[ad_1]
On Monday, farming equipment manufacturer John Deere announced it would pay $99 million in a settlement to a class action lawsuit brought on by its customers. The suit accused the company of restricting access to tools and repairs of its tractors and other farming equipment, effectively leveraging a monopoly on the repair market for its products.
The money, if accepted by the farmer-aligned plaintiffs, will go into a fund, then eventually be distributed to Deere equipment owners who can prove they paid for dealership repairs sometime since 2018. In the settlement, John Deere also says it will make repair tools and services more widely available. For the next 10 years, at least.
John Deere has kept tight control over how its customers can fix or tinker with its equipment by disallowing access via software restrictions or requiring machines to be brought to approved shops for repair. That has left thousands of farmers to deal with delayed harvests and millions of dollars in lost profits while waiting for an approved fix.
The difficulty in repairing John Deere equipment has become something of a catalyst for the broader right-to-repair movement—people who advocate for the ability to fix their own products after they have purchased them. To push back against the company, farmers have hacked tractors to get around software restrictions. Local laws have been drafted in farming-heavy states like Iowa to give power back to equipment owners. Advocates have filed many similar lawsuits against the company, including a suit filed in January 2025 by the US Federal Trade Commission. Repair advocacy has been booming, and John Deere is often right in the crosshairs.
“Right-to-repair is almost a misnomer,” says Ethan E. Litwin, an antitrust lawyer at Shinder Cantor Lerner law firm. “This is the fight about ownership rights. What the farmers alleged is that John Deere changed the rules on them once they purchased their tractors and other farming equipment. How can a manufacturer legitimately claim to restrain those rights post-sale?”
Litwin also noted the settlement amount of $99 million, rather than an even $100 million. It’s like when a company charges $9.99 for a product rather than $10, to make it feel like it’s less expensive than it is.
“Clearly that was the maximum that Deere was willing to go because they didn’t want to have a nine-figure number in the press release,” Litwin says, comparing the number to similar settlement cases he has seen. “There’s a big PR difference.”
In its settlement, Deere admitted no wrongdoing. By definition, a settlement is bound to be less money than the damages the company is being accused of and the legal costs it would absorb by fighting the case. But repair advocates estimate the losses by John Deere customers as a result of the company’s repair restrictions are somewhere in the realm of $4.2 billion. In the lawsuit, antitrust economist Russell Lamb estimated that overcharging for equipment repairs had cost farmers between $190 million and $387 million alone. Deere’s payout winds up being a fraction of those estimated damages, split up between an estimated 200,000 farmers who are likely to be included in the class action dole-out of funds.
“The farmers who get restitution will get some chunk of change, but that’s not the thing they care about,” says Nathan Proctor, head of the right-to-repair campaign at consumer advocacy organization US PIRG. “They’re not looking for five grand or something like that in the mail. They’re looking for the ability to fix their equipment, because if they can’t fix it, they can lose everything.”
[ad_2]
Source link
