How John Deere leverages repair-blocking into gag orders
A farmer’s only local dealership refuses to fix his tractor because he advocates for Right to Repair.
John Deere is justifiably notorious for its campaign to block farmers from fixing their own agricultural equipment. The company is Right to Repair’s archnemesis, and no amount of misleading feel-good stories about how it keeps its heavy hand on farmers’ tractors forever can change that.
https://doctorow.medium.com/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors-bc93f471b9c8
There are many reasons to worry about Deere’s assertion of a monopoly over farmers’ ability to maintain their vital equipment. For one thing, Deere has terrible information security, and the defects in its software infrastructure means that much of the world’s agricultural machinery could be bricked or corrupted by attackers:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/23/reputation-laundry/#deere-john
Food security is so important, and Deere has such a comprehensive monopoly over the world’s food production, that agricultural right to repair is an absolute no-brainer. There’s a reason that farms have had workshops since the dawn of agriculture: when the storm is coming and the crops need harvesting, you can’t wait for a service-call:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/02/its-the-economy-stupid/#jon-tester
Naturally, farmers understand this. They have a front-row seat to Deere’s ugly, extractive practices. Farmers are some of the Right to Repair movement’s most eloquent, best-organized activists — even though Deere’s lobbyists has so many statehouses sewn up that they manage to kill agricultural right-to-repair laws:
https://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/article261738957.html
This won’t last forever. The idea that farmers are too stupid to maintain their own tractors is belied by Deere’s own long history of improving its products by sending field engineers to identify and copy farmers’ own modifications to their tractors:
But the anti-repair axis — led by Apple, and incorporating Big Car, Big Ag, and Big Appliances — are determined to milk their monopoly over repair for as long as they possibly can, and this is one area where their innovative genius can’t be denied:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/30/80-lbs/#malicious-compliance
Here’s one way that Deere can extend the life of its repair monopoly: they can refuse service to farmers who complain about Deere’s behavior. That’s what happened to Jared Wilson, a Missouri farmer and vocal repair advocate:
As Matthew Gault writes for Motherboard, Wilson’s tractor’s AC stopped working, which meant that he would have to bring in the harvest under sweltering conditions — stuck in a glass box under direct sun for hours a day. Wilson only has one dealership within range: Heritage Tractor, whose manager refused to service his tractor.
The manager said that Wilson was “not a profitable customer” because he had complained about Heritage to Deere corporate. The dealership told him that his practice of complaining to “outside people” about repair meant that his business was no longer welcome. Which “outside people” has Wilson been speaking to?
The Missouri legislature:
https://youtu.be/C_56RBqy4ww?t=1530
NBC:
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/new-senate-bill-farm-equipment-right-to-repair-rcna13961
And the Federal Trade Commission.
Wilson is a fifth-generation farmer, whose forebears also used Deere products. He seen the number of Deere authorized service centers in his region dwindle from three to just one in under a decade. That drawdown occurred even as Deere was abusing the law to make it illegal for farmers to fix their own tractors, or source repairs from third parties:
https://www.wired.com/2015/04/dmca-ownership-john-deere/
For Wilson to get his tractor fixed anywhere but Heritage, he’d have to haul it 80 miles. Luckily, Wilson eventually got Heritage to fix his tractor.
All it took was a complaint to the FTC.
Deere says that today’s farmers lack the modern skills needed to maintain their own equipment. They imply that the skills deficit here is an inability to maintain electronic equipment. It turns out that the real vital skill for the modern farmer is the ability to complain effectively to federal regulators.
Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction author, activist, and blogger. He has a podcast, a newsletter, a Twitter feed, a Mastodon feed, and a Tumblr feed. He was born in Canada, became a British citizen and now lives in Burbank, California. His latest nonfiction book is How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism. His latest novel for adults is Attack Surface. His latest short story collection is Radicalized. His latest picture book is Poesy the Monster Slayer. His latest YA novel is Pirate Cinema. His latest graphic novel is In Real Life. His forthcoming books include Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid (with Rebecca Giblin), a book about artistic labor market and excessive buyer power; Red Team Blues, a noir thriller about cryptocurrency, corruption and money-laundering (Tor, 2023); and The Lost Cause, a utopian post-GND novel about truth and reconciliation with white nationalist militias (Tor, 2023).
