The Federal Trade Commission is investigating tractor manufacturer John Deere over long standing allegations that Deere makes its farm equipment hard to repair. The investigation has been ongoing since 2021, and we know more about it now thanks to a court filing made public on Thursday.
The stated purpose of the FTC’s [investigation] is ‘[t]o determine whether Deere & Company, or any other person, has engaged in or is engaging in unfair, deceptive, anticompetitive, collusive, coercive, predatory, exploitative, or exclusionary acts or practices in or affecting commerce related to the repair of agricultural equipment in violation of Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act
John Deere has been notorious for years for making its farm equipment hard to repair. Much like today’s cars, John Deere’s farm equipment comes with a lot of computers. When something simple in one of its tractors or threshers breaks, a farmer can’t just fix it themselves. Even if the farmer has the technical and mechanical know-how to make a simple repair, they often have to return to the manufacturer at great expense. Why? The on-board computers brick the machines until a certified Deere technician flips a switch.
Farmers have been complaining about this for years and Deere has repeatedly promised to make its tractors easier to repair. It lied. John Deere equipment was so hard to repair that it led to an explosion in the used tractor market. Old farm equipment made before the advent of onboard computing sold for a pretty penny because it was easier to repair.
In 2022, a group of farmers filed a class action lawsuit against John Deere and accused it of running a repair monopoly. Deere, of course, attempted to get the case dismissed but failed.
Chief among Deere’s promises was that it would provide farmers and independent repair shops with the equipment and documentation they needed to repair their equipment. The promises of the memorandum have not come to pass. Senator Elizabeth Warren called Deere out in a letter about all of this on October 2. “Rather than uphold their end of the bargain, John Deere has provided impaired tools and inadequate disclosures,” Warren said in the letter.
Tractors seem as good a starting place as any. Let’s not stop there.
Regular vehicles are getting rediculous too.
I just got my first computer controlled vehicle, a 2007 Volvo XC70. It’s fucking insane. The same code scanner equipment and software that the dealership has access to needs to be included with the car at purchase, and that equipment needs to be universal to all vehicles of that model, so it’s readily available on Ebay as cars go out of service. It’s the only solution I can think of to keep auto manufacturers from charging way to much for it like they do all of their parts/tools. You also should get all of the files that are relevant to the car with the car, in case you need to reprogram a module from another car. This stuff should also be available in some sort of database or something, maybe even government hosted, in case the files that came with the car get lost.
Instead, community members are left to reverse engineer and scrounge around to get tools working on their own. It’s genuinely insane how impossible it is to diagnose issues with modern vehicles as a home mechanic.
Sometimes you can’t fix something simply because you can’t replace a part with one from another car because it needs to be reprogrammed, but the dealership won’t reprogram it, and they also won’t give you the files so you can reprogram it yourself.
This is not Klans starting point. She has gone after Amazon and Google. John Deere is not the first or the last.
Might want to fix that typo there.
Lol khan
Khan is indeed doing good stuff, but I was referring specifically to corporations interfering with our ownership and repair of the things we buy.
I see the occasional Deere dealership while traveling the countryside. How are they still in business? Every single farmer, bar none, has to know about their business practices. And FFS, independent action like fixing your own shit is core to country life. Maybe they’re coasting on parts sales vs. new machine sales?
Best part the summary missed:
Last year, the company issued a “memorandum of understanding.” The document was a promise to farmers that it would finally let them repair their own equipment, so long as states didn’t pass any laws around the right to repair.
LOL, get real.
Chief among Deere’s promises was that it would provide farmers and independent repair shops with the equipment and documentation they needed to repair their equipment. The promises of the memorandum have not come to pass.
I’ve heard the other manufacturers aren’t locking down repairs. Anyone know if that’s true?
Modern farming is extremely reliant on gps and ‘smart’ planters, fertilizers, etc. Using tech to precisely control exactly how much seed, chemicals, etc is used can result in significantly less costs. My understanding is that Deere has bought out basically every company that has a decent implementation of this technology and is an effective monopoly on modern farming equipment.
You can move away from them, but expect your business costs to significantly increase as a result.
I wouldn’t say they have a total monopoly. As a farmer’s son, it’s entirely about having a dealer close by your operation. Most farmers just use the brand that has a location nearest to their farm. All the brands are all more or less the same these days as far as large row crop farming is concerned. My father used mostly New Holland equipment and Kinze planters, for example.
Having used every GPS system out there (there are plenty besides Deere’s), the best one I’ve used is one I built myself with the opensource project AgOpenGPS. Deere’s is second best but well integrated with their equipment. Trimble, Raven and Outback are expensive shit.
The real question is what other options do farms have? Let’s say their tracker breaks down and repair is no longer an option. How many other manufacturers are making the type of equipment they need? And how expensive would it be to enter that market to compete? To me it seems like John Deer has a monopoly and is exploiting it.
I live in an area with a lot of farms and I’ve been seeing more foreign brands (e.g. Fendt) popping up lately.
By the time John deere can even get them a replacement or repair, it’s too late and their harvest may just be fucked
Exactly why John Deer should not be allowed to do this. Any threat to the food supply should be considered a national security risk.
Not all, but a lot of this equipment is also made by caterpillar, right?
If they do, are they competitive? Or are they doing the same thing. It could also be like car dealerships in certain states, you’re not allowed to just open one within x miles of another (though that refers to more of the same brand). Wouldn’t surprise me if they can’t have dealerships near each other due to backwards legislation.
How are they still in business? Every single farmer, bar none, has to know about their business practices
Wendover Productions has a decent video on John Deere’s market dominance. tl;dw It’s by cutthroat capitalism of course.
John Deere has bought out all their competitors and continues to do so. Every single breakthrough in farming equipment technology in the last decade is owned by John Deere. As a farmer, you either choose to sign a one-sided contract with John Deere or you use outdated inefficient equipment that John Deere hasn’t purchased the patent rights to. Or, of course, you sell your farm all together. Large corporate farms don’t care much about the John Deere contract since they have the power to negotiate a better deal. A lot of small farmers have been making the choice to sell out.
Soon, all farming will be done by one megacorp, buying their seed from Monsanto, using John Deere equipment, and cashing in a ridiculously fat subsidy cheque from the government.
I hate myself for buying a John Deere tractor, but it was up to $5000 less than any comparable competitor at the time, included a 5 year service contract, and was 0.9% financing.
I’m in a better place financially now, so when I can and need to, I’m absolutely getting something different.
I get that ready cash availability at the time is absolutely a factor, but it does make you wonder whether spending $5k more on the competitor would save a bunch of money in shit that John Deere won’t let you repair for yourself down the line.
Remember that many of their customers are young contractors on credit who have valued ‘brand identity’ over more practical concerns.
You don’t see many old boys on their tractors, in the same way that you wouldn’t see many of them using Apple computers.
My bet is that a decent proportion of the John Deere owners who are up in arms about this are those who bought one while they were young and impressionable, then realised that they were getting punished for it and that they couldn’t offload it on their younger contemporaries because they wanted a new one and couldn’t offload it on their older contemporaries because they were too wise. These modern tractors are enormous investments.
You love to see it.
Why is the FTC being useful now? What happened?
She is literally my hero. I hope one day she becomes president.
I don’t think she’s eligible to be the President, she wasn’t born in the US.
Careful now, you’ll open the door for fElon Musk 2028. We don’t want that, do we?
Unfortunately VP Harris has been extremely tepid in her reception of Lina K, which is a remarkably poor interpretation of public favor.
ALL our public servants should model Lina Khan as an aspiration.
Case makes good equipment and as far as I know they don’t do that to their customers. So why do these dipshits still buy deere.
“nothing shits like a Deere”
Is Case to farming equipment what Brother is to printing?
Am I going to have to buy a Case for the two holes a year I might need to dig?
Because parts are readily available, if expensive. When the snow is coming and you have a thousand acres left to harvest, you want that part right fucking now. And contrary to what everyone here “knows”, you can fix pretty much anything that doesn’t directly interface with the ECM yourself. I have 10,000 page repair manuals that Deere supplies that details, step by step, how to fix nearly anything on their equipment. I’ve never seen manuals 1/10th as good on CNH equipment.
So case doesn’t have replacement parts. Sounds like a pretty weak argument. Since you are inside the grift I can see why you don’t like my solution.
Yah, double down on the ignorance. That’s a good look.
Just like looking in a mirror isn’t it. What I see is someone who likes the way things are knowing without your exclusive access you wouldn’t have a job. If the information was readily available to everyone there would be no reason to rely on someone who has bought in.
I’m a farmer, not a Deere mechanic, you redundant muffin.
It’s believe, with my very limited understanding, it has to do with equipment you have working together with other equipment you have.
Does equipment from one OEM not work best with other equipment from the same OEM?
I understand you can pick and choose, but sometimes with compatibility issues.
For the most part everything works together, buying non Deere implements and using them with Deere tractors is common. John Deere is a status symbol. Deere also does technology better IMO, that being said I really have no idea what auto-steer tech Case utilizes, they have to have something because no modern farmer is paying attention to their rows that much.
Louis Rossman intensifies
Go after the seed companies too!
Decades late, but I’ll take it. Do Monsanto next.
Never fuck with farmers
Society is built on the back of farmers and teachers, and they’re the two professions with the least amount of gratitude given by the people in charge. That’s fucked up
Well you know, unless you’re Trump, who would defang the FTC and prevent them from taking this sort of pro-consumer action. Then the farmers will vote for you anyway because at the end of the day they’re still predominantly bigots who don’t know shit about fuck outside the land they farm.
Edit: farmers as a demographic overwhelmingly support Trump. 78% of them believe that Trump would better address inflation than Harris, and 76% believe he would better “expand trade and address trade disputes” – the literal exact opposite of what he’s been shown to have done with his stupid “trade war”. As a demographic, farmers are exactly as described above.
I don’t know about that. I guess there may be some sampling bias, but I actually know a handful of farmers that are well educated and or saavy business people. They tend to be surrounded by communities of naked under their overalls bigoted neckbeards geographically, but I’m not sure the majority of actual farmers are as dumb as you imply.
This alone is compelling evidence that the average farmer is substantially more bigoted than the average person. Biofuels I can actually see because biofuels are fucking terrible, but the other four? Nah, blinded by bigotry.
To be clear, I’m not saying they can’t be savvy businesspeople – I absolutely include turning a profit in the part about farming their land. I’m just saying that as a demographic, they’re insular bigots who have no real understanding of the broader world.
its so stupid because trump renegotiated NAFTA and didn’t fix a single problem with it.
They don’t even know shit about the land they farm. Western (and now global by virtue of colonization) farming techniques are abysmal. The way we grow our food and take care of our lands are awful. But God forbid those librul scientists dare to suggest change…
Farmers are absolutely necessary and are far underappreciated but god damn, are they also some of the most stubborn people you’ll ever meet
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She’s doing amazing things where she is. All the same she’d get my vote in a heartbeat.
Just waiting for this to go to court and the SC to defer to their corporate overlords.
Why do farmers keep buying that shit?
I live in the sticks and I rarely see JDs any more. It’s a Claas, Fendt and MF now
European farmers take no shit
cackles in Fordson Major
These headlines always show up a month before every election. It’s the same shit as the “this time we’re definitely gonna legalize weed for sure bro just one more vote bruh.” It’s a non-specific promise that doesn’t have to be acted on, and should be treated as such.
