MOLINE, Ill. – An investigation to determine whether the John Deere Co. is “engaging in unfair, deceptive, anticompetitive, collusive, coercive, predatory, exploitative or exclusionary acts or practices” in regard to the company’s policies on repair of their agricultural equipment has been launched by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). 

“Today’s news that the FTC is investigating repair restrictions is good news for farmers, and everyone else who believes people should be able to fix their stuff,” said Nathan Proctor, the Public Interest Research Group’s (PIRG) senior right to repair campaign director, in a news release.

An investigative demand filed by the FTC on Oct. 16 seeks to determine if Deere is in violation of Section 5 of the FTC Act, which prohibits unfair or deceptive practices related to commerce. The FTC directive compelled Deere to submit all data sets in relation to the sale of agricultural equipment in the U.S., including market share and size statistics, instruction manuals and equipment specifications relating to data submissions, within 14 days.

In response to the subpoena, Hargrove and Associates, an analytics company that includes the Association of Equipment Manufacturers as a client, entered a motion to quash the investigation. Deere had not responded publicly or to media requests in relation to the investigation as of press time, other than to say in a prepared statement that the company is “cooperating with the FTC” and “cannot provide comment during an ongoing investigation.”

The FTC probe began in September 2021 following a lawsuit filed against Deere by PIRG, farm advocacy groups and others, but was not made public until after Hargrove and Associates made the motion to quash the subpoena. A January 2023 memorandum of understanding (MOU) between Deere and the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) granted Deere more time to follow through on their promise to allow more flexibility in machinery repair, which can be costly to farmers who are forced to go through Deere’s network of licensed technicians. According to PIRG, the AFBF-Deere memorandum failed to address all the needs of farmers.

“These agreements do not provide farmers who face repair restrictions with opportunity for legal recourse and allow manufacturers to walk away from the agreements with as little as 15 days’ notice,” according to PIRG. “Most notably, the repair materials promised in the MOU are not comprehensive. (PIRG’s) comparison of the software tools provided to farmers to those provided to Deere-affiliated dealerships found that the publicly available tool withholds, redacts or obfuscates functions and information required to independently complete many repairs.”

In addition to the recent FTC action, the 2021 lawsuit and the AFBF-Deere memorandum, the effort to grant Americans the right to repair the equipment they purchase has been addressed by the oval office. President Joe Biden signed an executive order in 2021 supporting the right to repair and efforts to make it easier and cheaper for people to repair their own items. In response, companies including Microsoft Corp. and Apple Inc. loosened their repair policies. While Deere was among the companies to promise looser repair policies, the FTC probe casts doubt on the sincerity of the pledge.

Earlier in October, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) alleged that Deere could be in violation of the Clean Air Act in relation to repair and replacement of its emissions control hardware and software. Warren’s Oct.2 letter to Deere said the company “appears to be evading its responsibilities under the Clean Air Act to grant customers the right to repair their own agricultural equipment – costing U.S. farmers $4.2 billion per year and leading them to miss key crop windows on which their businesses and livelihoods rely.”

Going a step further, Warren said the AFBF-Deere memorandum “appeared to be a veiled attempt to stave off the passage of ‘right-to-repair’ legislation. Rather than uphold their end of the bargain, John Deere has provided impaired tools and inadequate disclosures.”

Warren’s letter detailed how over the past two decades, the cost of parts and labor needed to repair agricultural equipment has nearly doubled. “Since 2020, these costs have spiked 41 percent. While demand for new machines goes up and down, John Deere keeps its profits streaming in by overcharging for repair services – despite labor strikes, supply disruptions, a drop in sales, and a global pandemic, the company has experienced a 270 percent increase in profits since 2020. These increases in repair costs coincide with a trend of increasing amounts of software and software-linked parts in farm equipment – a major mechanism through which manufacturers restrict independent repair,” Warren stated.

“When farmers can’t access the proprietary software tools which are required to diagnose or complete repairs, that means they have to wait for an authorized technician before they can finish their work,” PIRG’s Proctor said. “The weather doesn’t wait on a dealership’s schedule – a delay could mean the loss of your harvest.”