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.
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.