this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2025
146 points (99.3% liked)

Canada

10031 readers
859 users here now

What's going on Canada?



Related Communities


🍁 Meta


🗺️ Provinces / Territories


🏙️ Cities / Local Communities

Sorted alphabetically by city name.


🏒 SportsHockey

Football (NFL): incomplete

Football (CFL): incomplete

Baseball

Basketball

Soccer


💻 Schools / Universities

Sorted by province, then by total full-time enrolment.


💵 Finance, Shopping, Sales


🗣️ Politics


🍁 Social / Culture


Rules

  1. Keep the original title when submitting an article. You can put your own commentary in the body of the post or in the comment section.

Reminder that the rules for lemmy.ca also apply here. See the sidebar on the homepage: lemmy.ca


founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Okay I really don’t understand why this wouldn’t push for electrification?

Is it because the big machines they need is made by monopolies like John deer and they refuse to go electric?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

Electrifying farm equipment has huge engineering hurdles. They need a massive amount of power, which would mean very large and incredibly expensive battery packs. Those batteries would take either a long time to charge, or high current charging stations.

During seeding or harvest the machines often run for 16+ hours a day, and are literally out in the middle of a field. Where is the super-fast charging station going to go? They can't easily travel all the machinery back to home base every night, and there's no way it makes economical sense for a farm operation to get chargers installed at every field.

These are not necessarily insurmountable problems. There are a number of similarities to trucking, for example, and that's an industry that's starting to see electrification now. But the logistical problems are much harder than trucking. The biggest reason that John Deere etc... aren't making electric tractors right now is that no one would buy one, because no one has any infrastructure in place for it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Part of the reason is likely that farming equipment is bloody expensive. A new combine harvester can cost nearly a million dollars, and there aren't a hell of a lot of used electrical machines on the market yet. Each farm will have several machines that currently run on gas or diesel. How many can the average farmer afford to replace how fast?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Are there any electric tractors/combines on the market, let alone used ones? I mean industrial sized, not small yard work equipment.

EDIT: OK, yes, there are some small electrified tractors available now. Fendt has a line available to customers, John Deere has a prototype, etc... But they are the smallest size of industrial tractors, meant for work like greenhouses, feeding livestock, municipal work, etc...