From a farmer in Minnesota…
For those of you that think electric vehicles are the answer- this is a true story from a farmer in the Midwest- and I’m reposting it-
A close friend farms over 10,000 acres of corn in the midwest. The property is spread out over 3 counties. His operation is a “partnership farm” with John Deere. They use the larger farm operations as demonstration projects for the promotion and development of new equipment. He recently received a phone call from his John Deere representative, and they want the farm to go to electric tractors and combines in 2023. He currently has 5 diesel combines that cost $900,000 each that are traded in every 3 years. Also, over 10 really BIG tractors.
JD wants him to go all-electric soon.
He said: “Ok, I have some questions. How do I charge these combines when they are 3 counties away from the shop in the middle of a cornfield, in the middle of nowhere?”
“How do I run them 24 hours a day for 10 or 12 days straight when the harvest is ready, and the weather is coming in?”
“How do I get a 50,000+ lb. combine that takes up the width of an entire road back to the shop 20 miles away when the battery goes dead?”
There was dead silence on the other end of the phone.
When the corn is ready to harvest, it has to have the proper sugar and moisture content. If it is too wet, it has to be put in giant dryers that burn natural or propane gas, and lots of it. Harvest time is critical because if it degrades in sugar content or quality, it can drop the value of his crop by half a million dollars or more.
It is analyzed at the time of sale.
It is standard procedure to run these machines 10 to 12 days straight, 24 hours a day at peak harvest time.
When they need fuel, a tanker truck delivers it, and the machines keep going. John Deere’s only answer is “we’re working on it.”
They are being pushed by the lefty Dems in the government to force these electric machines on the farmer.
These people are out of control.
They are messing with the production of food crops that feed people and livestock… all in the name of their “green dream.”
Look for the cost of your box of cornflakes to triple in the next 24 months…”
THIS is truly scary… Just sayin…
This insanity is bought to you who live in cities and have no concept of what life in the real world is like.
…to you by those who… Apologies, not enough coffee yet.
Liberals never have actual plans. Just grand utopian dreams enacted with no forethought of which we pay the consequences if they are in power. Worse yet in this case is that it isn’t about ‘green’ anything.
Punch line:
He said: “Ok, I have some questions. How do I charge these combines when they are 3 counties away from the shop in the middle of a cornfield, in the middle of nowhere?”
“How do I run them 24 hours a day for 10 or 12 days straight when the harvest is ready, and the weather is coming in?”
“How do I get a 50,000+ lb. combine that takes up the width of an entire road back to the shop 20 miles away when the battery goes dead?”
There was dead silence on the other end of the phone.
I went shopping for a spare battery for my Ryobi hand tools.
Price is tripled from last year.
Excellent. I have no clue what to do with these liberal idiots; wish I did. All this is not going to end well.
I could see hybrid diesel electric tractors and combines working. Hydrogen fuel cell technology might work someday. But all electric on large scale farms seems unrealistic even 15 – 20 years from now.
Too be fair, if this is a demonstration project farm I assume they are paying him significant amounts of money to test and demonstrate their product. They also presumably work with him to improve and tweak their products based on his feedback, otherwise why do they need a demonstration farm instead of the field behind the factory?
Color me skeptical but I am always suspicious of stories that fit too neatly into a narrative. Seems to me that the company that has been making farm equipment since 1837 would know a bit about the challenges of farming.
Can’t argue your point a lot but Libs and their ‘green ideals’ remind me of my mother when I was a kid and desert came out and I was shooting for a second humongous piece of cake.
“Your mouth is bigger than your stomach.”
John Deere was, at one time, one of the very best farm equipment manufacturers. No more. They’ve tried some brilliant ideas — looked great on paper — but in the field they’re not so hot. Something break on your machine? Good luck. You can’t fix it — in fact you mustn’t even touch it. A John Deere rep. will get to you sometime… maybe… and maybe someone will come out to fix it. The gear is all kinds of flashy, but it’s not 24/7 reliable. There are other manufacturers who really do understand farming or logging (Massey Ferguson, Volvo, Caterpillar to name three). But not big green any more.
I won’t say that the liberal contingent is stupid (although they would say I am); they aren’t. The problem is that they have no reality check. They build their wonderful dreams on a few ideals, and just keep on going from there. Most of them have never worked for a living — they wouldn’t know how (pushing lattes or paper isn’t work). And then they believe that they are right — and have the right to force their theories on everyone else, since they are convinced that they, and they alone, are Enlighened.
Grr.
+1
I listen to my Nebraska farmer relatives and they scoff at all the “improvements”. A mixed marriage (He is Case, she is John Deere) they haven’t bought new equipment in years. Instead, they spend winters overhauling what they have.
My guess would be that the current leadership of the company were hired because they had high grades at some prestigious business school who were influenced by the “green dream” bunch at school!
Battery technology needs a paradigm shift and advancement before we try to build stuff for ‘long haul’ work. Period.
We’ve done some clever things with what we’ve got. Short range transport, power tools (heck, I’ve got a battery powered electric mower). But heavy duty vehicles, you need more than a stack of lithium ion batteries.
This doesn’t even get into the incoherent messaging of leftists who demand electric systems but don’t want to mine for the metals and minerals needed.
The price of cornflakes is going to go up, regardless. Diesel costs are jacked up, it costs $1/gallon more than gasoline.
That has a direct impact on the cost of growing corn, but when you add in the fact that almost all of our transport is diesel-based, it’s a double whammy.
I sure wouldn’t want to be an independent trucker right now.
I don’t think we HAVE the ability to produce enough diesel from crude here in the US.
Still, I hope the Minnesota farmer gets his crop in, and I hope the John Deere people get him the answers to those questions, because they are GOING TO HAVE TO PROVIDE THEM TO THIR CUSTOMERS if they are going to sell any equipment to them.
And we wont even talk about how the cost of fertilizer went right through the roof back in January and again in February first because of Biden’s foolishness jacking up the price of fuel, and then Putin’s invading with the resultant sanctions so that urea, which is vital for all these big tractors to run, which comes out of Russia and Ukraine, only not any more, because of foolishness, so that even if the cost of fuel does drop a bit, fertilizer and urea costs have only jacked waaay up…so, yes, your Corn Flakes will be much more expensive…until America wakes up and puts a stop to this foolishness!! We really need to get the idiots out of DC!!!
All- Agreed on the comments. And if you attended any equipment sales in the last 2 years, OLD John Deere equipment that could be serviced by the farmer was going for more than when new, and the new rep service only equipment wasn’t selling…
Tractor software.
Jesus said that before he returns there would be wars, pestilence (sickness and disease) world wide famine. The policies of these far left Democrats and green crazies are doing and bring in all what has been prophesied in the Bible. It is going to get a lot worse than today. Just pray for the quick return of the Lord Jesus in order for the whole mess to get straightened out.
And the Amish laugh…
I imagine every single famer in the world is telling any agricultural equipment manufacturer the same things.
Hobby famers and utopian ex-urbanites, (“Let’s go be farmers and show those rednecks how it should be done!”) not so much, not right away a least.
SMH-such in depth thinking on the part of the lefties. The next thing will be ‘just do it or we will shut you down’.
I went to MINExpo last year and was amazed at the huge pushes for (a) fully autonomous open pit operations with no people around; drones fly regularly to re-map 3D contours of rock being removed (and check if any haul road is subsiding!) and (b) all-electric operations on-site and underground.
https://www.canadianminingjournal.com/news/abb-hitachi-to-develop-all-electric-haul-truck/
These huge vehicles have pantographs which power them along the haul road, but they can leave the pantograph and operate off of stored battery power for periods of time, such as when driving up to a face shovel to receive a load of ore.
Another proposed operation had banks of batteries (each about the size of a 4’x4’x5′ block) charging up in scaffolded frames. A forklift-like tender has a swivelable platter and picks up one charged battery block from the array, then drives out to the stope or seam where some mobile mobile machine with a low battery is crunching away at rock. It inserts the empty side of the platter into the rear of the machine and extracts the depleted battery, then swivels the platter 180, and inserts the fresh battery into the mining machine, and drives off with the depleted battery back to the charging station. It then plugs the depleted battery into an open bay in the charging station and grabs the next fresh battery and trundles off to the next machine or truck or whatever, that has a low battery.
This is all done by a ‘big data’ computer compiling continuous operations of the entire fleet of machines at a pit or in an underground operation.
THREE things: (1) The miners are now all remote gamer types anywhere in the world, and their performance is measured in richness of ore per shovelful divided by the energy used in machinery movements, (but of course multiplied by worker diversity checkboxes,)
(2) All this electrical power comes from an HUGE offsite diesel or heavy-oil engine the size of an ocean-going vessel. But since you only measure carbon footprint on-site, that off site engine a few miles of wire away “doesn’t count” to the guys with the emission control sensors** (extra-tall factory stacks did the same thing 100yrs ago,) and
(3) WHAT THEY WILL MISS: No one is in a vehicle cab who can feel something squirrelly in the steering wheel, or hear a groan of an Ackermann arm that “wasn’t like this last week.” Unless these vehicles have an awful lot of temperature and vibration sensors, and AI looking at sound signatures, not to mention oil and coolant conductivity sensors – then every breakdown will come as a surprise.
** PS Carbon Trading works like this: A hippie says “YOU STINK, but if you send me money I will pay someone else to take a shower and send you a sticker you can wear that says “Somebody else took a shower for me today.” Note that you can sell that one shower at a different price to several smelly environmentalists.
RHT- Thanks! That was the video I couldn’t find…
John- Sigh… I’m starting to think you’re right.
Drang- Good point!
Randy- And THAT is when the ‘real’ pushback starts!
Guy- That is truly scary.
Several years ago I had a discussion on Free Republic with an Aussie about using Solar/Wind to provide electric power to power a remote farm (not tractors just the household, shop, irrigation pumps, and etc.). I asked the obvious question about what do you do when the sun doesn’t shine or the wind doesn’t blow and your stationary battery runs down, The answer was to fire up a Diesel generator. Oblivious to the absurdity of using a backup Diesel to save the planet.
Truly scary and outta control. They’ve been driven insane. We know who by.
NRW- Yeah, and they say it with a straight face!!!
LSP- Concur!
Hey Old NFO;
*Wow*, the lack of common sense of the people running some of these companies is jaw dropping, Batteries ain’t there yet…and wishing it ain’t gonna make it so.
The WEF 2030 agenda. You will own nothing and be happy.
You will go nowhere and be happy. You will STARVE and be
happy. The plan on cutting the population on planet Earth
by AT LEAST half….by whatever means necessary. If the poison
jab doesn’t do it then they will starve us.
Electrical vehicles can be entirely practical, if you generate the electricity from fossil fuels directly on the vehicle.
In aerospace, they are also talking a bunch about a shift to electric propulsion.
Bunch of sillys in my view.
Not to be outdone by the private sector the Army announced that it going to buy some electric Hummers from GM.
This is why all of our equipment was made in the 90’s, the high water mark of tractor development. Everything you want (AC and a radio) and no stupid failure points (advanced GPS, DEF exhaust bullshit, software).
I’m not that old, and we ran a 68 Case and a 76 New Holland until 97′. Eating dust and slowly cooking in a hot cab sucks.
You want to make the $900,000 combine non-fossil fuel? It’s probably big enough and expensive enough to look at putting in a small nuke reactor, that will run 24/7 for years.
Of course the Greenies wouldn’t like that either so???