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I watched several videos on a Combine Harvester's inner workings and I still don't understand how this thing works.
(lemmy.world)
this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2025
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There's a theory in my family.
You have true farmers, then you have factory farms. Factory Farms are not just for animals. They exclusively produce cash crop, they exclusively optimize profit, they also do hardly any of the work themselves. They'll be in a combine, sure. But combines are quite literally automatic nowadays, so it becomes a second office where they're negotiated deals and labor and contracts and taxes.
The true farmers on the other hand? Way back when, before Monsanto and Tyson, farm communities took care of specific jobs for specific farms because one of those farmers found a really good way to do it, or is just much more efficient.
That left a little more time for each of the farmers to work on something they were skilled with, or do a hobby even.
Guess what was a popular hobby amongst farmers? Electric Scale Trains. These farmers also invented and designed and engineered a lot of these tools and equipment, because they had to repair their machines quicker than a service tech could come out.
So you get robust engineering out of a Farmer. Then the Factory Farmer comes in and says "Hey, I got a friend named John Deer who could mass produce these, and the non-presceint Farmer said cool."
BAM innovations stifled.
Seems history shows innovations came from many individual sources but those Factory Farms weren't a thing. Corporations did help develop ideas into products but large scale Monsanto style factory farms weren't a thing during the time combine harvesters were being invented.
It seems quite the opposite: the efficiency of the combine harvesters made factory farms much more likely.
I think you might have missed the point of my story.
Farmers were the engineers designing these things. Because that's all the kind of farmers there was.
Now we have Factory Factory farms, but there are still some small farmers doing this stuff. We don't have many true farmer/engineers left. And it's bad for all of us.
It'll circle back