I come from a family of farmers, and some of my family does actively farm.
None of them are wealthy enough or operate large enough farms for expensive self-driving tractors. And I share in their concern about the meta-game here: the consolidation of capital, land, and power over the food supply.
Consumers already have a hard time having any lever against rising grocery costs. Consolidation earlier on in the supply chain is not helping.
Which is to say, automation in this space isn't a bad thing in and of itself, but it can enable strange market dynamics (/imbalanced power dynamics) over food, which is objectively a bad thing.
My father-in-law operates a "small farm" in Saskatchewan with no employees. The average farm size is pushing 10,000 acres, his is 2,000 acres. (2,000 acres is probably close to the median size, though. Really large farms skew the average).
He's got autosteer on a couple of pieces of equipment. His combine-harvester "only" cost $400,000 (used) compared to the $1M+ ones his neighbors use. As a fraction of $300,000, autosteer isn't particularly significant.
But it's massively useful. During a field operation, there are dozens of things the operator should be monitoring and adjusting in parallel. Pretty much all of these are automated with "idiot lights", but a good farmer is closely supervising. Less attention spent doing trivial things like steering results in more attention spend on deck levelling, rotor speed, pick-up speed, et cetera.
> None of them are wealthy enough or operate large enough farms for expensive self-driving tractors.
My father runs his own chopping business and his machines aren't automated or self-driven either. For him, it's all about being able to repair the machines himself. He's been a diesel mechanic and farm hand all his life, so if something breaks on a "traditional" harvester or tractor, he knows how to fix it and get it running again.
>Consumers already have a hard time having any lever against rising grocery costs. Consolidation earlier on in the supply chain is not helping.
Who in the grocery supply chain is earning huge profit margins?
As far as I understand, consumers have long benefited from myriad subsidies provided to farmers, too low fossil fuel prices that do not price in externalities, too low water prices that deplete aquifers quicker than they can recharge, and extremely cheap labor due to cheaper labor in less developed countries and government looking the other way on farms that hire illegal immigrants.
If anything, the mechanization of farms is the only force pushing food prices lower. Before that, it was the advent of the Haber-Bosch process which drastically increased yields.
Yep. One such example is the cotton gin and the rise of concentrated wealth by plantation owners led to the continuation of slavery, the Confederacy, and the Civil War.
The internet and smartphones destroyed many categories of products and whole industries. AI is the latest cotton gin in spite of the hype because of capital's response to it with mass layoffs.
If legislators are concerned about safety, what are they seeing in other states that indicates a safety problem?
If legislators are concerned about farm jobs, this is short-sighted, as technology-driven productivity improvements are the basis for the prosperity we experience today.
Liberal media will say they "want automation to replace the tough jobs, not the creative ones" when talking about LLMs, but then support this garbage that is just artificially increasing demand for cheap labor, often covered by vulnerable, illegal immigrants with no way to defend their rights. In trying to protect the workers they end up increasing worker exploitation
There might be a very important difference between automation pursued because we don't have enough workers to do all the work we would like to see completed, and automation pursued because it is cheaper for the gigantic corporations who will profit from employing fewer workers. But since we are still in the phase where there are too many jobs and not enough people to do them, I think we don't have to worry about those yet. We should revisit this issue in 300 years.
We're already in the insufficient jobs phase, but not for farm work. Everyone hates doing farm work and rightfully so. The commenter below me has never actually done farm work.
Doing more for less is just better. We should probably invent an economic system that doesn't kill people when efficiency improves.
>Everyone hates doing farm work and rightfully so.
Yes, everyone hates sitting in the million dollar tractor's cab, sitting on the cushioned seat and enjoying the air conditioning while looking at the dozen screens that remind one of piloting the space shuttle.
I'm glad that California's legislators are taking a look at that, and making sure no one ever has to do it again. It's a horrible job, and the sooner it has been eliminated the sooner we can all celebrate.
Farming is one of the hardest jobs out there. You need to effectively run your own business on fine margins often relying on government subsidies which can change over time, with a lot of risk due to crop failures/livestock disease (culling can be necessary for chickens due to bird flu etc). It requires hard manual labour running the farm with physical risk to you if you work with livestock. Cows don't care if you get sick, they still need cared for no matter what, there isn't much space for holidays or illness. This isn't to mention the few times of the year the tractors are used as you describe, but most tractors aren't this fancy, and how would you like to spend all day every day for a time working the land with the tractor from sunrise to sunset?
Most farm jobs are not sitting in the tractor all day. There are only a few farms in the world where a tractor has someone sitting in it all day every day. Most farms the tractors are used for 80 hours a week just a couple weeks per year (planting and harvest time). The rest of the time the tractors sit in the shed. There is a lot of non-tractor jobs farmers do. Many of the farms where the tractor is used full time every day the tractor is just pulling the harvest wagon and the crops are harvested by hand - one person drives the tractor while 30 walk behind it harvesting the crops.
The autonomous tractors are for use in fields where there are no other humans (at least so far)
Driverless tractors may allow for bigger, heavier machines which would be better yet. The bigger the better because soil compaction goes up at a sub-linear rate to weight. While the soil compaction is worse for a heavier tractor where it touches the soil, the heavier tractor can handle a wider pass which means it overall doing much less damage vs a smaller tractor that would need to do several passes touching more soil to get the same work done. This is also why tracks are often worse than tires - even though tires compact the ground more where they touch the soil, the track touches more soil in a turn and thus does more damage in a turn than you save in the row!
Of course different soils are different. You need to discuss the particulars of an individual field before you can make a judgement on what is best. But overall bigger is better.
Tractors are made heavy for traction (hence the name), not for safety. In addition to the weight of the tractor itself, fluid is often added to the tires for extra weight, and weights added to the front for more traction and to keep the front down when pulling a heavy load.
You can gain some traction by going from tires to tracks, as some modern tractors do, but you still need a certain amount of weight or you're just going to spin when you're trying to pull a 30-foot-wide chisel plow through soil and last year's stalks.
Going fully autonomous might make tractors a little cheaper, if they don't need A/C and mirrors and things like that, but not lighter. And they'd still need the human stuff for occasions when it can't drive itself anyway, like moving it around the barn lot or going down the road to the next field.
No, reducing speed wouldn't significantly reduce weight. Nor is there an actual need to reduce weight in the first place.
Machine costs do matter by hour. Tractors and harvesters are extremely expensive and there is only a limited time window to get the work done. Going slower means that farmers would have to buy more machines.
Surely the weight of a tractor pales in comparison to the person sitting inside? The heavy weight is for that big engine with a lot of torque. Can a lighter weight tractor pull its load?
I’d assume all the functionality inside the cab, the space needed, seat, controls, windscreen, AC inside the cabin, etc, add up to quite a bit of weight. If you went truly driverless without a cabin you could save a ton of weight.
Maybe a ton at the most - but the tractor weights far more than a ton. Actually more weight is a good thing in tractors because that allows for more traction.
Tractors are not cars - weight balance doesn't make nearly as difference. Between lower speeds, lack of suspension, and all wheel drive it doesn't matter.
Weight balance absolutely makes a difference. If you don’t have enough weight on the front of the tractor, for instance, certain implements are nonfunctional. You need to balance weight from front to back. Standard issue parts of tractors is adding weight boxes to either the front or back of the tractor to balance the weight of the implement on the other side.
Fair enough - but the humans and the need for a cab is not significant. Those weights are still added based on the implement, and removed for other operations. They are also heavier than the cab + human in many cases. They are also added in front of the front axle, or behind the rear, while the human weight affects both axles (not evenly, but close enough)
Removing a cab and a human removes at minimum 300-500 lbs (when you account for human weight, all the framing, window glass, HVAC components, seats, screens, etc etc) which is balanced somewhat evenly across both axles.
That means you can take that weight, and use only a portion of it to balance the tractor. Less weight overall.
First of all more weight is good! Weight means more traction, and traction is important. Depending on the system traction or horsepower may be the real limit, but the other is still close.
Second while balance can matter typically doesn't. Even when balance matters, you still need weight on the other axles. Most of the time your are towing something with most of the weight not on the tractor so you just want more weight and you want it more or less evenly balanced - about what a cab gives you.
Tractors tend to spread their load with more, gianter, wider tires.
The trade-off for making the tractor larger is that you can pull wider and multiple or multi-function implements to do the entire thing faster in one pass.
The larger contact patch for having an absurd number of wheels reduces soil compaction and reduces the chance you get stuck; working in fewer passes further reduces soil compaction and prevents you from getting stuck (since in the ideal case, you're doing one pass on solid ground, and never driving over tilled soil).
Tractors get stuck when they drive in mud (and other mud like soils) all the time. However when driving on not-mud it is true. That is the trade off, the heavier you are the more care you need to take about mud.
I suspect tanks get stuck often in part because that is fun and in part because they need to train troops how to get them unstuck and so they intentionally send tanks into mud - which is to say in a real war the generals might (should) avoid getting stuck, but in training it is important to get stuck often. I'm not a military expert though, but that is my opinion on tanks.
What you could achieve with a driverless tractor is using two smaller ones instead of one big one. Since the driver's effective wage leaves the cost equation, the number of tractors can potentially be much larger.
Come to think of it, this might also benefit small landholders eventually by reducing the minimum amount of land required to fund a single tractor.
I can't figure out how to link, but if you search me you will see elsewhere that I explained that bigger is better for the soil.
Most small landholders should sell and move to the city. You need a fair amount of size to make a decent living selling something cheap. Though my biggest worry is the medium sized farmers - wasting $10/acre in extra chemicals when you have 600 acres is only $6000 - you probably won't even notice it and in any case not wasting it costs investment too. When you have 6000 acres though that $10 is a larger number and you can afford to put a lot of money in better whatever to not waste it.
The American voter is too ideologically attached to the idea of the small family farm and opposed to the big scary boogeyman corporation to support any policy that encourages consolidation of farming and farmers to move to th city
In order to link, you right-click (or equivalent) on the time stamp of the post, which on your comment currently says "4 hours ago". That creates a link like this:
> Most small landholders should sell and move to the city.
Economically, this has been true for decades irrespective of developments in autonomous vehicles. But city life is miserable, and there will always be people trying to escape it on the farm.
Presumably the weight is there because it helps the tractors pull. I don't think the human is a small percentage. How could you reengineer the system to get the right traction without the weight?
The actual regulation in question is part of CA's state-wide agricultural safety code...
(b) All self-propelled equipment shall, when under its own power and in motion, have an operator stationed at the vehicular controls.
It's been in place since the 1970s. At the time it was passed, it was probably reasonable to require a human operator at the controls at all times.
The law is just an anachronism that the state legislature should remove/update.
I wonder how the law is written? Could you have a set of vehicular controls in Kenya remotely hooked up to control it? And then you only pay kenyan not US labour rates?
Can't imagine tractors move fast enough whilst plowing that the extra 67 milliseconds of latency matters.
California has some other interesting legacy laws, like the one banning night vision use on weapons. IIRC, in theory a modern thermal imaging rifle sight wouldn't violate the law as written (but I wouldn't want to be the test case).
The video says the regulation was written 50 years ago, and just says "operators must be stationed at the controls". Autonomous tractors were not commercially available yet, it's just a well-intentioned safety regulation that needs to updated now.
It says: "All self-propelled equipment shall, when under its own power and in motion, have an operator stationed at the vehicular controls. This shall not prohibit the operator occupying or being stationed at a location on the vehicle other than the normal driving position or cab if controls for starting, accelerating, decelerating and stopping are provided adjacent and convenient to the alternate position."
So you do explicitly need to be physically on the vehicle at all times while it's moving.
It has further rules for remotely operating "Furrow guided self-propelled mobile equipment" (which is not how modern autonomous tractors work), but even for those you need to be actively watching it and have immediate access to steering and braking controls.
This seems to open the door to operators not being literally in the driver's seat.
I think "location on the vehicle" could reasonably be interpreted as including virtual locations. For example a drone operator is physically in a little room somewhere but they are in actuality operating controls that fulfill all of those requirements remotely. It's not hard to go from there to "I can press the stop button on my phone whenever I want" so I am effectively "stationed at the vehicular controls".
There is all kind of automation possible, and was in the 70s too. for example, you could do the whole thing mechanically without a singe chip. a few hydraulic levers and some guide wires and you have a 20,000lb tractor that runs up and down rows.
I'm not sure about that. A field is sort of a best case scenario for autonomous vehicles. There are only well established obstacles, no pedestrians, and straight lines for large distances.
Source: autosteer on JD tractors let me get really good at switch games.
> A field is sort of a best case scenario for autonomous vehicles
There is no “autonomous tractor law”, the headline is misleading. There is a farm safety law that has been in place since long before any autonomous production farm equipment existed which prohibits self-propelled equipment without the operator seat occupied at all times while in operation. It was not unheard of for people to get on and off low-speed self-propelled (that was not self-driving) farm equipment while in operation, in an attempt at efficiency/multitasking, with attendant safety risks. That’s what the law was directed at.
Also, it's useful to remember that before tractors, there were horses, and the equipment pulled by horses was gradually converted to tractors. With horses, the farmer might sit on the equipment and use reins, or he might walk in front of the horses and lead them. Either way, he had control of them without literally sitting on them. So when the first tractors came along, it probably wasn't automatic to think you needed to sit directly on it. And it was a lot easier to hop on and off them when they were small machines without cabs. They were pretty dangerous, really, with little in the way of safety protection over moving parts, so I can see why people thought a rule was needed to keep the driver on the seat.
Not only that, but if a tractor encounters an obstacle in the field that it doesn't know what to do about, it can simply stop right where it is and wait for human intervention, unlike cars where you don't want them stopping dead in the middle of the road. Also tractor speeds in fields are far lower than cars on roads, so automatically a huge safety advantage there.
Until you get to the end of the field. If a malfunction means you don't turn or stop, the next thing in front of you might be a house, a school, or a highway. Today's farm tractors are powerful, heavy machines that can plow right through a lot of obstacles. I'd want to have a couple extra layers of fail-safes, and probably a human overseer with a kill switch. That could be someone watching a bunch of tractors remotely on monitors.
> I'd want to have a couple extra layers of fail-safes, and probably a human overseer with a kill switch
This is the sort of feel-good rule making that stifles an economy.
Driverless tractors exist. They’ve been deployed across the world. We have real-world data about their safety and precisely zero cases where they ran into schools because they got lost.
There is a legitimate safety debate that can be had. But it should pit data against data, not hypotheticals.
GPS (or GNSS in general) is hardly sufficient for anything safety critical. The signals are very weak and can easily be spoofed or jammed. Even overhead obstructions like trees and buildings nearby can cause significant offsets due to multipath reflection issues.
Simple solution for that. If you jam GPS and it makes an autonomous tractor run over a school, you're liable for the manslaughter of the school kids. Trains can be derailed, but they're still allowed to operate and we just put the derailer in prison. And knives can be used to stab people. And someone can even grab your arm and force you to stab someone with the knife, and the law understands this.
What a stupid "solution". It is almost never possible to catch GNSS jammer users after the fact. GPS alone can never be sufficient, regardless of the legal issues. There are automated technical solutions to this problem involving sensor fusion and/or ground beacons.
Simply jamming the GPS would cause the vehicle to stop. What would be needed would be spoofing the GPS to make the vehicle think it was still operating normally, in the field it was supposed to be in, without any detectable quirks, a much harder task.
Jamming or not isn't a binary condition, nor is there a clear line between jamming versus spoofing. Certain types of signal interference will still allow for a position fix but with greatly degraded accuracy. There are algorithms to detect signal quality, but again that alone isn't considered adequate for anything safety critical.
Commercial aircraft aren't legally allowed to fly with only GPS for navigation, and for good reason.
Right - commercial aircraft are required to use navigation methods that are orders of magnitude easier to spoof than GPS is - such as radio beacons that transmit certain three-letter Morse code IDs on certain frequencies, and the plane just flies directly towards the strongest signal source.
That particular one is considered outdated but still used in some areas.
Automatic landing is done by tuning into a certain frequency, and two angled transmitters are used so that a plane too far to the left receives a certain pattern and a plane too far to the right receives a different one. A similar system is used for vertical guidance. How easy is it to transmit a short repeating pattern at an aircraft to make it think it's too far to the left?
And these are allowed to fly, and refrigerators are legal too even though filling one with propane and a spark source may cause it to explode.
I'm not opposed to the idea of autonomous (or better near-autonomous) tractors working in fields. They'd definitely be safer than autonomous vehicles on roads. I just think people, especially at a tech-loving forum like this, are a little too quick to assume safety concerns are fully covered. Perhaps they can be, but will they be when large corporate farms cut corners on things like maintenance?
I started driving tractors when I was 10, and I've been in a couple situations where equipment failure required some quick action to get stopped before serious damage was done. Shit happens, and should be expected to happen and prepared for.
But I expect a autonomous tractor - like an auto - to have a radar and be able to stop if an obstacle is there - not only migrants, how about wild animals, etc.
I agree, it’s private property not open to the public. As long as the owner assumes responsibility for injuries it should be fine. Perhaps some updated osha rules, I assume they have rules for existing equipment.
It's an unintended consequence of a very old law. Getting worked up about it is extraordinarily counterproductive.
It's very hard and time-consuming to repeal/replace a law. It's at least 10x easier to make a "technical fix"/"clarification" that preserves the original intent while removing the unintended effects. That's what should be done.
Wild because most of the big ass combines and tractors you see out working the field are essentially already autonomous -- a human just happens to be sitting in the cab.
There are no family farmers. Tax laws demand you be a corporate farm, so all farms are corporate farms. (there are a few exceptions, but they are hobby farms where the farmer works full time off the farm)
When you see a headline that starts with "Farmers [something]", it always refers to large farming corporations and the lobbying organizations like Farm Bureau they fund. It never means they went and interviewed Farmer Hank with his 50 cow dairy or his 1000-acre grain and pasture operation.
self-propelled equipment shall, when under its own power and in motion, have an operator stationed at the vehicular controls. Wow. I didn't realize there was a ban and that it's from 1977. Btw, we had an almost autonomous Case tractor ("AutoSteer") at Trimble in Sunnyvale (department since moved to Colorado) in 2000 without an operator at the controls (so it was possibly illegal), but it's surprising that it's a blanket ban rather than a selective one like human-overseen. Perhaps it was written to protect jobs or there was subconscious fear over killer machines later epitomized by the film Maximum Overdrive (1986).
Its not a ban on autonomy, which didn't exist at the time to ban. It was directed at people trying to maximize use of their time by getting off slow moving, non-autonomous, equipment to do other things and then climbing back on when needed to make course changes.
It also functions to ban unattended autonomous vehicles now that they do exist, and it may need to be adjusted to allow for an appropriate regulatory framework for limited and safe use of unattended autonomous vehicles, but that was not a subject of concern when it was written.
Food control is easy but we don’t actually want it.
1. Prohibit large companies from using their size to negotiate prices, like how it used to be
2. Stop farm subsidies for all but the most critical areas. If you want to make food available to the poor, give them food stamp cards, but further restrict junk food. Supply side subsidies just create excess crops which lead to everyone trying to use cheap corn in some way. This cheap corn is then used to destroy local farmers in Latin America, further increasing illegal immigration and the power of cartels over a newly destitute population.
I come from a family of farmers, and some of my family does actively farm.
None of them are wealthy enough or operate large enough farms for expensive self-driving tractors. And I share in their concern about the meta-game here: the consolidation of capital, land, and power over the food supply.
Consumers already have a hard time having any lever against rising grocery costs. Consolidation earlier on in the supply chain is not helping.
Which is to say, automation in this space isn't a bad thing in and of itself, but it can enable strange market dynamics (/imbalanced power dynamics) over food, which is objectively a bad thing.
My father-in-law operates a "small farm" in Saskatchewan with no employees. The average farm size is pushing 10,000 acres, his is 2,000 acres. (2,000 acres is probably close to the median size, though. Really large farms skew the average).
He's got autosteer on a couple of pieces of equipment. His combine-harvester "only" cost $400,000 (used) compared to the $1M+ ones his neighbors use. As a fraction of $300,000, autosteer isn't particularly significant.
But it's massively useful. During a field operation, there are dozens of things the operator should be monitoring and adjusting in parallel. Pretty much all of these are automated with "idiot lights", but a good farmer is closely supervising. Less attention spent doing trivial things like steering results in more attention spend on deck levelling, rotor speed, pick-up speed, et cetera.
> None of them are wealthy enough or operate large enough farms for expensive self-driving tractors.
My father runs his own chopping business and his machines aren't automated or self-driven either. For him, it's all about being able to repair the machines himself. He's been a diesel mechanic and farm hand all his life, so if something breaks on a "traditional" harvester or tractor, he knows how to fix it and get it running again.
>Consumers already have a hard time having any lever against rising grocery costs. Consolidation earlier on in the supply chain is not helping.
Who in the grocery supply chain is earning huge profit margins?
As far as I understand, consumers have long benefited from myriad subsidies provided to farmers, too low fossil fuel prices that do not price in externalities, too low water prices that deplete aquifers quicker than they can recharge, and extremely cheap labor due to cheaper labor in less developed countries and government looking the other way on farms that hire illegal immigrants.
If anything, the mechanization of farms is the only force pushing food prices lower. Before that, it was the advent of the Haber-Bosch process which drastically increased yields.
Yep. One such example is the cotton gin and the rise of concentrated wealth by plantation owners led to the continuation of slavery, the Confederacy, and the Civil War.
The internet and smartphones destroyed many categories of products and whole industries. AI is the latest cotton gin in spite of the hype because of capital's response to it with mass layoffs.
If legislators are concerned about safety, what are they seeing in other states that indicates a safety problem?
If legislators are concerned about farm jobs, this is short-sighted, as technology-driven productivity improvements are the basis for the prosperity we experience today.
Liberal media will say they "want automation to replace the tough jobs, not the creative ones" when talking about LLMs, but then support this garbage that is just artificially increasing demand for cheap labor, often covered by vulnerable, illegal immigrants with no way to defend their rights. In trying to protect the workers they end up increasing worker exploitation
4 years ago: "These electric self-driving tractors could make farming much greener"
https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/11/tech/monarch-autonomous-elect...
Or is cnn not what you mean by liberal media?
Very few people who rant against the liberal media actually consume much content from them.
Are the liberal media saying this in the room with us right now?
What else are they saying?
What liberal media and what does that have to do with 50 years old legislation? Other then wanting to rant at liberal media, because fox said so.
There might be a very important difference between automation pursued because we don't have enough workers to do all the work we would like to see completed, and automation pursued because it is cheaper for the gigantic corporations who will profit from employing fewer workers. But since we are still in the phase where there are too many jobs and not enough people to do them, I think we don't have to worry about those yet. We should revisit this issue in 300 years.
We're already in the insufficient jobs phase, but not for farm work. Everyone hates doing farm work and rightfully so. The commenter below me has never actually done farm work.
Doing more for less is just better. We should probably invent an economic system that doesn't kill people when efficiency improves.
>Everyone hates doing farm work and rightfully so.
Yes, everyone hates sitting in the million dollar tractor's cab, sitting on the cushioned seat and enjoying the air conditioning while looking at the dozen screens that remind one of piloting the space shuttle.
I'm glad that California's legislators are taking a look at that, and making sure no one ever has to do it again. It's a horrible job, and the sooner it has been eliminated the sooner we can all celebrate.
Farming is one of the hardest jobs out there. You need to effectively run your own business on fine margins often relying on government subsidies which can change over time, with a lot of risk due to crop failures/livestock disease (culling can be necessary for chickens due to bird flu etc). It requires hard manual labour running the farm with physical risk to you if you work with livestock. Cows don't care if you get sick, they still need cared for no matter what, there isn't much space for holidays or illness. This isn't to mention the few times of the year the tractors are used as you describe, but most tractors aren't this fancy, and how would you like to spend all day every day for a time working the land with the tractor from sunrise to sunset?
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Most farm jobs are not sitting in the tractor all day. There are only a few farms in the world where a tractor has someone sitting in it all day every day. Most farms the tractors are used for 80 hours a week just a couple weeks per year (planting and harvest time). The rest of the time the tractors sit in the shed. There is a lot of non-tractor jobs farmers do. Many of the farms where the tractor is used full time every day the tractor is just pulling the harvest wagon and the crops are harvested by hand - one person drives the tractor while 30 walk behind it harvesting the crops.
The autonomous tractors are for use in fields where there are no other humans (at least so far)
If driverless tractors can be made lighter in weight, they could also help in reducing how much the heavy machines cause soil compaction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soil_compaction_(agriculture)#...
Driverless tractors may allow for bigger, heavier machines which would be better yet. The bigger the better because soil compaction goes up at a sub-linear rate to weight. While the soil compaction is worse for a heavier tractor where it touches the soil, the heavier tractor can handle a wider pass which means it overall doing much less damage vs a smaller tractor that would need to do several passes touching more soil to get the same work done. This is also why tracks are often worse than tires - even though tires compact the ground more where they touch the soil, the track touches more soil in a turn and thus does more damage in a turn than you save in the row!
Of course different soils are different. You need to discuss the particulars of an individual field before you can make a judgement on what is best. But overall bigger is better.
Tractors are made heavy for traction (hence the name), not for safety. In addition to the weight of the tractor itself, fluid is often added to the tires for extra weight, and weights added to the front for more traction and to keep the front down when pulling a heavy load.
You can gain some traction by going from tires to tracks, as some modern tractors do, but you still need a certain amount of weight or you're just going to spin when you're trying to pull a 30-foot-wide chisel plow through soil and last year's stalks.
Going fully autonomous might make tractors a little cheaper, if they don't need A/C and mirrors and things like that, but not lighter. And they'd still need the human stuff for occasions when it can't drive itself anyway, like moving it around the barn lot or going down the road to the next field.
Can you reduce the weight if you go slower? I realize there is still a floor threshold here.
Optimizing for time matters when paying people is involved but machine costs don't matter so much per hour.
No, reducing speed wouldn't significantly reduce weight. Nor is there an actual need to reduce weight in the first place.
Machine costs do matter by hour. Tractors and harvesters are extremely expensive and there is only a limited time window to get the work done. Going slower means that farmers would have to buy more machines.
When you're tilling, planting, or harvesting, you're often trying to beat the rain or the season. You don't want to go any slower than necessary.
Simply put, food goes bad.
Surely the weight of a tractor pales in comparison to the person sitting inside? The heavy weight is for that big engine with a lot of torque. Can a lighter weight tractor pull its load?
I’d assume all the functionality inside the cab, the space needed, seat, controls, windscreen, AC inside the cabin, etc, add up to quite a bit of weight. If you went truly driverless without a cabin you could save a ton of weight.
Maybe a ton at the most - but the tractor weights far more than a ton. Actually more weight is a good thing in tractors because that allows for more traction.
More weight over specific areas is good. By removing weight from the cab, you can add it in places you actually want it. I.e. over the wheels.
Tractors are not cars - weight balance doesn't make nearly as difference. Between lower speeds, lack of suspension, and all wheel drive it doesn't matter.
Weight balance absolutely makes a difference. If you don’t have enough weight on the front of the tractor, for instance, certain implements are nonfunctional. You need to balance weight from front to back. Standard issue parts of tractors is adding weight boxes to either the front or back of the tractor to balance the weight of the implement on the other side.
Fair enough - but the humans and the need for a cab is not significant. Those weights are still added based on the implement, and removed for other operations. They are also heavier than the cab + human in many cases. They are also added in front of the front axle, or behind the rear, while the human weight affects both axles (not evenly, but close enough)
So, you're agreeing with me then?
Removing a cab and a human removes at minimum 300-500 lbs (when you account for human weight, all the framing, window glass, HVAC components, seats, screens, etc etc) which is balanced somewhat evenly across both axles.
That means you can take that weight, and use only a portion of it to balance the tractor. Less weight overall.
Not really.
First of all more weight is good! Weight means more traction, and traction is important. Depending on the system traction or horsepower may be the real limit, but the other is still close.
Second while balance can matter typically doesn't. Even when balance matters, you still need weight on the other axles. Most of the time your are towing something with most of the weight not on the tractor so you just want more weight and you want it more or less evenly balanced - about what a cab gives you.
Is that really true? The heavier the tank, the more often it gets stuck and needs to be pulled out by other vehicles.
Tractors tend to spread their load with more, gianter, wider tires.
The trade-off for making the tractor larger is that you can pull wider and multiple or multi-function implements to do the entire thing faster in one pass.
The larger contact patch for having an absurd number of wheels reduces soil compaction and reduces the chance you get stuck; working in fewer passes further reduces soil compaction and prevents you from getting stuck (since in the ideal case, you're doing one pass on solid ground, and never driving over tilled soil).
Tractors get stuck when they drive in mud (and other mud like soils) all the time. However when driving on not-mud it is true. That is the trade off, the heavier you are the more care you need to take about mud.
I suspect tanks get stuck often in part because that is fun and in part because they need to train troops how to get them unstuck and so they intentionally send tanks into mud - which is to say in a real war the generals might (should) avoid getting stuck, but in training it is important to get stuck often. I'm not a military expert though, but that is my opinion on tanks.
Even a small utility tractor is over 10,000lbs
What you could achieve with a driverless tractor is using two smaller ones instead of one big one. Since the driver's effective wage leaves the cost equation, the number of tractors can potentially be much larger.
Come to think of it, this might also benefit small landholders eventually by reducing the minimum amount of land required to fund a single tractor.
I can't figure out how to link, but if you search me you will see elsewhere that I explained that bigger is better for the soil.
Most small landholders should sell and move to the city. You need a fair amount of size to make a decent living selling something cheap. Though my biggest worry is the medium sized farmers - wasting $10/acre in extra chemicals when you have 600 acres is only $6000 - you probably won't even notice it and in any case not wasting it costs investment too. When you have 6000 acres though that $10 is a larger number and you can afford to put a lot of money in better whatever to not waste it.
The American voter is too ideologically attached to the idea of the small family farm and opposed to the big scary boogeyman corporation to support any policy that encourages consolidation of farming and farmers to move to th city
Not just American - most of Europe is even worse.
In order to link, you right-click (or equivalent) on the time stamp of the post, which on your comment currently says "4 hours ago". That creates a link like this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44889842
> if you search me you will see elsewhere that I explained that bigger is better for the soil.
I read through your argument here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44889514
These claims are interesting but I did not find information to substantiate them with a brief search. I did find this:
https://mupages.marshall.edu/sites/nexus/2025/01/17/types-of...
> Most small landholders should sell and move to the city.
Economically, this has been true for decades irrespective of developments in autonomous vehicles. But city life is miserable, and there will always be people trying to escape it on the farm.
Presumably the weight is there because it helps the tractors pull. I don't think the human is a small percentage. How could you reengineer the system to get the right traction without the weight?
what are the goals of the policy of banning autonomous tractors?
I imagine it is at least twofold:
a) provide jobs for manual laborers
b) more of an equal playing field between large-scale industrial agriculture companies and "sole proprietor" farmers
EDIT: turns out to be a case of safety regulation written before more recent advances in tractor automation. So my guesses were wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driverless_tractor
The actual regulation in question is part of CA's state-wide agricultural safety code... (b) All self-propelled equipment shall, when under its own power and in motion, have an operator stationed at the vehicular controls.
It's been in place since the 1970s. At the time it was passed, it was probably reasonable to require a human operator at the controls at all times.
The law is just an anachronism that the state legislature should remove/update.
> operator stationed at the vehicular controls.
I wonder how the law is written? Could you have a set of vehicular controls in Kenya remotely hooked up to control it? And then you only pay kenyan not US labour rates?
Can't imagine tractors move fast enough whilst plowing that the extra 67 milliseconds of latency matters.
I literally quoted the law... Like I said, it was written in the 1970s, before remote controls and GPSes and AI and things existed.
California has some other interesting legacy laws, like the one banning night vision use on weapons. IIRC, in theory a modern thermal imaging rifle sight wouldn't violate the law as written (but I wouldn't want to be the test case).
I have to wonder why the regulation was written in the first place. Was there really an outbreak of rogue machinery that necessitated the regulation?
The video says the regulation was written 50 years ago, and just says "operators must be stationed at the controls". Autonomous tractors were not commercially available yet, it's just a well-intentioned safety regulation that needs to updated now.
Does it define "stationed" and "controls"?
If the automated tractor is remotely controlled by my smartphone (IANAF) in my pocket, does that count?
https://www.dir.ca.gov/title8/3441.html
It says: "All self-propelled equipment shall, when under its own power and in motion, have an operator stationed at the vehicular controls. This shall not prohibit the operator occupying or being stationed at a location on the vehicle other than the normal driving position or cab if controls for starting, accelerating, decelerating and stopping are provided adjacent and convenient to the alternate position."
So you do explicitly need to be physically on the vehicle at all times while it's moving.
It has further rules for remotely operating "Furrow guided self-propelled mobile equipment" (which is not how modern autonomous tractors work), but even for those you need to be actively watching it and have immediate access to steering and braking controls.
This seems to open the door to operators not being literally in the driver's seat.
I think "location on the vehicle" could reasonably be interpreted as including virtual locations. For example a drone operator is physically in a little room somewhere but they are in actuality operating controls that fulfill all of those requirements remotely. It's not hard to go from there to "I can press the stop button on my phone whenever I want" so I am effectively "stationed at the vehicular controls".
That is not how laws work. "could be interpreted" doesn't matter when there is one clearly stated and intended interpretation.
There is all kind of automation possible, and was in the 70s too. for example, you could do the whole thing mechanically without a singe chip. a few hydraulic levers and some guide wires and you have a 20,000lb tractor that runs up and down rows.
Safety is a far more likely concern.
I'm not sure about that. A field is sort of a best case scenario for autonomous vehicles. There are only well established obstacles, no pedestrians, and straight lines for large distances.
Source: autosteer on JD tractors let me get really good at switch games.
> A field is sort of a best case scenario for autonomous vehicles
There is no “autonomous tractor law”, the headline is misleading. There is a farm safety law that has been in place since long before any autonomous production farm equipment existed which prohibits self-propelled equipment without the operator seat occupied at all times while in operation. It was not unheard of for people to get on and off low-speed self-propelled (that was not self-driving) farm equipment while in operation, in an attempt at efficiency/multitasking, with attendant safety risks. That’s what the law was directed at.
Also, it's useful to remember that before tractors, there were horses, and the equipment pulled by horses was gradually converted to tractors. With horses, the farmer might sit on the equipment and use reins, or he might walk in front of the horses and lead them. Either way, he had control of them without literally sitting on them. So when the first tractors came along, it probably wasn't automatic to think you needed to sit directly on it. And it was a lot easier to hop on and off them when they were small machines without cabs. They were pretty dangerous, really, with little in the way of safety protection over moving parts, so I can see why people thought a rule was needed to keep the driver on the seat.
Not only that, but if a tractor encounters an obstacle in the field that it doesn't know what to do about, it can simply stop right where it is and wait for human intervention, unlike cars where you don't want them stopping dead in the middle of the road. Also tractor speeds in fields are far lower than cars on roads, so automatically a huge safety advantage there.
Until you get to the end of the field. If a malfunction means you don't turn or stop, the next thing in front of you might be a house, a school, or a highway. Today's farm tractors are powerful, heavy machines that can plow right through a lot of obstacles. I'd want to have a couple extra layers of fail-safes, and probably a human overseer with a kill switch. That could be someone watching a bunch of tractors remotely on monitors.
> I'd want to have a couple extra layers of fail-safes, and probably a human overseer with a kill switch
This is the sort of feel-good rule making that stifles an economy.
Driverless tractors exist. They’ve been deployed across the world. We have real-world data about their safety and precisely zero cases where they ran into schools because they got lost.
There is a legitimate safety debate that can be had. But it should pit data against data, not hypotheticals.
seems like someone didnt playing autonomous drone before, its a solved problem
and Yes we do have OSS tool for that
We even had solutions for that in the 70's when the law in question was written. But the solutions available at the time were far from fool-proof.
A GPS-driven cutoff seems like an obvious thing to have in this situation, no?
GPS (or GNSS in general) is hardly sufficient for anything safety critical. The signals are very weak and can easily be spoofed or jammed. Even overhead obstructions like trees and buildings nearby can cause significant offsets due to multipath reflection issues.
RTK driven tractors are not using just standard GPS. They have positional accuracy down to one inch.
Simple solution for that. If you jam GPS and it makes an autonomous tractor run over a school, you're liable for the manslaughter of the school kids. Trains can be derailed, but they're still allowed to operate and we just put the derailer in prison. And knives can be used to stab people. And someone can even grab your arm and force you to stab someone with the knife, and the law understands this.
What a stupid "solution". It is almost never possible to catch GNSS jammer users after the fact. GPS alone can never be sufficient, regardless of the legal issues. There are automated technical solutions to this problem involving sensor fusion and/or ground beacons.
Simply jamming the GPS would cause the vehicle to stop. What would be needed would be spoofing the GPS to make the vehicle think it was still operating normally, in the field it was supposed to be in, without any detectable quirks, a much harder task.
Jamming or not isn't a binary condition, nor is there a clear line between jamming versus spoofing. Certain types of signal interference will still allow for a position fix but with greatly degraded accuracy. There are algorithms to detect signal quality, but again that alone isn't considered adequate for anything safety critical.
Commercial aircraft aren't legally allowed to fly with only GPS for navigation, and for good reason.
Right - commercial aircraft are required to use navigation methods that are orders of magnitude easier to spoof than GPS is - such as radio beacons that transmit certain three-letter Morse code IDs on certain frequencies, and the plane just flies directly towards the strongest signal source.
That particular one is considered outdated but still used in some areas.
Automatic landing is done by tuning into a certain frequency, and two angled transmitters are used so that a plane too far to the left receives a certain pattern and a plane too far to the right receives a different one. A similar system is used for vertical guidance. How easy is it to transmit a short repeating pattern at an aircraft to make it think it's too far to the left?
And these are allowed to fly, and refrigerators are legal too even though filling one with propane and a spark source may cause it to explode.
I mean a GPS geo-fence is pretty simple and fail safe.
I'm more worried about something like humans unexpectedly in the field. Imagine a migrant crossing a field and getting run over by a combine.
Yeah, that's a concern too.
I'm not opposed to the idea of autonomous (or better near-autonomous) tractors working in fields. They'd definitely be safer than autonomous vehicles on roads. I just think people, especially at a tech-loving forum like this, are a little too quick to assume safety concerns are fully covered. Perhaps they can be, but will they be when large corporate farms cut corners on things like maintenance?
I started driving tractors when I was 10, and I've been in a couple situations where equipment failure required some quick action to get stopped before serious damage was done. Shit happens, and should be expected to happen and prepared for.
But I expect a autonomous tractor - like an auto - to have a radar and be able to stop if an obstacle is there - not only migrants, how about wild animals, etc.
I agree, it’s private property not open to the public. As long as the owner assumes responsibility for injuries it should be fine. Perhaps some updated osha rules, I assume they have rules for existing equipment.
Kinda odd that AVs are allowed on roads but not on farmland
California overregulation is obscene.
It's an unintended consequence of a very old law. Getting worked up about it is extraordinarily counterproductive.
It's very hard and time-consuming to repeal/replace a law. It's at least 10x easier to make a "technical fix"/"clarification" that preserves the original intent while removing the unintended effects. That's what should be done.
Autonomous cars are not a thing yet, too dangerous.
So yeah, let's let giant farm tractors, larger and more dangerous than (non-firing) tanks from WWII, roam fields nationwide.
Wild because most of the big ass combines and tractors you see out working the field are essentially already autonomous -- a human just happens to be sitting in the cab.
Sounds like what corporations want, not family farmers.
There are no family farmers. Tax laws demand you be a corporate farm, so all farms are corporate farms. (there are a few exceptions, but they are hobby farms where the farmer works full time off the farm)
eyeroll Every family farm is also incorporated. Family farm is orthogonal to incorporation
When you see a headline that starts with "Farmers [something]", it always refers to large farming corporations and the lobbying organizations like Farm Bureau they fund. It never means they went and interviewed Farmer Hank with his 50 cow dairy or his 1000-acre grain and pasture operation.
self-propelled equipment shall, when under its own power and in motion, have an operator stationed at the vehicular controls. Wow. I didn't realize there was a ban and that it's from 1977. Btw, we had an almost autonomous Case tractor ("AutoSteer") at Trimble in Sunnyvale (department since moved to Colorado) in 2000 without an operator at the controls (so it was possibly illegal), but it's surprising that it's a blanket ban rather than a selective one like human-overseen. Perhaps it was written to protect jobs or there was subconscious fear over killer machines later epitomized by the film Maximum Overdrive (1986).
Its not a ban on autonomy, which didn't exist at the time to ban. It was directed at people trying to maximize use of their time by getting off slow moving, non-autonomous, equipment to do other things and then climbing back on when needed to make course changes.
It also functions to ban unattended autonomous vehicles now that they do exist, and it may need to be adjusted to allow for an appropriate regulatory framework for limited and safe use of unattended autonomous vehicles, but that was not a subject of concern when it was written.
Food control is easy but we don’t actually want it.
1. Prohibit large companies from using their size to negotiate prices, like how it used to be
2. Stop farm subsidies for all but the most critical areas. If you want to make food available to the poor, give them food stamp cards, but further restrict junk food. Supply side subsidies just create excess crops which lead to everyone trying to use cheap corn in some way. This cheap corn is then used to destroy local farmers in Latin America, further increasing illegal immigration and the power of cartels over a newly destitute population.
> which lead to everyone trying to use cheap corn in some way
Example: corn burning furnaces.
https://americasheat.com/post.php?pid=7