New Tractor Company as if we didn't have enough

[Puddingmannz]

There is so much to be Gained in Ag just by supporting and pushing No-till Agriculture in as many aspects as possible. Less tractor hours needed, less tractors, Even in intense vegetable production gains can be had.

Utilisation of Brushless motors etc have a huge effect too, for example I use ag leader Suredrive brushless motors on my corn planter (kinze 2000 finger pickup), I could run a Hyd drive, but unless its load sense i have to run a fixed engine speed to get the flow to run the machine, Electric Motors allow me to run any engine speed i want, using the factory alternator on the tractor (1996 MF390). I therefore drive it on the foot accelerator, no power robbing HST, no CVT, just a mechanical box, and when planting engine RPM is about 1400, it halved the fuel consumption.

I get the same result with less complication. Now i know if i had a Vaccum planter i would need a Hydraulic drive to run that and it would create demand, but surely we are not far away from manufacturers able to offer electric fans, probably would elminate any change of singulation issues from hyd flow spikes.

Love the EV tech, I support Mean Green mowers for customers, they work well!

EV tech will be implemented in areas of the industry were torque is not the limiting factor, it is true that EV cars and Trains put out loads of torque, but they do it in bursts to maintain rolling momentum, constant loading creates heat, heat wears things faster

 

[MoKelly]

Yeah, and someone once said that someday just plain old steam would be able to power freight trains and ocean liners. LOL What an idiot that guys was, huh.

An Englishman. They put him on a stamp.

MoKelly

 

[Marinemammal]

I bought a used battery-powered ATV that I use on our cow operation. I am very happy with it. It's my first experience with an electric vehicle so the learning curve was steep and made steeper by the fact that the manufacturer went belly-up not long after it was built. I bought it from a guy who was in on the production of the machines, but there is no parts department or service department. ATV use is different from tractor use. It needs charged for more hours than I use it--when you count actual use time. When it was down for repairs, I went back to a gas 4-wheeler, and the first thing that I noticed was that I never had to start the electric ATV--just push the throttle and go. The battery is Lithium. I use it between 50 volts at full charge down to about 45 volts when I get through with it for the day. Charging takes about 3-5 hours depending on the final voltage.

 

[Jstpssng]

Fuel truck

Just like all of the other off grid heavy equipment throughout the world. I do take umbrage with the poster who suggested that diesel will be cheaper when the rest of us aren't using it... have you checked out the price of buggywhips lately?

 

[/pine]

IMO the compact tractor market is headed for some consolidation...may not be tomorrow but it's going to happen sooner or later...

...If the big fish decide to offer electric power plants for their proven models...they can crush the little fish trying to break into the e-tractor market...

 

[PuffyC]

Fuel truck

So maybe the answer is instead of paying for a fuel truck, somebody comes out and just does a battery swap, sorta like what this company is doing for EVs today: How battery swapping could reduce EV charge time to just 10 minutes

 

[lman]

So maybe the answer is instead of paying for a fuel truck, somebody comes out and just does a battery swap, sorta like what this company is doing for EVs today: How battery swapping could reduce EV charge time to just 10 minutes

Can I get that in the 2.5 gallon size?

 

[timbrr]

I'm not a farmer. I use my 51HP diesel tractor to develop and maintain a 22ac property. An American would probably call me a 'homesteader'. I prefer to work in short bursts, when the weather is nice (or at least tolerable). Most of the time I have either a 4-in-1 bucket or forks on the loader. I have a 500kg block of steel+concrete as a counterweight on the 3PH. An electric tractor would suit my usage pattern perfectly.

If a battery was available in the form of a 3PH counterweight, then not only would it move weight from the front to the back (which would be fantastic from a physics point of view), but I could also have the option of just buying a second one for more demanding times of year, and as an emergency backup for the house. Whilst I use one, the other would be charging. Swapping quick-hitch implements currently takes seconds, so swapping quick-hitch battery packs would be just as fast. Double the endurance with about a minute of downtime for 'refueling'.

There are a lot of 'homesteaders' like me. The use-case for an electric tractor already exists. Complications are next-to-nil for folks like us. If I could have bought one a couple of years ago, when the purchasing decision had to be made, I would have. Without hesitation.

 

[timbrr]

But I do get tired of the BS illusion that "somehow" going electric is "cleaner". That's BS for now. We have to go nuclear power first

The 'dirty-ness' of grid power is a function of the fuel source used by electrical generator(s) for your part of the world/country/state/county — it has nothing to do with the cleanliness of EVs, and it is misleading (or, at the very least, a mistake) to conflate the two.

If your part of the world is dominated by Jurassic-era generators, then sure, your grid electricity will be dirty, and everything that relies on that electricity will be dirty. EV technology in and of itself is 'clean' — certainly much cleaner than anything based on dinosaur juice — but whether or not grid electricity is clean, well, that's a different issue. Analogy: An engine can be designed to run clean. If you give it a good quality fuel, it does indeed run clean. If, however, you feed it poor quality fuel, then it runs dirty. The fault lies not with the engine, rather with the fuel. It is illogical to blame the engine when you should blame the fuel. Likewise it is illogical to blame EVs when you should be blaming grid electricity.

I live in a part of the world that hasn't seen a coal power station in years, and is in the process of phasing out gas. We generated over half of our electricity from solar and wind in 2019, and that fraction has increased every year. Another nearby state is almost totally hydro. In these states going electric is obviously and undeniably "cleaner" than sticking with dino juice. No-one could mount a remotely-serious argument otherwise.

But it wasn't always this way. Twenty years ago we had coal stations producing a fair fraction of base load. Now they are extinct. A nearby state is retiring all of their coal stations because coal simply can't compete on price in the national energy market — solar is so much cheaper. The same story is common everywhere I look. The grid itself has become greener, and is getting greener every single day. It is impossible for a coal power plant to even get planning permission any more, let alone financing. So if you buy an EV today, and charge it from the grid, every single day you own it the fuel will just get greener and greener.

It's not an "illusion". It's just math and market forces.

Please don't think that just because dinosaurs still roam the streets in your neck of the woods, that they do so everywhere else in the world.

It won't be that long before the only place you can find diesel will be in a museum.

PS: It took 13 years for New York City to transition from >95% horse-drawn buggies to >95% ICE cars. 13. Folks under about 70 years of age that assert "it won't happen in my lifetime" might want to re-calibrate their opinion based on the lessons of history.

 

[timbrr]

batteries, solar panels, etc use significant amounts of high quality rare earth elements, which there isn't a lot of, relatively speaking.

That's a common misconception. There's actually ridiculously large amounts of rare earth elements available. One is even more common than copper. They are called 'rare' not because the extractable amounts are low, but because the deposits of those elements are sparse. You get less of them per m³ of ore mined.

What appreciating the subtle difference does is shift the bottleneck from "how many devices can be built in total before we run out" to "how many devices can be built each year". Extraction limits will cause the currently exponential growth curve to become more linear, that's all. Everyone will have an EV... eventually. The world will not run out of rare earth elements.