As a farm equipment engineer my view of this is a little bit different than some. Earning profit is the #1 goal of any company and to do that it must provide a product that their customer whats to buy. If the farm equipment market was calling for basic, no-frills equipment with 30-year old technology I guarantee you that is what you'd find when you visit your dealer. (Emissions controls would be here, but the computers involved with those systems are really just a small part of a modern machine.) But, that is not what the market is demanding. New equipment buyers - the folks the companies cater to because that's where the money comes from - want machines with the latest and greatest technology and if you don't provide it your competitor will be glad to. Don't blame the engineers for designing a product that the customer wants to buy! For every one person asking for a basic machine there are five others asking for the latest technology so which type of machine should the companies produce? Of course they will satisfy the majority, especially considering the fact that the profit margins are much better for high-end equipment.
The particular machine that I am involved with has many computer controls, far more than the previous generation that it replaced. Why? Because the market demands more of everything - speed, comfort, productivity, ease of use, flexibility, etc, etc - and electronics are the most effective way to provide it at a price point the customer can accept and at a production cost that satisfies the #1 company goal stated above. There are many thousands of these machines in the field today with a combined millions of hours of operating time and the overall reliability has been very good. Of course there have been ones that have had electrical issues but these are a very small minority and percentage-wise really no more than the number of machines with any other kind of glitch. Properly designed and well-executed electrical systems can be just as reliable as any other type of system - there are countless machines of every type all around us that prove this. On the other hand, poor designs and/or execution can create reliability nightmares which have given the technology a black eye over the years. It is up to the industry to make sure that they provide the former and not the latter.
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Today's Featured Article - An Old-Time Tractor Demonstration - by Kim Pratt. Sam was born in rural Kansas in 1926. His dad was a hard-working farmer and the children worked hard everyday to help ends meet. In the rural area he grew up in, the highlight of the week was Saturday when many people took a break from their work to go to town. It was on one such Saturday in the early 1940's when Sam was 16 years old that he ended up in Dennison, Kansas to watch a demonstration of a new tractor being put on by a local dealer. It was an Allis-Chalmers tractor dealership,
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