The Feds Are Suing John Deere Over Your Right to Fix Your Own Tractor

The federal government is taking one of the most powerful companies in agriculture to court — over whether you’re allowed to fix the machine you paid six figures for.

In early 2025, the Federal Trade Commission, joined by the states of Illinois and Minnesota, filed suit against Deere & Company — John Deere — alleging the equipment giant illegally drove up repair costs by locking critical tools and software behind its authorized-dealer network. The complaint is the federal government’s most aggressive move yet in the long-running farm right-to-repair war. You can read the FTC’s announcement directly.

What Deere is accused of doing

Modern tractors and combines aren’t engines with wheels. They’re rolling computers. When something breaks, diagnosing and clearing the fault often requires a piece of proprietary software called Service ADVISOR — a tool Deere has historically restricted to its dealers.

The practical effect, the FTC alleges, is a trap. A farmer can be mechanically capable of fixing their own machine — can have the part in hand — and still be unable to complete the repair because the equipment won’t run again until a dealer plugs in the software and authorizes it. That forces farmers to tow expensive equipment to a dealership, often hours away, and pay dealer rates, sometimes during the narrow planting or harvest window when every hour costs money. The agency frames this as an unfair method of competition that inflated repair prices.

Deere has denied wrongdoing and pushed back hard, arguing the suit is meritless and that it already offers customers and independent shops access to manuals, parts, and tools. Reuters and AP both covered the company’s response when the case was filed.

Why this is bigger than tractors

Right-to-repair sounds niche until you realize it’s about who controls the means of production — literally. When the manufacturer holds the keys to every repair, the farmer doesn’t fully own the equipment. They own a license to use it on the manufacturer’s terms.

This is the same software-lock playbook that’s swallowed phones, cars, and medical devices. In agriculture it bites harder, because timing is everything. A combine down for three days during harvest in a wet fall isn’t an inconvenience — it can be the difference between a profitable year and a loss.

The farm-equipment fight has been the tip of the spear for the entire right-to-repair movement. It’s plain, it’s sympathetic, and it crosses every political line. There’s no left or right on whether a farmer should be allowed to fix their own tractor.

The fragile truce that came before

The lawsuit didn’t come out of nowhere. In January 2023, Deere signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the American Farm Bureau Federation, promising to give farmers and independent shops better access to repair tools and information. It was hailed as a breakthrough.

Critics — including repair advocates at organizations like iFixit and the U.S. PIRG network — argued the MOU was voluntary, toothless, and easy to walk back. The FTC suit suggests regulators concluded a handshake wasn’t enough. Real change, it turns out, needs a courtroom or a statute.

The state-by-state front

While the federal case grinds forward, the action is also in statehouses. Colorado passed the first-in-the-nation agricultural right-to-repair law in 2023, requiring manufacturers to give farmers and independent technicians the tools, parts, software, and documentation to fix their own equipment. Other states have introduced similar bills. The National Conference of State Legislatures tracks the wave.

What to watch

This case will be slow — antitrust litigation always is. But the stakes are clean: if the FTC prevails, it could force open the repair market for an entire industry and set a precedent that ripples far beyond green paint. If Deere wins, the software lock stays, and “you bought it but you can’t fix it” becomes even more entrenched across American agriculture.

For a family farmer staring at a dead combine and a closing weather window, this isn’t an abstract antitrust theory. It’s whether they get to pick up a wrench, or wait for a dealer.

Save US Farms is following the right-to-repair fight at the federal and state level. Got a repair-lock horror story? The desk wants it.