Right-to-repair revolution: Farmers challenge John Deere's control over equipment repair
Spring is planting season for Missouri farmer Jared Wilson.
Spring is planting season for Missouri farmer Jared Wilson. It’s his only opportunity during the year to get his corn and soybeans sown and sprayed. Not getting it right would affect his yield. But every year, he says, he struggles to get his John Deere equipment to do the job. Broken down combines, tractors and harvesters have cost him hundreds of thousands of dollars to fix.
“Time absolutely means money in this business,” Wilson said. “When you have machines that are failing at those critical times of the year — when you have that one shot to get things right — it can severely impact your bottom line.”
A U.S. Public Interest Research Group report published in 2023 estimated that farmers lose $3 billion to tractor downtime and pay $1.2 billion more in excess repair costs every year as a result of needing to rely on dealerships for repairs.
Wilson is among hundreds of farmers represented in class action lawsuits fighting for the “right to repair,” a movement that argues that customers should be able to fix their products when they break down or pay independent repair people to do so.
Jared Wilson with his John Deere tractor.Kenny Johnson for NBC NewsAccording to the lawsuit he is part of, Wilson and others accuse John Deere of blocking farmers and everyday mechanics from fixing equipment without going through John Deere dealers. Although the company doesn’t prohibit users from fixing equipment themselves, the lawsuit claims it locks users out of repairs because of the limited access to software that only dealerships can access. The lawsuit says that makes most fixes nearly impossible.A lot like cars, the farming equipment is equipped with sensors. The John Deere tractors, for instance, run on firmware that is necessary for basic functions, according to the lawsuit. If something is wrong with the equipment, a code will appear on a display monitor inside the machine. The suit says interpreting the error codes on tractors, for instance, requires software that “Deere refuses to make available to farmers.”
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