Today, USA The Federal Trade Commission has filed a lawsuit against farm equipment maker Deere & Company—maker of the iconic green John Deere tractors, harvesters and mowers—citing a longstanding reluctance to prevent its customers from repairing their own machines.
“Farmers rely on their farm equipment to make a living and feed their families,” FTC Chairwoman Lina Khan wrote in statement with full appeal. “Unfair repair restrictions can mean farmers face unnecessary delays during tight planting and harvest periods.”
The FTC’s main complaint here is about a software problem. Deere places limitations of its operating softwaremeaning that certain features and calibrations on its tractors can only be unlocked by mechanics who have the right digital key. Deere only licenses these keys to its authorized dealers, which means farmers often can’t take their tractors to more convenient third-party mechanics or simply fix the problem themselves. The suit would demand that John Deere stop its practice of limiting the repair options its customers can use and make them available to those outside authorized dealerships.
Kyle Wiens is the CEO of Repair Advocacy Retail iFixit and an occasional WIRED contributor who first wrote about John Deere repair averse tactic 2015 In an interview today, he noted how frustrated farmers are when they try to fix something that went wrong, only to be met with Deere’s policies.
“When you have something that doesn’t work, if you’re 10 minutes from a store, it’s not a big deal,” Wiens says. “If the store is three hours away, which is for farmers in most of the country, that’s a big problem.”
Another difficulty is that copyright protection in the US prevents anyone but John Deere from making software that counters the restrictions the company has placed on its platform. Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 allows people to legally oppose technological measures that fall under its protection. John Deere equipment is subject to this copyright policy.
“Not only are they anti-competitive, it’s literally illegal to compete with them,” says Wiens.
Deere in the headlights
Wiens says that although it existed a decade of pushing away against John Deere from farmers and advocates of fixabilitycustomers using the company’s machines didn’t see much benefit from all that discourse.
“Things really haven’t improved for farmers,” says Wiens. “Even with all the noise about right to repair over the years, nothing has really changed for farmers on the ground yet.”
This lawsuit against Deere, he thinks, will be different.
“This has to be the thing that does it,” says Wiens. “The FTC will not settle until John Deere makes the software available. This is a step in the right direction.”
Deere’s reluctance to make its products more affordable has angered many of its customers and even won over generally bipartisan views. congressional support for repairability in the agricultural area. The FTC alleges that John Deere also violated legislation enacted by the government of Colorado in 2023. yes requires agricultural equipment sold in the country to make the operating software available to users.
“Deere’s illegal business practices inflated the cost of farmers’ repairs and degraded farmers’ ability to receive repairs in a timely manner,” the lawsuit states.
Deere & Company did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
Nathan Proctor, senior director for the Right to Repair Campaign at the advocacy group US PIRG, wrote a statement praising the FTC’s decision. He believes that this case, no matter how it turns out, will be a positive step for the right to repair movement more widely.
“I think this discovery process will paint a picture that will clearly show that their equipment is programmed to monopolize certain repair functions,” Proctor tells WIRED. “And I expect Deere to either fix the problem or pay the price. I don’t know how long it will take. But this is such an important turning point, because once the genie is out of the bottle, there’s no going back.”