Somebody has never made a wood gasifier before. You can build an apparatus like this one out of propane tanks that will allow your tractor to suck woodgas instead of
This would work well enough for a long while. Where I grew up in Indiana, maybe 10 or 15% of acreage were all these little woods here and there. Creeks running through them. Into the 1980s, people would still clear them out for firewood. But in truth, those were just the table scraps of whatever forests were around in the mid-1800s... all the good timber sold off on contract before i was born. If someone tried to keep a tractor running with woodgas, if they were successful enough that others decided to try to imitate them, everything would be clearcut in 20 years. It's not viable on a multi-decades basis. Which is a shame, some of the older tractors have frames and basic designs that might well last 150+ years before they were truly unsalvageable.
The basic flaw in this scheme is the same as with hunters. They think they can live off the land, but not have to put forth the effort to manage it. And nature looks vast, far too large to have to worry about it having nothing left to give. So they take as much as they like and by the time it becomes apparent they've taken too much, the only possible way recovery could ever happen is to quit, cold turkey. But then that means they are starved of whatever resource it is they needed (meat for hunters, wood for wood gassification).
You want a diesel tractor. You use it to grow an oil crop. The oil crops differ from region to region, but most will do 100 gallons of vegetable oil per acre. Depending on what else you might grow (and how many passes with a tractor those will need), that acre of oil crop will provide the fuel to cultivate up to another 10 or 12 acres of something else. Biodiesel would be best (straight vegetable oil looks like more trouble than it's worth). Biodiesel requires an alcohol (methanol is best, ethanol or butanol might do in a pinch), and lye (potassium hydroxide is best, NaOH might be ok). The reaction itself isn't particularly challenging.
There are other consumables for these other tractors to be accounted for. Engine oil, air filters, oil filters, fuel filters. Belts, hoses, tires. Metal parts fail too, but some significant fraction could be fabricated new if you had a passable machine shop. Frankly, I'm more worried about tires.
Though ultimately unworkable, bacon grease as engine oil is probably superior to the shit you buy at NAPA or Advanced Auto parts:
Youtube - Bacon Grease as Engine OIl? Let's try it!
Castor (bean) oil might be the correct direction for engine oil substitute.
A total collapse will make those machines a drain on resources and that air conditioned machine will eventually fall apart with no new parts to fix it in the event of a total collapse.
I don't think that the newer self-drive combines are the same sort of
planned obsolescence as consumer goods. If you get into the cab of one, there's much less plastic than you find in a newer model car. They do not appear to be made to fall apart after the 3 year warranty's up like with a Chrysler or a Chevy. Not that JD is particularly warm-and-fuzzy and wants what's best for the customer, but there would be major lawsuits if someone bought a million-dollar combine and they didn't last 25-40 years more often than not. There are elements of the newest models that are just not compatible with longevity, but these are often electronics-and-software based features that farmers are salivating over, even demanding.
What makes these combines unviable isn't that they're a drain on resources or that they're air-conditioned. They're just too big and unwieldy once there's no longer a mass market. The reason they get bigger every year, more sophisticated every year, is that per pound of flour, they use less fuel, fewer man-hours, and provide a better product. The very things you'd want in a collapse scenario. But that only works at gigantic economies of scale. And every single one of us reading this, we'll be lucky if we can get ahold of 20 acres, and we'll be even luckier if we manage to cultivate more than that were we to somehow get it.
If you can swing it, find one of those fat old assholes you seem to hate, and learn from him whatever he's willing to teach. He likely has 100+ years of institutional knowledge. All this seems like retard work to some of you, but there are subtle details that if you get wrong then you'll get to see what your kids' ribs look like through their skin. A day late, a day early on some of this shit makes all the difference. Trying to gauge whether you should use the water you have now to irrigate, or just take the 30% lower harvest and keep it for something more important.
