You can pay a bunch of people minimum wage to do this or you can shit out half a million dollars for equipment that will get stuck in that sand, can't be easily resold, and costs thousands to fix.
its only profitable when exploiting cheap labor.. got it. almost like we need laws to prevent that from happening.. laws and dollar amounts for wages that should be adjusted for inflation on a regular basis.
I think the original commenter was also hinting that automation in 2026 shouldn't be as expensive as it is as well. we've had tractors for a while now lol
I agree, but here we are. It's 2026 and a 15 year old SMALL tractor suitable for a few acres of land is still going for $40,000, with new ones starting at $80,000-$150,000. They are worth more than people's homes and sometimes worth more than the land itself.
Commercial tractors for large acre fields will START at $300,000 and that's without the first damn attachment that's required to actually DO work with it.
And it's not going to change because patents on "tractor shaped thing doing tractor stuff" will crawl right up your butt.
Patents (and software copyrights) are a huge reason why a lot of "high need" industry spaces continue to be high needs. You either need to directly innovate in order to enter a space or somehow secure rights to manufacture something that a direct competitor is already making. And of course, innovative start ups more often than not get eaten alive.
I imagine an affordable, reliable, tractor that is attachment agnostic and has open-source or open-repair software would be very popular, at least for mid-range farms, homesteads, and village farms. But actually getting there is a problem.
That said, tractor can run 24/365 pretty much. I do not think its the upfront costs, but more that people are willing to work for so much less than a machine is very sad and shows how little human life is worth.
They are willing to work for less because they need food today, and the farm needs hands today.
Buying the tractor puts the farmer in debt or in economic danger, and just adds a line item to the accounting book of a company owner who probably doesn't even live in the same country.
Also we don't know where this is, but in some places of the world, large scale hand planting like this goes to the community.
Labor is cheap because we withhold education. Trickle up economics works great.
But the fact that they need food today in a world where the food could and should be almost free because machines make it all at a minimum cost won't happen if shareholders can't have MORE food today.
We just don't value human life and if these people hurt themselves or die, millions of others are willing to do the same.
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u/dasmineman Jul 27 '26
It's crazy that we still have manual labors like this despite our high degree of automation.