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- [00:00]
A
Complexity 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?
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Hello and welcome to the 404 Media
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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. One 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
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B
parts and diagnostic tools and repair guides hard to access.
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C
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. So 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.
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B
Hey, 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, it, 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 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.
- [02:47]
A
Sure thing. Thanks for having me on here. So myself, I grew up on a farm, dairy farm, long time ago now because I am, I'm 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 worked. We, we'd get up in the morning, we'd start 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, into millwriting where we were building machinery for sawmills. But I got to do a lot of machinery design and, and hands on fabrication. And then after that I got back, 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, 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, with a customer, an existing customer who had a, had a need. And he also helped me out with the original design and 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.
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B
Right. So I mean the website is pretty straightforward. Like it's built Alberta tough. You're in Alberta, Canada, I believe. Right?
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A
Correct.
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B
It says price. Right. No frills. Back to basics. Built to last. And then you say our tractors are built without computer controls by design. This 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?
- [04:54]
A
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.
- [05:57]
B
Yeah, 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, you know, 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 kind of 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 and you need to call up a John Deere dealership in order to get, get them to come out and repair your tractor. And I think that I've heard from farmers kind of 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. Like, you know, time is often of the essence if you're trying to harvest a crop or plant a crop or you know, work on your crops, and you only have like 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 years ago about kind of like old models of tractors gaining value because of this phenomenon that you're talking about where there's actually like a demand for older John Deere tractors that predate all these sensors and all of this like precision agriculture and needing an Internet connection and all that for these tractors to work.
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C
Had you followed that at all?
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B
Like the fact that there was demand for these like decades old tractors?
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A
I have, and I, 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. 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. And $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.
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B
Yeah, Yeah. I have heard from farmers who, yeah, haven't been able to run their tractors because, yeah, these sort of, like, optional or what should be optional equipment breaks.
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C
And then, you know, it's not that
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B
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're artificially locked out of the tractors because you need software. You mentioned coded out. I guess that refers to when, you know, you have, like, an error code on the tractor and you need the dealer to come out and clear that using their, like, proprietary software.
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A
Correct.
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B
You design 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 for reliability. And, you know, I'm sure that you make a good product, but. But it will break, I'm sure, under certain circumstances. And hopefully farmers will be able to fix these themselves. Right?
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A
Yes. I've always said there's only two types of machines in the world. There's broken ones, and then there's ones that will break. It's an inevitability. So what we try to build in is. Is the simplicity. You know, no one has to come out and reboot your clutch with their computer. You could 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. Makes sense to me. Complexity is the enemy.
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B
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 right to 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.
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C
And you know, maybe really big farms
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B
can afford to buy a tractor outright. But 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, like you often have to sign these very legally, very long and arduous
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C
terms of service agreements.
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B
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 like figures I tossed out there correct? And is it the case that a lot of farmers like kind of end up in this cycle where they are leasing their equipment from a dealer and that kind of limits, like what they can do with their machines?
- [12:06]
A
You're right. In Canada at least, tractors do get over a million dollars. I don't know. Obviously there's a, there's an exchange rate between the Canadian and U.S. dollars. So maybe in the U.S. they don't. any rate, your question was regarding lease deals, contracts that they're signing. I, I understand there has been some gains on right to repair, but basically the, the farmer is signing on to a lease 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, they're, 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 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 the what, what I will say, and I think what is important to say is, is that high tech stuff, that million dollar John Deere tractor has a place, they have technology that is well worth the money. What they call their see and 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.
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B
Yeah, I do want to talk more about that. I'm curious. Sort of like when you were building the Ursa AG tractors, it looks like you have four different models. Like what price point were you targeting? I'm sure it kind of varies depending on what you're getting and that sort of thing. But like, it sounded like from the story you told at the beginning, like you, you are targeting a lower price point than a million dollars.
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A
Yes. Yeah, we, we definitely don't have anything worth a million. So as general target, we were trying to be able to retail at half the price of the competition. We, 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, the bigger the difference between our price and the competition becomes because everything's just more expensive. The less companies building the tractors, the higher the price gets. And I don't believe for a minute that's because they're more complex, complicated to build. It's because when you eliminate competition, you start increasing the price because you can, not because you have to.
- [15:31]
C
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B
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C
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B
How 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 you know, finding the factories to make it, finding the the parts and all this, like how long was this process and how did you go about doing?
- [21:02]
A
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. You know how much you pay for it can change dramatically based on where you buy it, but they're out there. It'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 and D by at least half. Just the ability to get those parts so quickly and so precisely has changed our world for sure.
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B
What was like the most difficult part of this whole process,
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the 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, that was a, 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.
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B
So I do want to talk about precision agriculture a little bit. Like you mentioned, John Deere, 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 like self driving technology. I believe that with some of the newer John Deere tractors you can kind of plant your rows of crops like 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 like 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?
- [23:39]
A
I don't think I can disagree with anything you said there. All of that was correct. The see and 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. Like 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, you know, the bulk of tractors are not doing heavy field work. The bulk of tractors are hauling feed wagons or mixer wagons or dragging bale processors to chop up bedding for their for stock. The 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. 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 every, on every pass, you're wasting piles of money on seed. But that, that's one thing that happens one time a year on a farm. The most of the rest of the year. The tractors are used for dumb tasks to use, to use your term, tasks that don't require any computer at all. They 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 running, especially this time of year. There's no computer necessary. It's, it's just stationary power.
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B
I guess like I'm starting to think as you're saying this, like I guess if I own a farm, is it something where like maybe you could use a precision ag tractor for like that one task that you need one time and then use, you know, your tractor the rest of the time? Or is it something where, that's not really an option for, for most farmers where they kind of need to, to pick one. Is there such a thing as like tractor rental for a week or a day or what have you?
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A
So there is. I don't, I don't know all that much about it. I know one of, one of our great suppliers, they farm a, 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. The 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.
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B
So I want to talk a little bit about the response to Ursa Ag since you've announced this. I learned about it from an article in a YouTube video a couple of weeks ago. I'm not sure exactly when you announced it, but I believe you went to like a trade show and sort of showed it off. What were you kind of expecting and what has the response been so far?
- [27:41]
A
I 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 the matter 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. You know, a few people, a few people contact. This particular time it's gone a little more 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 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. He heard about it and wanted us to mail him information about the tractors. South Africa, Barbados, places like that with probably 30 countries we've heard from that all got it off this. So it's been, it's been a busy time around here. Definitely.
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B
Well, you are a Canada based company. Again, I've been covering this for, you know, seven, eight years now, like the, the right to repair movement in farms. 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 him is like, well, Deere is kind of the only game in town and case and they, they kind of have like the same, the same policies, more or less. You know, I guess maybe there are like some Smaller tractor manufacturers, but I feel like a lot of them had sort of the same repair policies and all of that. And it now seems like there will be another option in that market, and it's one where, you know, it's being built with right to repair in mind, reliability in mind, that sort of thing. I'm curious, like, what is your capacity to get tractors to the United States, to Barbados, to France, et cetera? Like, what, do you have a plan here or is this all kind of new?
- [29:55]
A
Well, this is very much all come at us in the last four or five weeks. So we have set up a distribution in the US we will start. Tractors will start crossing our southern border here in about two weeks. As far as production capacity enough to satisfy the US Demand, that's going to take a little longer. We are working on that, though. We already had a plan to triple our production capacity this year. And it's a good thing because if we didn't, we. We would be underwater right now. But at this point, we're delivering about four months behind on orders. And that in the tractor business is not bad. That's actually above average for new, for new equipment. We'll make it happen. If, if we, if we need to make 10,000 tractors a year, we will make it happen. How are we going to make it happen? I never have all the answers before I start something. We'll figure it out.
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B
Can you give us a sense of, of the scale? I mean, I don't want to ask, like, how many tractors have you sold? But, like, are we talking 10 tractors or like hundreds of tractors, thousands of tractors?
- [31:09]
A
Well, we're not at 100 yet. We'll build more this year than we have in the past total, which is probably good because we've improved the quality of our tractors dramatically in the last year. So it's probably better that we're making more tractors now than we were a year ago. But as we, as we improve the quality, a lot of that is improving the quality without making them more complex. That's, that's critically important to me.
- [31:32]
C
What do you think?
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B
It says that the demand seems to be so high for this and that people seem to be so excited for this. Like, it's, it's, it's a pretty. I know it's been very like a journey for you to make it, et cetera, but the whole point of it is that it's a pretty simple tractor and yet people are, like, going nuts for it. So, I mean, what do you think it says about the problems that farmers have been Facing with this issue, I
- [31:57]
A
think the response overwhelmingly is all the same. Farmers need them for 100 different reasons. One guy will be doing one job with it, one guy will be doing a different job with it. But at the end of the day, the attraction is the same one. For their average, what we. What we would call a chore tractor, meaning they get in, they feed cows, they move stuff around the yard. Basic stuff. Not a field tractor, but a chore tractor for the average farmer to spend $300,000 on. That is wild. Like, I can't even imagine it. Which means the average farmer then has to go into the used market and buy someone else's problems, or go back 25 years and get something that probably worked fine for its whole life but is houred out now, and he's going to have to spend 50 or 60 grand fixing it up before he can really put it to work. You match the price with the frustration of having to call the dealer once a week because the tractor's gone into limp mode and they can't figure out how to get it working again. Restricted power mode is one of the most frustrating things in the world. It's intended just so you can. So you can drive back to your yard, but that's not what you needed to do. You didn't need to get back to the yard. You needed to get your work done. So that. That's a major frustration with, with our, with our customer base.
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B
So I don't. This isn't directly related, but this is something that I've heard kind of over and over again from farmers. And I'm curious if you've been following it. And the reason I want to ask you about it is because it has to do a fair bit with tech billionaires and things like this. But I know that there is a movement in the US at least, where a lot of farmland and farms are being consolidated and bought up by investors, and a lot of farmland is being bought up by investors and people like Bill Gates and things like this. I'm curious if you're seeing anything similar in Canada, if you've been following this and if you're able to kind of like, explain why this is of concern to small farmers. I feel like there's like a broader, like, consolidation that is. That is happening.
- [34:16]
A
So there absolutely is. The largest farm in North America at about 400,000 acres, runs on both sides of the border. I can't remember what their split is. I think about 300,000 acres in Canada and about a hundred thousand in the U.S. something like that, so the, the general concern from the small farmer is he can't grow enough to get himself to the scale of being able to afford the equipment. Because it's not just tractors. All equipment has gone wild in price. So you can't scale himself up enough that he can afford to own the equipment to do the job efficiently because he can't afford to buy the land, because he's competing with huge corporations on to purchase land. I know Bill Gates has bought a lot of land. I'm not right into what he's doing with it, whether he's just buying it and renting it back to farmers, which is a pretty common buy and hold investment strategy. You know, I wish I had money I needed to park like that. I don't. So I, I'm not right into it whether, whether, like I assume Bill Gates is not hopping in a tractor and farming any of it. So if he's renting it back to small farms or medium sized farms, then there's not a lot of harm in that. But it does create higher demand for the land, which puts higher prices on it, makes it harder for the, for the average farmer to expand enough to have the scale to be able to afford the machinery the way it is now.
- [35:50]
B
I think that's pretty much all I have for you. This is very fascinating. I'm wondering if we're going to start to see this in other industries as well. I know that again, washing machines, dryers. It's quite hard to just buy a straightforward washing machine that has a timer on it without wifi, without having to download a firmware update in order to wash your clothes, things like that. Are you aware of this happening in other industries as well? Like, I know that there's demand from consumers. They're like, I just want something that is like, straightforward and will work.
- [36:23]
A
Given the number of my customers that carry flip phones, I would say there is consumer pressure to back away from some of the technology that is unnecessary to perform everyday tasks that is definitely transferable to dishwashers and washing machines, refrigerators. Refrigerators that have screens on them that'll tell you what's inside. It's a little crazy. I just, I don't know why any of that's necessary, really.
- [36:51]
B
Yeah, fair enough, fair enough. Is there anything that we should have talked about that, that we didn't get to?
- [36:56]
A
Not that I can think of, really. It's, it's just an exciting time over here. We have a lot going on. We are expanding our product line. We're going to add some other machinery as well, some complimentary machinery for the same customers buying our tractors. These are not machines that inherently have a lot of technology in them, but they're machines that cost way more than they need to. So we're going to, we're going to try to help address that in the industry, kind of keeping everything in the same basic philosophy of, you know, make it make it affordable and make it just work. Right.
- [37:29]
B
Right. Well, Doug, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. And this is hope to see more of this, hope for success for you and also see more of this in other industries as well.
- [37:41]
A
Thank you very much.
- [37:49]
C
Thank you for listening. As a reminder, 404 Media is supported by our readers and listeners. Check out 404 Media Co to subscribe and for more articles. We'll be back with another episode in a few days.