A Repairable, No-Tech Tractor

0:00Complexity got packaged as improvement. It was a constant push to make things more complex. And I just never bought into complexity being the equivalent of improvement. Is there actually an appreciable improvement for the user? Or is it just complexity for the sake of complexity?

0:23Hello, and welcome to the 404 Media Podcast, where we bring you untold stories from hidden worlds, both online and IRL. 404 Media is a journalist-owned company and needs your support. To subscribe, go to 404media.co. Subscribers get unlimited access to our articles, early access to interview episodes like this one, and bonus segments on our weekly podcast. I'm this week's host, Jason Kebler, and I'm talking to Doug Wilson of Ursa Ag, an Alberta, Canada-based company that is selling a repairable no-tech tractor. It's not often that we have companies on this podcast, but listeners of the show will know I've been covering the right to repair movement for years.

1:01One of the things I've written most about is the frustration that farmers feel with agriculture giant John Deere, which has made their tractors really difficult to repair by loading it up with tech, lobbying against right to repair legislation, and making parts and diagnostic tools and repair guides hard to access. When I write about right to repair, people often say, why don't farmers just vote with their dollars and buy something else? Well, all the major tractor companies have more or less done the same thing that Deere has done. They've added software locks, sensors, and digital rights management to their tractors.

1:34So there really wasn't any other alternative. That's basically the theory behind URSA AG, which is selling a repairable dumb tractor specifically to provide an alternative in the market. I spoke with Doug about how one creates a tractor company, how it all works, and what the response has been.

2:00Hey, I'm really excited to be joined today by Doug Wilson. Doug is with Ursa Ag, which is making a new tractor. I don't know if it's fair to call it a dumb tractor, but I've been referring to it as a dumb tractor in that it's a repairable tractor. It's a tractor that doesn't have a lot of the sensors that have kind of become very common in modern tractors that have made it very hard for farmers to repair their tractors, which has been kind of a universal thing that I've been writing about for years, this lack of repairability and sort of all of the problems that it causes. Doug, I was curious if you could just tell me a little bit about yourself and your background and about Ursa Ag.

2:46Sure thing. Thanks for having me on here. So myself, I grew up on a farm, a dairy farm, long time ago now because I am very old. On the dairy farm, we use just the tractors that were available at the time. So we're talking about the 80s and 90s now. It just kind of works. We'd get up in the morning, we'd start a tractor, we'd go to work. At the end of the day, we'd park it and be done for the day. And that logic is not lost on me. If stuff just works, it helps. I went from there into mill writing, where we were building machinery for sawmills. But I got to do a lot of machinery design and hands-on fabrication.

3:27And then after that, I got into construction. A lot of machinery repairing, but a lot of machinery purchasing. And then I realized just how bad we were getting gouged. I started selling machinery. And that's how I got into this business in the first place. But then a customer came to me and said, I need a tractor that I can afford to hand down to my son because I'm trying to pass on the business and he can't afford my tractors. So that's where all of this came from was that simple discussion with a customer, an existing customer who had a need. And he also helped me out with the original design.

4:05And we got a tractor together and he still uses it and loves it. it's gone well and he didn't need or want computers on his tractor. He wanted to be able to turn it on at the start of the day, use it and shut it off at the end of the day. That was the requirement. It needed power and it needed to work. So that's what we built. Right. So, I mean, the website is pretty straightforward. It's built Alberta tough. You're in Alberta, Canada, I believe, right? Correct. So the price right, no frills, back to basics, built to last. And then you say, our tractors are built without computer controls by design.

4:40This intentional simplicity delivers reliability. For people who don't know, can you explain a little bit about what has happened in the tractor market over the last couple decades? I sure can. And I don't know that it's exclusive to the tractor market. I'm old enough to remember a time when we didn't have computers in every house. and I saw that move in and then there wasn't cell phones in every pocket and I saw that move in. There's a crossover there to the tractor industry and that is that complexity got packaged as improvement and it was a constant push to make things more complex, more integrated, more easily controlled by the manufacturer because it's harder for other people to it's harder for other people to tap into them and make things change and make things work and I just never bought into complexity being the equivalent of improvement is is there actually an appreciable improvement for the user or is it just complexity for the sake of complexity and I don't believe that's a necessary thing.

5:56Yeah. So in my own reporting on this, it's basically like, it's John Deere, but as you mentioned, it's happening in every industry. It's happening with smart fridges and smart microwaves, internet connected washing machines, things like that. But then in the tractor market, John Deere has started adding different sensors to all these different components within a tractor. A lot of the tractors these days kind of drive themselves. It's called precision agriculture. And as we've reported over and over again, when these things break, sometimes it is just like one of these sensors that break and then the tractor won't run itself.

6:35And you need to call up a John Deere dealership in order to get them to come out and repair your tractor. And I think that I've heard from farmers over and over again that they're very frustrated with this experience. it can be very expensive. And it can also take a long time to get someone to come out. Time is often of the essence if you're trying to harvest a crop or plant a crop or work on your crops and you only have a few days to do it, leave these critical windows. And if your tractor is broken during that and John Deere can't come out for a week, well, then your crops die. So I did a story a couple of years ago about old models of tractors gaining value because of this phenomenon that you're talking about where there's actually a demand for older John Deere tractors that predate all these sensors and all of this precision agriculture and needing an internet connection and all that for these tractors to work.

7:34Had you followed that at all? The fact that there was demand for these decades old tractors? I have. And I talk to farmers every day. And I hear about it every day, how they went back and bought something from 1987 so that they wouldn't need a computer on it. But now it's played out. There's 16 ,000 hours on it. Everything's war. And they're looking to get something new and they don't want something that's going to code out. Or a great example is a friend of mine who bought an$800 ,000 John Deere to drive an auger. So this basically stationary power, he's backing it up to an auger and running it during harvest.

8:15And$800 ,000 it cost, and one day it quit. Wouldn't start. Nobody knew why. The tech came out from John Deere. He couldn't solve the problem. It had to be trucked back to the dealer. The dealer had it about two months, and they did decipher the problem. The problem was the radio had failed. And because the radio failed and it's all tied together in what they call a can bus system, the tractor would not start. So that seems like unnecessary risk, unnecessary technology to me. yeah yeah i have heard from farmers who yeah haven't been able to run their tractors because uh yeah that these sort of like optional or what should be optional equipment breaks and then you know it's not that they are unable to repair their tractors like they have the technical ability to repair their tractors it's not that these farmers aren't good mechanics it's that they are artificially locked out of the tractors because you need software.

9:24You mentioned coded out. I guess that refers to when you have an error code on the tractor and you need the dealer to come out and clear that using their proprietary software. Correct. You designed this tractor with repairability in mind. Can you talk a little bit about the mindset of the farmers that you've talked to who want this? Because you can design this reliability and, you know, I'm sure that you make a good product, but it will break, I'm sure, under certain circumstances. And hopefully, farmers will be able to fix these themselves, right? Yes. I've always said there's only two types of machines in the world.

10:06There's broken ones and then there's ones that will break. It's an inevitability. So what we try to build in is the simplicity. You know, no one has to come out and reboot your clutch with their computer. You just turn some wrenches and you can fix the problem. Maybe adjust a linkage, change a hose, that sort of thing. It's all done with the simplest parts that we can get our hands on. And it's all done, you know, exposed so you can see what you need to fix without taking the engine out first. It is what my high school football coach described as the KISS method. And everybody's heard it. You know, keep it simple, stupid.

10:43Makes sense to me. Complexity is the enemy. Yeah, I want to talk a little bit about price just because this is a tech show. A lot of our listeners probably are not farmers, although we do write about rights for repair for farmers and right to repair more broadly. But one thing that I was shocked to learn when I first started writing about this issue is that over the last, I don't know, decade, decade plus, a lot of tractors cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not upwards. I don't know if any of them cost a million dollars, but they're very, very expensive. And maybe really big farms can afford to buy a tractor outright.

11:26But a lot of the ways that this works now is you end up leasing a tractor from a Case IH or from John Deere. And when you decide to lease these tractors, you often have to sign these very legally, very long and arduous terms of service agreements. And some of those terms of service say that you can't fix your own tractor. So can you just talk a little bit about that? Were those figures I tossed out there correct? And is it the case that a lot of farmers end up in this cycle where they are leasing their equipment from a dealer and that limits what they can do with their machines? you're right in Canada, at least tractors do get over a million dollars.

12:11I don't know. Obviously there's a, there's an exchange rate between the Canadian and the U S dollars. So maybe in the U S they don't at any rate, your question was regarding lease deals contracts that they're signing. I understand there has been some gains on right to repair, but basically the, the farmer is signing onto a lease. the and these are the big farms because most farmers just can't afford to we're we're in we're in a huge farming area and there definitely are big farms that just go get brand new equipment every couple of years because they don't want the downtime and those are the guys who are really married to john deere or case or whoever they work with although the biggest farms all definitely are John Deere and they are effectively locked out of their equipment they're there you know there are some subscriptions you know there are we're starting to get private shops that have the software to get in but you're still paying a guy 200 250 dollars an hour to come out and fix the thing it's not as easy as you know the the mechanic on the farm being able to wrench right in And what I will say, and I think what is important to say is that high-tech stuff, that million-dollar John Deere tractor has a place.

13:35They have technology that is well worth the money. What they call their CN spray system, where it only sprays the weeds, it doesn't spray the ground that doesn't have weeds. Brilliant technology. Love it. But that is 5 % of what a farm does. and so many applications for tractors on farms just don't require the technology. Even the technology that goes into a calculator is not required for most farming applications. Yeah, I do want to talk more about that. I'm curious, when you were building the URSA Ag tractors, it looks like you have four different models. What price point were you targeting?

14:22I'm sure it varies depending on what you're getting and that sort of thing. But it sounded like from the story you told at the beginning, you are targeting a lower price point than a million dollars. Yes. Yeah, we definitely don't have anything worth a million. So as a general target, we were trying to be able to retail at half the price of the competition. We make that for most of the competition. There are some lesser known brands that are maybe 1.8 times our price. But the bigger the tractor we build, the bigger the difference between our price and the competition becomes. Because everything's just more expensive.

15:03The less companies building the tractors, the higher the price gets. And I don't believe for a minute that's because they're more complicated to build. It's because when you eliminate competition, you start increasing the price because you can, not because you have to.

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20:43How does one go about manufacturing a new tractor and bringing it to market and all of that? I know that you have a background in this industry, but finding the factories to make it, finding the parts and all this, how long was this process and how did you go about doing it? It definitely takes some time. It's not for the faint of heart. I would suggest the step number one is to put good sense aside and carry on anyway. As far as sourcing parts go, anybody can buy a transmission. They're out there. How much you pay for it can change dramatically based on where you buy it, but they're out there.

21:23It's getting the right selection of parts to keep the price down. That's what really matters. And then having the capacity to build parts yourself is pretty critical. We actually partnered with a great group of guys that have state-of-the-art laser and bending technology. And basically, if we can draw the part in AutoCAD, they will make it. And I'll have it back within a day or two. And that has, without a doubt, driven our success and shortened our R &D by at least half. Just the ability to get those parts so quickly and so precisely has changed our world, for sure. What was the most difficult part of this whole process?

22:10The most difficult part of the whole process was probably tying the first engine to the first transmission. That adaption without really knowing how to do it, that was a huge hurdle, cost a lot of money, took a lot of time. Once that was done, everything else just looked easier by comparison. So I do want to talk about precision agriculture a little bit. Like you mentioned, John Deere's sea and spray. As I understand it, it is like an AI machine vision type thing where it can identify weeds. I think that's how it works. I'm not exactly sure. But there is increasingly a lot of AI in farming. There is a lot of self-driving technology.

22:59I believe that with some of the newer John Deere tractors, you can kind of plant your rows of crops closer together and things like this. And again, forgive me, I'm not a farmer, but this is what farmers have told me. But I'm curious, and it sounds like there definitely is a place for this. And I think that it probably has increased the crop yields of certain types of farms and things like that. But it does sound like a lot of what farmers do can be accomplished with the like, quote unquote, old tradition, traditional methods of farming. And I'm curious if you could talk a little bit more about like, what are what are farmers doing with their tractors most of the time?

23:39I don't think I can disagree with anything you said there. All of that was correct. The CN spray is identifying the weeds and spraying them. I didn't link that to AI, but it probably is that that would make perfect sense. The satellite steering, it's basically a$10 ,000 bolt-on option. So it's not really a good reason for tractors to be worth a million dollars. But we can put that onto our tractors too if that's something the customer wants. But we wouldn't put it on as a standard feature because the bulk of tractors are not doing heavy fieldwork. The bulk of tractors are hauling feed wagons or mixer wagons or dragging bale processors to chop up bedding for livestock.

24:23The big gain in satellite guidance was not accidentally planting the same piece of ground twice, especially on expensive seeds, because the seeds will then fight with each other and only half of them will grow. So you get an expensive seed crop like potatoes and that, you know, 500 acres of planting could pay for your satellite guidance system. Because if you double plant a couple of rows on every pass, you're wasting piles of money on seed. But that's one thing that happens one time a year on a farm. Most of the rest of the year, the tractors are used for dumb tasks, to use your term. TASA don't require any computer at all.

25:07They require the farmer to get in, drive the tractor, maybe pick up a hay bale, move it across the yard, fill a feed wagon, then tow that feed wagon, go feed the cows, that sort of thing. There's far more applications where the tractor doesn't need computers than what does. Manure pumps are another one. There's guys that have manure pumps run on, especially this time of year. There's no computer necessary. It's just stationary power. I guess I'm starting to think as you're saying this, I guess if I own a farm, is it something where maybe you could use a precision ag tractor for that one task that you need one time and then use your tractor the rest of the time?

25:52Or is it something where that's not really an option for most farmers where they need to pick one? And is there such a thing as like tractor rental for a week or a day or what have you? So there is. I don't know all that much about it. I know one of our great suppliers, they farm a pile of land and they will rent combines and heavy tractors just for seeding and harvest. I know those deals are expensive, but I guess it's a great way of not having to suffer the depreciation on the equipment or the repair costs later on. The reality is a small farm will have four to seven tractors. So it's not a matter of picking one.

26:43The tractor that you pull your seed drill with probably does very little else in the course of a year because it's too large to do the around the yard tasks. I can't really think of a situation where an actual operating farm wouldn't need at least three tractors to cover their needs just for different applications. but also in the heavy use like the harvest and the planting, you're going to need five tractors just to cover all the tasks that have to be done at the same time. So I want to talk a little bit about the response to IHRSA Ag since you've announced this. I learned about it from an article in a YouTube video a couple weeks ago.

27:31I'm not sure exactly when you announced it, but I believe you went to a trade show and sort of showed it off. What were you kind of expecting and what has the response been so far? Honestly, I wasn't expecting a whole lot. I've done a couple of interviews in the past. We've had good response, but typically it's been five or eight people over a matter of months that will contact and say, I heard you on this radio interview or I heard you here or there. And I always thought that was great. A few people contact. this particular time it's gone a little more uh viral we're now over a thousand contacts in a month off of that one video i did at that trade show i will give farms.com a lot of credit for that they they have they have decent reach especially in the u.s but we've had response from many countries australia is a big one a lot of response from australia i got a handwritten letter from a farmer in France who doesn't own a computer.

28:33He heard about it and wanted us to mail him information about the tractors. South Africa, Barbados, places like that, which probably 30 countries we've heard from that all got it off this. So it's been a busy time around here, definitely. Well, you are a Canada-based company. Again, I've been covering this for seven, eight years now, the Right to Repair movement informs. And one thing I've heard from, I think, a not so well-informed readership is like, well, why don't farmers just vote with their dollars and buy something else? And what I was telling you is like, well, deer is kind of the only game in town and case.