Today, the United States 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 its long-standing reluctance to prevent its customers from repairing their own machines.
“Farmers depend on their farm equipment to make a living and feed their families,” FTC Chair Lina Khan wrote in a statement. statement alongside the full complaint. “Unfair relief restrictions can mean farmers face unnecessary delays during tight planting and harvest windows. »
The FTC’s main complaint here concerns a software problem. Deere places limits on its operational software, meaning some features and calibrations on its tractors can only be unlocked by mechanics with the correct digital key. Deere only licenses these wrenches to its authorized dealers, meaning farmers often can’t take their tractors to more convenient third-party mechanics or simply fix a problem themselves. The suit would demand that John Deere stop limiting the repair features its customers can use and make them available to people outside of official dealerships.
Kyle Wiens is the CEO of the defense repair retailer iFixit and an occasional WIRED contributor who first wrote about John Deere’s repair aversion tactics in 2015. In an interview today, he highlighted how frustrated farmers get when trying to repair something that didn’t work, only to run into Deere’s policy.
“When something doesn’t work, if you’re 10 minutes from the store, it’s no big deal,” Wiens says. “If the store is three hours away, which is the case for farmers in most of the country, that’s a huge problem.”
The other difficulty is that U.S. copyright protections prevent anyone other than John Deere from creating software that counters the company’s restrictions on its platform. Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 prohibits users from legally countering technological measures that fall within its protections. John Deere equipment falls under this copyright policy.
“Not only are they anti-competitive, but it’s literally illegal to compete with them,” Wiens says.
Deere in the headlights
Wiens says that while there has been a decade of resistance against John Deere from farmers and repairability advocates, customers using the company’s machines haven’t seen much benefit from all the talk.
“The situation really hasn’t improved for farmers,” says Wiens. “Even with all the noise around the right to repair over the years, nothing has yet materially changed for farmers on the ground.”
This lawsuit against Deere, he thinks, will be different.
“That’s what has to be the thing that does the job,” Wiens says. “The FTC won’t settle until John Deere makes the software available. This is a step in the right direction.
Deere’s reluctance to make its products more accessible has angered many of its customers, and even sparked a generally bipartisan reaction. Congressional support for repairability in the agricultural sector. The FTC alleges that John Deere also violated legislation adopted by the Colorado government in 2023 which requires agricultural equipment sold as is to make operational software accessible to users.
“Deere’s illegal business practices inflated farmers’ repair costs and degraded their ability to obtain timely repairs,” the suit states.
Deere & Company did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
Nathan Proctor, senior director of the Right to Repair Campaign at the advocacy group US PIRG, wrote a statement welcoming the FTC’s decision. He believes that this case, whatever its outcome, will constitute a positive step for the right to reparation, more broadly.
“I think this discovery process will paint a picture that will show very clearly that their equipment is programmed to monopolize certain repair functions,” Proctor told WIRED. “And I hope Deere fixes the problem or pays the price.” I don’t know how long this will take. But this is a very important step, because once the genie is out of the bottle, there is no way to put it back in. »
