> The farm equipment industry spent 20 years adding complexity and cost. Ursa Ag is wagering that a significant number of farmers never wanted any of it.
Nice tag line but not a complete picture. The "significant number of farmers" in terms of actual market spend driving the equipment industry is not mom-and-pop outfits but rather agri-industrial complexes with machines to match. What they want is (1) availability and (2) ROI. For (1), that is first and foremost subject to legal stipulations like EPA etc, then secondly subject to production availability. For (2), electronics are the name of the game if you are looking to turn a profit with farming because counting every seed, measuring every drop of chem, and tracking every inch of plotted ground leads to better ROI.
Farming is a way of life for a lot of people, not just a business. That’s what is missing from your picture. And by population, small time farmers significantly outnumber industrial outfits, regardless of how much they spend. Sure you can make more money selling the most advanced tech to the biggest spenders. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a market for affordable, reliable equipment that gets the job done. Add on the risky nature of farming and its untenable to trap yourself in high 6 figures of debt and pray that you can optimize your way to enough profit to pay the interest.
Not so. In fact, farming is a way of life for almost nobody in developed countries.[1]
Ursa shows us that there is indeed a market for "simple and reliable" equipment -- but it's not cheap or affordable. There is zero market for "affordable" equipment, because almost nobody does small scale farming anymore
Small farms became economically and socially irrelevant almost a century ago in developed countries. Petroleum based fertilizer and industrial machinery drove the marginal cost of food to zero, and it is now only profitable to farm at very large industrial scale.
The main social outcome there was that starvation and malnutrition became vanishingly rare in these countries.
(In fact, _obesity_ is now, for the first time in human history, a widespread problem for the poorest in these societies.)
Society chose "nobody starving" as a better outcome than preserving romantic small farms for the sake of tradition.
Ah yes, millions of people = “almost nobody”. Do you also believe trans people are irrelevant because they make up less than 1% of the population? Let’s also ignore that plenty of people live on homesteads and do small scale agriculture for their own needs (eg feed for animals) while working other jobs. If all you have is statistics and you’ve never lived in the country, maybe you shouldn’t pretend to be an authority. But please go on and continue telling other people their lived experiences aren’t real. It’s sure to make you plenty of friends. This is exactly why a lot of normies hate tech people, extreme arrogance and a complete inability to see outside your bubble.
Fancy gains in ROI come from smart seeder/sprayer attachments and combine harvesters (a completely different piece of machinery), not from the tractor that's pulling those equipment. At best there's the ROI from less seed overlap, but plenty of GPS systems integrate well into any tractor and the gains are really marginal. I don't think tractor electronics are as important as they're hyped up to be.
Nice tag line but not a complete picture. The "significant number of farmers" in terms of actual market spend driving the equipment industry is not mom-and-pop outfits but rather agri-industrial complexes with machines to match. What they want is (1) availability and (2) ROI. For (1), that is first and foremost subject to legal stipulations like EPA etc, then secondly subject to production availability. For (2), electronics are the name of the game if you are looking to turn a profit with farming because counting every seed, measuring every drop of chem, and tracking every inch of plotted ground leads to better ROI.