this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2026
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Electric Vehicles
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I've never been on a farm where you could get back and forth from a field to a barn in 15 minutes. Minimum viable acreage for hard red wheat is 6k acres plus in most areas of the US. Corn and soy are higher than that.
Also, quick charging these days is very good given an appropriate design, a tender vehicle utterly loaded down with batteries could pull up along side a combine, connect, and charge, all while not stopping operations. Instead of moving the batteries and just move the power. Then one tender could service multiple machines. It wouldn't be all that different than how garin carts move in tandem with harvesting equipment currently.
Your op sounds... much bigger than mine lol. My place is less than a tenth of that. I could see running a battery car out to the equipment, then running that back to the barn to charge / swap batteries. I would love to build one but I don't think it's worth it at my scale.
My rough plan right now is to throw a big old motor in an old tractor chassis, and have a bunch of lead acid batteries on a pallet that sits on top of the engine compartment, and put a solar panel roof over all of it to charge in the field + keep the batteries (and me) out of direct sun. I should be able to drive into the barn, fork the battery onto a rack with a charge cable, fork a new pallet onto the tractor, plug everything in, and get back at it in about 15 minutes, but that's 15 minutes from the time I drive into the barn to the time I leave the barn, it doesn't account for transit time to and from the barn, but that's only a few more minutes on a small farm.
That was from back in my time with USDA ars. That's just the basic maths behind wheat operation. Most farmers can't make it work unless they are farming huge averages simply because it's how the math works out for winter wheat.
Interesting setup. Make sure to take pictures and share it. On farm innovation is where most of the fun stuff happens anyways