Big ag tractors auctioned as salvage, engines trashed w cutting torch

[CalG]

Precision Farming components are added to tractors and equipment older than these every day. If you are going to post about a topic, at least have some grain of knowledge about it.

You must have missed the smile emoticon at the end of the expression.

If I have my grains of knowledge all lined up correctly, Ag businessmen, i.e. farmers, "dick around with tractors" a lot.
And most of them are likely to know how to put horsepower like those scrap units back into service if they were needed.

 

[California]

You're right about that. Air quality was and still is a big problem in the Great Central Valley from Stockton to Bakersfield. All the traffic on I5 and Hwy 99 coupled with the huge number of farm diesels in the Valley make air quality places like Fresno still marginal.

Yeah.

I never thought about air pollution until I started flying down to Los Angeles in the early 80's several times a year on my job. Getting off the plane and taking a breath was like when you use bleach cleaning the shower and your lungs burn. Except there was no escape for the entire week, I got a sore throat that didn't improve while I was there. My first thought was how can anyone live like this? Suddenly it made sense why common people were pressuring the legislature to improve things. Like California's huge Central Valley, Los Angeles is a basin where nasty air can't escape, in summer it just sits there and brews into concentrated poison. When kids can't go outdoors for recess you know its bad.

California is livable again after all the new regulations. It worked. But sorry that this impacts those in other states.

 

[ericm979]

If we didn't have emissions regs the other states would be affected- because the prevailing wind blows east, they breathe California's exhaust.

I grew up in California. The air in the bay area in 70s and 80s was visibly dirtier than it is today. The emissions regs suck in a lot of ways but they have made the air cleaner even though there's a lot more cars. And by and large the auto industry has been able to engineer engines that not only are much cleaner but make more power too. My current "economy" car is a second faster in the 1/4 mile than the '67 GTO I learned to drive in, and is far cleaner. And it gets much better fuel mileage than the GTO too. Eventually the diesel truck and tractor engineers will be able to engineer engines that are cleaner and more powerful without the reliability issues we sometime see today.

The tractors in question are probably from California's ag assistance program, where they subsidize owners to upgrade to new cleaner tractors.
Carl Moyer Memorial Air Quality Standards Attainment Program. The ag assistance program requires destroying the engine of the old tractor.