self driving tractors

[moresmoke]

CH, I am in ND. Going rate for farm help is $25-35/hr plus benefits. Most other labor jobs are $20-25. Most farmers that only need seasonal help bring in South Africans, they make the same wages, need to be housed and provided transportation, but go home for the winter.

To Barnyard Engineering, the wages listed above are for year round work, not just in season. 10 years ago I left a farm hand job and took a pay cut to be a mechanic at a Deere dealership. Was making $18 full family benefits and a house. I made the move for strategic reasons, got me to where I am today.

 

[rustyfarmall]

The absolute best self driving mode of transportation is a horse drawn buggy. The horse always knew how to get home.

 

[NY 986]

Employment helps keep people prone to fouling up out of trouble. All this automation is going add idle time to people who need it like a hole in the head. I know everybody's grandpa liked to say that there are jobs out there if people would just go looking for for them. Might have been true in 1955 or 1965 but will not be true going into the future. The local Lowe's the past several times did not have a single cashier on duty down at the consumer end of the store. I go up to the contractor end and have a live person do the check out for me. Go into the local Walmart and normally no cashiers are on duty. Just self check out. Years ago I when I worked for Central Tractor I would joke that the retail companies would love to find a way to be rid of employees to unload incoming stock, staff the showroom floor, and cashiers. This would get people up in arms including running to the store manager. But between self checkouts, self loading, and companies such as Amazon who operate a non-traditional retail model my prediction from 25 years ago is gradually coming true. As to driving tech I don't think the process is refined enough to have it operating in mass at present.

 

[NY 986]

Very few open jobs in town period. A major reason why people leave the region you and I call home. Honestly, I would hate to
have to look for a job around me. Anything that is a quality job has somebody in place already willing to work some time off of
the clock. That leaves working for the local Chevy dealer whose owner is well known for being mentally erratic. There would be a
better chance of carrying water a couple hundred feet using a sieve than to keep that owner happy more than 5 minutes per day.

 

[ss55]

Most newly licensed drivers still have a lot to learn before they become safe drivers in all situations, many never do accomplish that. Likewise most inexperienced new hires take several months if not years of training to really be effective in their jobs. Until someone figures out how to find/create more employees that already have ten years of experience without robbing them from other businesses, automation could be the better alternative.

As large farms continue to be more spread out, automation will likely be more and more attractive. one combine operator with a self driving tractor on a grain cart and several self driving trucks hauling to the elevator or farm grain leg would be able to cover a lot more ground than one operator working alone. Simply moving three or four farm machines from one field to another field several miles away can take a lot of time for one person to do alone.

 

[Crazy Horse]

I'd say that is a pretty decent pay scale ..... and then when we would add on the 33% exchange rate ($25 per hour becomes $33 Cdn), it looks even better. Minimum wage up here is $15 per hour, Alberta is now near the bottom of the minimum wage scale up here by a bit, BC is $16.75 and one of the maritime provinces down east is $14.75, Cdn dollars of course. In your situation, I suspect the $25 would be an unskilled labor rate while the high end would be a skilled equipment operator. A lot higher than I expected but I'm not exactly in the loop for these things.

 

[Russ from MN]

When I went and drove sugar beet harvest trucks over 10 years ago their tractors were self-driving then! The operator on the harvester would turn around at the end of the field, get between the correct rows, hit enter, and the GPS guided it to the other end of the field! Same way with tillage, the chisel plows were so wide the GPS would keep it on the correct track so as to not skip or overlap.

 

[NY 986]

You raise an interesting if an unintended point. All modern equipment takes up more width than what is granted in a single lane on a two lane road. In reworking the road I live on there is barely two feet from the road edge until dipping into the ditch. How does AI react to an angry and irrational driver coming from the opposite lane or from behind in the same lane? I've had people crowd right to the median as I come from the opposite lane making me run into the ditch. Just two weeks ago a truck passed me while I was moving a grain drill and he kicked up gravel from the opposite shoulder as he uneasily passed. How is AI going to react to erratic driving behavior? The ambulance chasing lawyers will shaking out the pockets of the farmer, the company selling the automated tractor, and whoever else they can legally corner.

 

[Greenfrog]

So when a self-driving vehicle makes its way to WalMart, what is it going to do then? Self check?

 

[Jim in LA]

In the year 5555 your arms hanging limp by your side
Your legs got nothing to do
Some machines doin that for you.

 

[37 chief]

Wonder how many remember that song, or even herd it. It goes back few years. Stan

 

[fdt860]

(quoted from post at 09:31:08 10/03/23) They are not meant for you. They are not meant for me. They are meant for BTO/corporate farming operations that run 10,000 acre operations.

So unless we get up to that level we will have a hard time understanding why the market may want that.

Even the Bto do not need them. They can hire someone and have him very busy all the time. Hiring cost is not much compare to the 1 million dollar machine. Thinking tgat we need to have machines instead of people because of poor education and values is trowing our future in the toilets.

Mankind is totally crazy to want not to work hard. Where will be the purpose, and pride in life? I like to plant straight, but if it is not, it does not matter...
Soon, we will say it is too dangerous to drive a car, because humans do so much mistakes.... Probably, living is too dangerous as well and we shall live in connected boxes like chicken.

I am a mecanical engineer and I hate those times. 80% of the patents issued in farm machinery are nonsense electronics devices, done and tought for the incapable, brainless, careless, dangerous to himself that they must think people are.

Just look at the guards required on farm machinery. I am waiting for the law saying to guard the knife of the cutterbar while in operation if the combine has no people detector.... you could put your arm in the fan of a Deere A. A 7 year old was driving the ferguson te20 tractor in front of the Queen in 1947....

I have to watch pictures of perfectly straight plowed fields done with a Deere A in the mud, balestacks done by hand, and two way cultivated check rows to believe what we were capables one day. From there, i cannot understand why humanity want to remove them from the fun.of their life!

Myself, i would rather ride a bicycle than mount in an autonomous vehicle.

 

[Brendon-KS]

It's a totally different situation where I'm at. Here in our area of central Kansas the unemployment rate is only 3% and there are help wanted signs everywhere. If you can pass a drug test and have even a little bit of work ethic there are plenty of entry-level jobs around here paying $20/hr plus good benefits. The biggest hurdle is finding people who can check these two boxes.

 

[Russ from MN]

Zager & Evans - In The Year 2525! I remember it well, if you google it you can listen! They were a one-hit wonder.

 

[Loosehandle]

Just because your driving something big doesn't give you the whole road...

 

[NY 986]

????? No farmer is running equipment that will fit in a 10 ft lane these days. Nobody is trading off their 24 row planter which needs 13 plus ft to get a 3 row main section so it will fit a 10 ft lane. Combine capable of handling a 16 row corn head needs close to 20 feet of road width. Back when the road dimensions were being established during the 1940's farmers were pulling 3 bottom plows and 2 row planters. As farms grew it was understood by the then locals that farmers needed more than 10 feet so drivers yielded to farm traffic and farmers got over as much as they could. Now you have outsiders driving through on their way to the outlet mall or casino that have a get the heck out of my way attitude. Equipment that takes up 15 ft and hot head drivers don't mix. Hence my statement that AI operated farm equipment will soon be fertile ground for the ambulance chasing lawyers.