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Farmers Struggling With High-Tech Farm Equipment
An anonymous reader writes: Farming is a difficult profession. One of the constants throughout the generations is that if you're working out in the field all day, machinery eventually breaks down. Farmers tend to deal with this harsh reality by becoming handy at basic repair — but that strategy is starting to fail in the digital age. Kyle Wiens, founder of iFixit, writes about the new difficulties in repairing your broken tractors and other equipment. Not only do you often need experience in computer software, but proprietary technology actively blocks you from making repairs.
"Dave asked me if there was some way to bypass a bum sensor while waiting for the repairman to show up. But fixing Dave's sensor problem required fiddling around in the tractor's highly proprietary computer system—the tractor's engine control unit (tECU): the brains behind the agricultural beast. One hour later, I hopped back out of the cab of the tractor. Defeated. I was unable to breach the wall of proprietary defenses that protected the tECU like a fortress. I couldn't even connect to the computer. Because John Deere says I can't." Wiens also tells us about Farm Hack, a community that has sprung up to build a library of open source tools and knowledge for dealing with high-tech modification and repair in agriculture.
"Dave asked me if there was some way to bypass a bum sensor while waiting for the repairman to show up. But fixing Dave's sensor problem required fiddling around in the tractor's highly proprietary computer system—the tractor's engine control unit (tECU): the brains behind the agricultural beast. One hour later, I hopped back out of the cab of the tractor. Defeated. I was unable to breach the wall of proprietary defenses that protected the tECU like a fortress. I couldn't even connect to the computer. Because John Deere says I can't." Wiens also tells us about Farm Hack, a community that has sprung up to build a library of open source tools and knowledge for dealing with high-tech modification and repair in agriculture.
It might be regulations, but I doubt the manufacturers are too cut up about having to supply their own service personal, equipment and parts at a high price to solve these problems.
In europe things went the opposite way , with cars anyway. The EU mandated anyone must be able to interrogate the ECU, clone a keyless fob and service the vehicle via the ODBC2 port. Which is fine, except that now any thief with some cheap equipment can break into keyless cars, clone a key fob within a minute and drive away with it.
Since farming is Big Business, would you expect much different? Most of these companies are really just putting a computer hooked up to some hydraulic doohicky on a piece of standard farming equipment or trying to use a standard commercial product such as GPS or a weather station in a farming situation. Open everything up and the next guy down the street can program the Aurduno and sell the same thing.
What I'm a bit surprised hasn't happened is an analogy to boating. The NMEA standard allows manufacturers of various bits of marine electronics to talk to each other. After the usual startup problems of everyone's implementation being subtly different (Hi Garmin, you nitwits) it pretty much works as advertised. I still can't open up the guts to my chartplotter and do anything helpful, but if I don't like the way it is working, I can toss it and get another one and keep the rest of the network.
Even the marine engine people are finally figuring this out. While they don't use the OBDC spec like cars (for whatever reason), it is now possible to buy the adapter and software for engine diagnostics (most of the time, except for you idiots at Suzuki). ** I suppose it will just take continuing pressure to get manufacturers to streamline these things.
** Just a friendly note to the people at Mercury and Yamaha. MS-DOS has not been a commercially acceptable operating system in some decades. Shall we ramp it up a bit?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I spent nearly 15 years in IT before returning to the family farm to work with my brothers. We farm several thousand acres of irrigated land with some large, expensive machines, so I have some experience in this. This article really hits home for me. Forgive some of the jargon, but this is slashdot; you can deal with it.
Coming from the open source world, computer technology in farming, both in the machines themselves, and the software farmers use, is like stepping back in time 20 years or more. Farm software is a niche market, and companies are pretty jealous of their profits. So mapping software is very expensive and interoperability is a bit difficult. Right now I can pull maps off my machines (Case, John Deere), but they each use different native formats so if I want to do any work in QGIS I have to use the company's individual software (which ironically enough is DRMd even though it comes for free with the machine) to export the data in SHAPE format. Software packages like the SMS mapper can read some manufacturers' data files directly because they licensed the formats. But there's very little info out there on hacking these formats and very few open source hackers know enough about farming and these systems to bring expertise to bear.
Even worse, all the companies are talking about cloud-based mapping solutions, but that's even more proprietary and closed.
Companies talk about "open standards" but what they really mean is they export SHAPE files from a computer program. It's really frustrating, but with interest in UAVs, perhaps people will finally crack this barrier.
As to the machines themselves, there are a number of issues. One is government regulations. Adjusting the timing as the farmer in the article wanted to do is extremely illegal and can get you a huge fine from the EPA if you are caught, which you will be. Because unlike in the automotive world, there aren't a any third-party repair shops with access to the parts, let alone diagnostic equipment. Apparently the EPA requires the manufacturer to report any deviations from the the approved program, and they levy fines. Sounds orwellian, but the EPA doesn't mess around when it comes to pollution regs (and I'm okay with that in theory). Suppose the manufacturers want to cover themselves.
Someone asked why a company can't spring up to develop hackable machines? There are efforts to this effect.
http://opensourceecology.org/
But for larger scale farming, it's harder. In the case of engines, the EPA would simply never allow them to market if the parameters that cause an engine to meet EPA regs are allowed to be changed. Regulatory capture has made modern diesels so expensive to develop now, including licensing patented pollution control technologies like the urea injection systems, that it's cheaper for companies to buy an existing engine than to develop their own. So even if I started a hackable tractor company I'd still need to use an engine with an extremely proprietary ECU, and would have to license canbus info to simply connect a transmission to the engine.
The other part of machines that is jealously guarded is the main canbus that links everything on the tractor. We're talking engine control, transmission control, hydraulic remotes, cab systems, and most importantly, the GPS receiver, guidance computer, and steering valve. The commands that flow on this bus are not yet encrypted (they will be soon, starting in cars I predict), but they are highly proprietary and protected by NDAs. You'd think that with a modern tractor I could take anyone's GPS receiver, mate it with anyone's guidance computer, and control any tractor's steering. Well it's not like that. On John Deere, for example, if I want to use anything other than GreenStar for GPS and guidance (a $10-$20k touch by the way, plus yearly fees for RTK), I have to physically replace the steering valve system with one that the 3rd party system is compatible with. There was a company that rev
It is both. Some manufacturers use the added regulations (take DEF and DPF mandates for example for diesel emissions) in order to ensure repeat business for their repair shops, as well as planned obsolescence when the ECU dies and there isn't another to be found, as it was an ASIC that was fabbed only for a span of 2-3 model years and even an ECM firmware upgrade wouldn't change that.
The Feds mandated things like nonadjustable governors so one can't adjust the RPM of some items unless done manually by twisting the throttle rod. However, some companies are happy to take that even further to ensure people come back to get stuff fixed.
There is blowback to this. For example, a RV refrigerator that runs on propane made 10-15 years ago which uses a pilot light can cost more than a new refrigerator, just because it requires no 12 volt current to keep the contents cold, while newer models often have issues with the control board.
How does this get fixed? With state and federal governments still looking to add more regulations compounded with companies that want their own "DRM" to keep the next quarter looking good, the only real solution will be for relatively small startups to hit the market with simple products that do the same thing, but don't have all the bells and whistles. For fridges, companies like Unique Gas Products come to mind, who may not have appliances that have the latest 5000 pixel count in the LCD screen... but keep the contents in the fridge cold without issue.
The future will probably wind up people having to fudge to get around various regulations. For example, the EPA ban on wood stoves will just mean that a building gets built with a propane stove, which gets swapped out for a wood stove the second the inspectors leave. If this isn't the case, there will be a heavy market for people to purchase jailbreaks for their appliances and vehicles... with bounties going up as steep as what was paid for access to root on the latest Samsung devices.
That model has been changing over the last several decades. Both of my parents grew up in rural America in the 40's and 50's. Back then, a family could make a decent living on a quarter section (i.e. 160 acres). As my grandparents' generation started to retire in the 60's and 70's, consolidation had already started. Those four farms on a square mile plot turned into one farm with 3 retired families living in the houses. And consolidation continues. It's getting to the point where "family farms" should be measured in terms of square miles rather than acres. There's just no way to sustain a family on a small plot of land. The "family farms" are increasingly turning into small corporations with many employees managing huge tracts of land. They have to. Without being able to take advantage of economies of scale there's no way to make it.
They're not losing the tie between land and family. The families that are there are still tied to the land. But the farms are losing families as farms consolidate. Only one of my cousins stayed in farming but all 3 of her kids left as soon as they graduated. And my extended family is pretty typical among modern families. A few of the kids stay on the farm but by in large most of them leave for more promising careers. The few that stay behind are taking over increasingly large farms.
Last year, my 99 year old grandmother passed away and we went back to her home town in central North Dakota for the funeral. I grew up visiting there all the time so I had many fond memories of the town. I was shocked at how much of a shell of a town it had become. Most of the houses are now abandoned. Of the ones that aren't, most of them are owned by people who use them as hunting cabins a few weeks out of the year. My grandfather's garage where he worked on farm equipment for 63 years stands idle. Not enough business to make it worth keeping open. The K-12 school house on top of the hill once accommodated 50+ kids in my father's day. Now it stands empty. The few kids left go to a neighboring town that houses the consolidated school district. Driving towards town, many of the farm houses and barns I remember have long since been torn down to get access to farm the land underneath them. A few of them remain, with added shops and grain bins to handle the load of running more acres from a central location. The only reason this town is still alive is that the patriarch of a large family farm uses it as his home base. He was a class mate of my father's and has lived there his whole life. He's partially retired now but he built his family farm to cover some thousands of acres. It was the only way to survive. One of the neighboring towns is entirely abandoned. And if it hasn't been bulldozed and turned into more acreage, it's only because no one has gotten through the miles of red tape to get access to the land.
My point here is that while you're correct that families are still owning and operating farms, the nature of the farms they own and operate is changing. Consolidation is happening. Families are leaving. Population density is decreasing because fewer people are needed to run the farms. And families are increasingly turning to incorporation in order to survive. Sure, they will always feel a kinship with the land. But the quaint notion of the "family farm" is in the distant past. And sure, the family farms aren't just subsidiaries of the corporate ag producers. However, they are corporations in their own right and operate on a scale that would have been unthinkable 100 years ago.
I've had the same experience with a 1954 Massey-Ferguson. I've never worked on a farm tractor in my life, only small engines and cars. Yet I could tell it was designed to be disassembled in the field.
All the panels were held on securely, but with a minimum of screws. 10 screws, and I had the entire engine cowling and side panels removed. The front debris screen was actually hinged by the cowling! The radiator was held on with two massive bolts, making it a cinch to remove, all right in the middle of the lawn.
Repair and reassembly was just as simple, and easily accomplished by just myself. I went from dead-in-the-field to full operation in about 2 hours, with nothing more than 1/2, 9/16 and 3/4 sockets and a flat-head screwdriver.
And again, I'd never worked on a farm tractor in my life. It was just that simple and intuitive.
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