Advocates say diagnostic tools given farmers are more complex than those for dealers
By Jennifer Bamberg — Investigate Midwest
During the 2023 harvest season, one of Jake Lieb’s tractors quit working. A week later, his combine stopped working, too. Both were new — and he was locked out from making any repairs himself because of software restrictions embedded in the machines.
Instead, a technician from John Deere was dispatched to diagnose and repair the problems. While waiting for the technician to come out, Lieb fired up a 20-year-old tractor he hadn’t used for harvesting in years. Crops are vulnerable to the weather, and had he not, Lieb could have lost at least a day of harvest, potentially costing him thousands of dollars.
“Meanwhile,” Lieb said, “we’ve got over a million dollars of equipment in the field, inoperable.”
When the technician from John Deere arrived at his farm near Monticello in central Illinois, it took about 30 minutes to plug in a diagnostic tool, see which sensor was bad, unscrew it, replace it and close everything up in the combine.
“If I knew what sensor was bad in that combine, I could have had it fixed in five minutes,” Lieb said. “But if you don’t have the software, it’s impossible to know what’s wrong.”
For more than a decade, farmers like Lieb haven’t been able to fix their high-tech equipment. Until recently, manufacturer restrictions meant only company-authorized representatives could own and use diagnostic tools, and make fixes when needed.2023 Agreement
But in March 2023, in an attempt to address farmers’ frustrations, the American Farm Bureau Federation signed a memorandum of understanding with John Deere and four other farm equipment manufacturers. The farm bureau called it a “private-sector solution to the right-to-repair issue.”
In the agreement, Deere, Kubota, Case New Holland, AGCO and CLAAS of America promised to give farmers and independent repair shops access to customer diagnostic tools. In exchange, the Farm Bureau agreed not to support any federal or state repair legislation.
When the agreement was first announced, Chad Hart, an economist at Iowa State University, said he sees the memorandum of understanding as a “first step” between the two sides.
“This represents an ongoing negotiation,” Hart told the Associated Press, noting the agreement calls for the two sides to talk every six months. “They expect fully they’re going to have to make adjustments along the way.”