First,
thanks to all of you who waited patiently during my hiatus from this blog, as
Lesley and I sold a house, packed up, and drove (very slowly, it seemed) to our
new home in Depoe Bay, OR. A few people had asked if I had intended to get back
to The Geekly Weekly, and—in spite of some freelance commitments—I have
been anxious to return to blogging. (Because, frankly, it's fun. Also, my
publisher says that this is a good way to sell books.)
And
now, let's talk about farmers.
Growing
up in Los Angeles, I didn't know much about farms or farmers. I figured that
eggs just . . . well, showed up, somehow naturally and neatly deposited
in those tidy, clean cardboard cartons. Milk was magically placed in bottles,
at first, and then later on in cartons and plastic jugs. Meat was from an
animal, I knew, but I liked to think of it as it came to me: clean, sanitary,
packed in cellophane and Styrofoam. (And I preferred to think that nothing had died
just so that I could enjoy that juicy ribeye; or that if something did
have to die, it was a quick, painless death to which the animal had stoically
been looking forward.) I thought of farming as something simple, elemental, and
pastoral, in a Rockwellian sort of way. Farmers were close to the earth,
literally and figuratively; it was, I thought, a simple, peaceful way to make a
living.
![]() |
A modern John Deere tractor. Image by Wikimedia user HCQ, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. |
When I moved to Nebraska, I discovered that I was wrong about some (perhaps most) of this. I got to meet many farmers, and I worked with many men and women who had grown up on farms. They were quick to disabuse me of my naïve notions.
Farming,
it turns out, is hard. It's a lot of work, and it's work that never
really ends: If a farmer is not planting something, he's selling it, or tending
to it, or harvesting it, or preparing the fields for the next planting.
If he's not on a tractor or other piece of equipment, he's fixing or
maintaining that equipment. There's almost nothing on a farm or ranch that
doesn't involve some arcane set of skills and a whole lot of work. (I once
accepted an invitation to go "baling hay" with a friend. It sounded
like fun. It's not. It's hot, scratchy, seemingly endless work in the fields for
which my puny, citified muscles were not at all prepared, and there's no rest,
because the flatbed truck or trailer on which you're supposed to toss the
bales—which easily weigh 870 pounds apiece—keeps moving down the field, whether
you're ready or not. The woman on the trailer upon which I was attempting to
toss bales of hay got a good deal of enjoyment, I'm sure, out of watching me
struggle and pant. She could throw those bales around as if they were nothing; I
couldn't move for days afterward.)
Farming
is also expensive these days. It requires sophisticated equipment to plow,
fertilize, plant, and harvest crops. (It also requires some specialized
knowledge to operate such tools.) A Missouri farmer I interviewed for Leveling the Playing Field showed me a large outbuilding in which sat several large
pieces of equipment: tractors, a combine, cultivators, a backhoe, etc. The
farmer to whom I was speaking reckoned that he had "a few million
dollars" invested in this equipment. (Of course, this is on top of the
cost of land, feed, seed, fertilizer, manpower, and so on.)
![]() |
The cab of a modern combine can look much like the
cockpit of a jet. Image courtesy of Challenger/Caterpillar,
Inc.
|
So,
now we know two important things about farmers: They work hard, and even the
small-scale "mom and pop" farms (of which there are frighteningly few
left) cost a fair amount of money to operate.
There's
something else about farmers, too: They can do, fix, build, repair, or maintain
just about anything. They are the ultimate in self-reliance. They have
to be. If a tractor conks out, someone has to fix it, and it has to be
done now, not in a few days or weeks. If a farm truck breaks down,
someone needs to get it running again, and fast. If a fence is down, someone
has to rebuild it. If something falls off of a piece of complicated equipment,
the farmer needs to understand how the piece is supposed to work and then find
a way to reattach it in such a fashion that it once again can function, at
least temporarily. Trust me, if there's ever a zombie apocalypse, you want to
be very good friends with a farmer. (In fact, it wouldn't hurt if you were to
find a deserving farmer right now and send him a bottle of good bourbon. You know, just
to pave the way before the apocalypse actually starts. Or send me the bottle, and I will see that it gets to a deserving farmer. Sooner or later.)
The
bottom line is that you don't want to piss off a farmer. But that's exactly
what John Deere seems intent on doing.
The
issue has to do with software. (See? Technology—you knew I'd get to this.) Many
of the newer machines, even the supposedly "simple" ones, like
tractors, use software. Software feeds GPS signals from the cab of a tractor to
its steering and determines when to turn and where to begin the next row. When fertilizing,
software consults a database, downloads data, and determines how much
fertilizer to use on a given piece of land, based on how much was used last
season and the resultant yield: If this piece of land didn't perform as well as
expected, perhaps it gets an extra blast of fertilizer; another field may get
less fertilizer than it got last year, if it didn't really seem to need as
much. (Fertilizer is expensive, folks. Farmers try to use it wisely.) If the
machine has mechanisms through which grain or other substances flow, that
output is metered by software so that the flow remains constant, efficient, and
measurable.
What
this means is that when a farmer buys, say, a tractor, he's also buying a lot
of software.
Except
that he's not. Not buying the
software, that is. Technically, he's licensing the software, just as you
and I do when we "buy" a copy of Microsoft Excel or Adobe Photoshop.
We don't really own that software; we've simply licensed the right to use it
under certain conditions. (A couple of those conditions being that we're not
allowed to tinker with the software, say, or make copies to sell to our buddies.)
And
just as we cannot look at, reverse-engineer, or otherwise fiddle with the
software we've licensed, John Deere is telling its customers (read:
farmers) that they cannot repair or modify—or have their local fix-it guy
repair or modify—their equipment. If your John Deere tractor breaks down, you
may not be allowed to fix it, even if you know how to fix it. And you
may not be able to let your cousin Warren fix it, either, even though Warren
has been repairing tractors all over the county for 30 or 40 years. You might
have to send the machine 100 miles away or wait for an authorized technician to
get out to your farm in order to get the machine repaired.
Unsurprisingly,
this does not sit well with many of the farmers—the work-hardened, self-reliant
men and women who A) are used to repairing equipment right there in the field,
if need be and B) don't like to be told what to do in the first place.
Who
could have predicted that software and farming would collide in such a manner?
It
doesn't look good for John Deere, by the way. First, in a recent court case,
the Supreme Court determined that if someone buys a Lexmark laser printer,
Lexmark has no right to stop the buyer from refilling toner cartridges or from
buying cartridges refilled by someone else. In other words, if the buyer bought
the printer, he bought the whole thing, and could do with it whatever he
liked. (In the Court's words: "Today, the Supreme Court reaffirmed that a
patent does not confer unfettered control of consumer goods to the patent
owner.") It's not difficult to imagine the Court reaching a similar
decision about the software that makes your tractor or combine work.
Second,
and perhaps more importantly, farmers are a sturdy, realistic lot, and they
don't take well to being bullied. If competing heavy machinery companies are
smart, they'll simply start offering equipment that does allow the
farmer or rancher more freedom to tinker, repair, or modify equipment they've bought. Many of these farmers lease
new machines every year; it will not bother them one bit to be seen in a
combine that happens to be Case red, Caterpillar yellow, or Kubota orange,
rather than one in the more traditional John Deere green.
Don’t
piss off farmers, especially when they’re your best customers.
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