Old tractors and new tech

I grew up on an Iowa farm and even for the 1960s I spent a lot of time on what were old tractors for that time. My dad made due with old John Deeres – an A, B, and a G. It also wasn’t just the tractors. I cultivated corn and beans with a two-row cultivator using the John Deere B. Other farmers used much larger tractors and could cultivate many more rows with one pass through the field.

The story of old tractors surfaced just this past week. When I left the farm in the late 1960s, I really had no further participation in farming. So the reference in news stories to older John Deer tractors caught my attention. Things have evidently been tough in agriculture since Trump got into the trade war with China. Farmers buy new equipment when they make money and use what they have when crop prices are low. With the depreciation on their equipment as a tax write off, this is the way to keep your taxable income low. However, what was being described in these articles was about something different. New tractors are incredibly expensive AND are so computerized (like modern cars) that farmers cannot really do their own repairs. Farmers have plenty of time in the offseason to work on their equipment and many are skilled at repairing equipment. With a prolonged downturn in crop costs, repairing your own equipment was another survival strategy. This was the emphasis of the articles I have noticed. One of the initial of these articles came from my Minnesota Paper which makes some sense, but other papers have been telling the same story.

One of the interesting angles on this story has been the similarity to the lack of repairability of most of the devices we use now. My original Apple II+ allowed you access to the innards and had slots you could use to add cards that added functionality. You connected your own disk drive or drives with controller cards. One of the first cards I added gave me access to lower case text.

My early Mac Pro (it looked very much like the present cheese grater) had a large door on the side that could be opened to add additional drives and other upgrades). I added a second drive and added more RAM. Early phones allowed you to change the battery.

The slim style of phones and tablets makes them difficult to work with. Laptops are slim as well, but this is less important and it would seem reasonable to at least allow users to put in a new battery.