Your John Deere Tractor Is About to Get Internet From SpaceX Starlink Satellites - The Messenger
John Deere, the world’s largest agricultural machinery manufacturer, is partnering with Elon Musk’s SpaceX to connect its farm equipment to the internet.
SpaceX, Musk’s astronautics firm, will equip Deere crop sprayers, tractors and other machinery in the U.S. and Brazil with Starlink to provide farmers with high-speed internet access later this year, Deere announced on Tuesday.
Starlink's satellite internet constellation will help improve connectivity on farms, particularly in rural areas, where key operations are often challenged by communications hurdles, the Moline, Ill.-based company said.
“For example, throughout the year, farmers must complete tasks within extremely short windows of time,” Aaron Wetzel, vice president of production and precision ag production systems at Deere, said. “This requires executing incredibly precise production steps while coordinating between machines and managing machine performance. Each of these areas are enhanced through connectivity, making the entire operation more efficient, effective, and profitable.”
The Starlink network will allow machine-to-machine communication, real-time data sharing, remote diagnostics and self-repair solutions, which will allow for more efficient work and decreased downtime, according to Deere.
Deere declined The Messenger's request for comment on the value of the partnership.
SpaceX announced the partnership in a post to X, formerly Twitter, on Monday.
Nearly one-fifth of U.S. farms don’t have access to the internet, according to a 2021 report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In June, the White House announced $42 billion in funding to expand high-speed internet access across the country as part of the Biden administration's Inflation Reduction Act.
In September 2022, Deere requested proposals for satellite communications to connect its fleet of intelligent machines. In the past several years, Deere has invested billions of dollars into modern technologies for its equipment, including self-driving tractors and herbicide sprayers that can differentiate between crops and weeds.
Jonathan Spendlove, senior product manager at Deere, said at an event hosted by the company last April that it projects 10% to 15% of the 1.5 million connected machines it expects to produce by 2026 will use satellites to connect to the cloud.
The 187-year-old company holds a quarter of the global agricultural machinery market share, claiming 40% of the total North American market alone.
(Update: This article was updated to include that Deere declined to comment on the value of the partnership.)
Russians plunder $5M farm vehicles from Ukraine – to find they’ve been remotely disabled
Russian troops in the occupied city of Melitopol have stolen all the equipment from a farm equipment dealership – and shipped it to Chechnya, according to a Ukrainian businessman in the area.
But after a journey of more than 700 miles, the thieves were unable to use any of the equipment – because it had been locked remotely.
By Monica MillerBBC News, Singapore
Deere & Co
Tractor maker John Deere has agreed to give its US customers the right to fix their own equipment.
Previously, farmers were only allowed to use authorised parts and service facilities rather than cheaper independent repair options.
Deere and Co. is one of the world's largest makers farming equipment.
Consumer groups have for years been calling on companies to allow their customers to be able to fix everything from smartphones to tractors.
The American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) and Deere & Co. signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) on Sunday.
"It addresses a long-running issue for farmers and ranchers when it comes to accessing tools, information and resources, while protecting John Deere's intellectual property rights and ensuring equipment safety," AFBF President Zippy Duvall said.
Under the agreement, equipment owners and independent technicians will not be allowed to "divulge trade secrets" or "override safety features or emissions controls or to adjust Agricultural Equipment power levels."
The firm looks forward to working with the AFBF and "our customers in the months and years ahead to ensure farmers continue to have the tools and resources to diagnose, maintain and repair their equipment," Dave Gilmore, a senior vice president at Deere & Co. said.
Farmers are part of a grassroots right-to-repair movement that has been putting pressure on manufacturers to allow customers and independent repair shops to fix their devices.
In 2022, Apple launched a "self-service repair" scheme giving customers the ability to replace their own batteries, screens and cameras of recent iPhones.
The UK and European Union have policies enforcing manufacturers to make spare parts available to customers and independent companies for some electronics.
"Consumers have long been complaining that products not only tend to break down faster than they used to, but that repairing them is often too costly, difficult to arrange for lack of spare parts, and sometimes impossible," according to the European Parliamentary Research Service.
Some US states like New York and Massachusetts and have passed similar measures. President Biden signed an executive order in 2021 calling on the Federal Trade Commission to draw up a countrywide policy allowing customers to repair their own products, particularly in the technology and agriculture sectors.
Oh Deere, Is That Right To Repair Resolution Troubling You?
Over the years a constant in stories covering the right to repair has come from an unexpected direction, the farming community. Their John Deer tractors, a stalwart of North American agriculture, have become difficult to repair due to their parts using DRM restricting their use to authorised Deere agents. We’ve covered farmers using dubious software tools to do the job themselves, we’ve seen more than one legal challenge, and it’s reported that the price of a used Deere has suffered as farmers abandon their allegiance to newer green and yellow machines. Now comes news of a new front in the battle, as a socially responsible investment company has the tractor giant scrambling to block their shareholder motion on the matter.
Deere have not been slow in their fight-back against the threat of right-to-repair legislation and their becoming its unwilling poster-child, with CTO Jahmy Hindman going on record stating that 98% of repairs to Deere machinery can be done by the farmer themself (PDF, page 5) without need for a Deere agent. The question posed by supporters of the shareholder action is that given the substantial risk to investors of attracting a right-to-repair backlash, why would they run such a risk for the only 2% of repairs that remain? We’d be interested to know how Deere arrived at that figure, because given the relatively trivial nature of some of the examples we’ve seen it sounds far-fetched.
It’s beyond a doubt that Deere makes high-quality agricultural machinery that many farmers, including at least one Hackaday scribe, have used to raise a whole heap of crops. The kind of generational brand loyalty they have among their customers simply can’t be bought by clever marketing, it’s been built up over a century and a half. As spectators to its willful unpicking through this misguided use of their repair operation we hope that something like this shareholder move has the desired effect of bringing it to a close. After all, it won’t simply be of benefit to those who wish to repair their tractor, it might just rescue their now-damaged brand before it’s too late.
Curious about previous coverage on this ongoing story? This article from last year will give context.
No comments:
Post a Comment