Chris Berube

But, you know, this was a surprise to me.

Like, it's the same thing with a lot of cars now, where functions that used to be mechanical, they are now all run by an operating system.

And my car, you know, gives me a driving score, for example, which is very, very annoying.

But for the most part, Jared told me this digitization of the tractor, it's a really positive thing.

Like, in lots of ways, these controls make his job a lot easier.

Yes, there are some drawbacks.

So Jared told me if there's a problem with the tractor, sometimes the software will just slow down the tractor's horsepower.

So at D rating, this is when the software basically makes the tractor unusable.

Like, it slows down the horsepower so much, you cannot use the tractor to do farming.

Right.

So there could be safety reasons for doing this or smaller issues like a sensor isn't working on the tractor.

And Jared gave me this example from his life where he had a problem with the tractor and the operating system slowed it down, but it didn't tell him what was wrong.

So when this happened to Jared, he was faced with a choice, right?

He could either spend a lot of time trying to figure out the problem, you know, waste a day doing that, or he could do the much easier thing, which was call out a technician.

But according to Jared, that's also kind of a pain.

And losing a couple of days during the growing season, that's a total disaster.

Because Jared told me losing a day can cost him a ton of money.

Jared didn't have a guess about how much these kinds of delays have cost him, but in 2023, the Public Interest Research Group, so they're this advocacy group, they estimated downtime for farmers caused by these repair delays cost them about $3 billion that year.

And this is at a time when farmers are facing all sorts of challenges, like unpredictable weather, tariffs, and then on top of that, you have to figure out these software problems.

So the stakes are really, really high for somebody like Jared.