendered":"

In yet another example of why Congress should pass right to repair legislation, farmers in the Midwest are engaging in bidding wars over 40 year old tractors<\/a> because they are not locked out of fixings them by the manufacturers:<\/p>\n

Kris Folland grows corn, wheat and soybeans and raises cattle on 2,000 acres near Halma in the northwest corner of Minnesota, so his operation is far from small. But when he last bought a new tractor, he opted for an old one \u2014 a 1979 John Deere 4440.<\/span>

<\/span>He retrofitted it with automatic steering guided by satellite, and he and his kids can use the tractor to feed cows, plant fields and run a grain auger. The best thing? The tractor cost $18,000, compared to upward of $150,000 for a new tractor. And Folland doesn\u2019t need a computer to repair it.<\/span>

<\/span>\u201cThis is still a really good tractor,\u201d said Folland, who owns two other tractors built before 1982.<\/span>

<\/span>\u201cThey cost a fraction of the price, and then the operating costs are much less because they\u2019re so much easier to fix,\u201d he said.<\/span>

<\/span>Tractors manufactured in the late 1970s and 1980s are some of the hottest items in farm auctions across the Midwest these days \u2014 and it\u2019s not because they\u2019re antiques.<\/span>

<\/span>…….<\/span>

<\/span>The other big draw of the older tractors is their lack of complex technology. Farmers prefer to fix what they can on the spot, or take it to their mechanic and not have to spend tens of thousands of dollars.<\/span>

<\/span>\u201cThe newer machines, any time something breaks, you\u2019ve got to have a computer to fix it,\u201d Stock said.<\/span>

<\/span>There are some good things about the software in newer machines, said Peterson. The dealer will get a warning if something is about to break and can contact the farmer ahead of time to nip the problem in the bud. But if something does break, the farmer is powerless, stuck in the field waiting for a service truck from the dealership to come out to their farm and charge up to $150 per hour for labor.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’m seriously beginning to think that every innovation introduced since the Reagan administration has just been a scam.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In yet another example of why Congress should pass right to repair legislation, farmers in the Midwest are engaging in bidding wars over 40 year old tractors because they are not locked out of fixings them by the manufacturers: Kris Folland grows corn, wheat and soybeans and raises cattle on 2,000 acres near Halma in …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[525,368,428,382],"class_list":["post-177006","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-agriculture","tag-corruption","tag-ip","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177006"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=177006"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177006\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=177006"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=177006"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=177006"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}