Technology

I live in the sticks and I rarely see JDs any more. It's a Claas, Fendt and MF now

European farmers take no shit

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lina_Khan

Regular vehicles are getting rediculous too.

This is not Klans starting point. She has gone after Amazon and Google. John Deere is not the first or the last.

Modern farming is extremely reliant on gps and 'smart' planters, fertilizers, etc. Using tech to precisely control exactly how much seed, chemicals, etc is used can result in significantly less costs. My understanding is that Deere has bought out basically every company that has a decent implementation of this technology and is an effective monopoly on modern farming equipment.

You can move away from them, but expect your business costs to significantly increase as a result.

I hate myself for buying a John Deere tractor, but it was up to $5000 less than any comparable competitor at the time, included a 5 year service contract, and was 0.9% financing.

I'm in a better place financially now, so when I can and need to, I'm absolutely getting something different.

How are they still in business? Every single farmer, bar none, has to know about their business practices

Wendover Productions has a decent video on John Deere's market dominance. tl;dw It's by cutthroat capitalism of course.

John Deere has bought out all their competitors and continues to do so. Every single breakthrough in farming equipment technology in the last decade is owned by John Deere. As a farmer, you either choose to sign a one-sided contract with John Deere or you use outdated inefficient equipment that John Deere hasn't purchased the patent rights to. Or, of course, you sell your farm all together. Large corporate farms don't care much about the John Deere contract since they have the power to negotiate a better deal. A lot of small farmers have been making the choice to sell out.

Soon, all farming will be done by one megacorp, buying their seed from Monsanto, using John Deere equipment, and cashing in a ridiculously fat subsidy cheque from the government.

The real question is what other options do farms have? Let's say their tracker breaks down and repair is no longer an option. How many other manufacturers are making the type of equipment they need? And how expensive would it be to enter that market to compete? To me it seems like John Deer has a monopoly and is exploiting it.

Remember that many of their customers are young contractors on credit who have valued 'brand identity' over more practical concerns.

You don't see many old boys on their tractors, in the same way that you wouldn't see many of them using Apple computers.

My bet is that a decent proportion of the John Deere owners who are up in arms about this are those who bought one while they were young and impressionable, then realised that they were getting punished for it and that they couldn't offload it on their younger contemporaries because they wanted a new one and couldn't offload it on their older contemporaries because they were too wise. These modern tractors are enormous investments.

Because parts are readily available, if expensive. When the snow is coming and you have a thousand acres left to harvest, you want that part right fucking now. And contrary to what everyone here "knows", you can fix pretty much anything that doesn't directly interface with the ECM yourself. I have 10,000 page repair manuals that Deere supplies that details, step by step, how to fix nearly anything on their equipment. I've never seen manuals 1/10th as good on CNH equipment.

"nothing shits like a Deere"

Is Case to farming equipment what Brother is to printing?

Am I going to have to buy a Case for the two holes a year I might need to dig?

Society is built on the back of farmers and teachers, and they're the two professions with the least amount of gratitude given by the people in charge. That's fucked up

Well you know, unless you're Trump, who would defang the FTC and prevent them from taking this sort of pro-consumer action. Then the farmers will vote for you anyway because at the end of the day they're still predominantly bigots who don't know shit about fuck outside the land they farm.

Edit: farmers as a demographic overwhelmingly support Trump. 78% of them believe that Trump would better address inflation than Harris, and 76% believe he would better "expand trade and address trade disputes" – the literal exact opposite of what he's been shown to have done with his stupid "trade war". As a demographic, farmers are exactly as described above.