Deere & Company has agreed to a potential deal to settle a years-long dispute over its equipment repair programs.
In January 2025, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), along with Illinois and Minnesota, sued the company, alleging it violated state antitrust laws and the Sherman Act and FTC Act by withholding its repair programs from its customers. Since then, Arizona, Michigan, and Wisconsin have joined the litigation. This week, they filed a joint motion to resolve the lawsuit in the federal District Court for the Northern District of Illinois Western Division.
The proposed settlement requires the Moline-based farm equipment manufacturer provide farmers and independent shops with necessary repair software for 10 years. The company would also pay $99 million to eligible customers.
Willie Cade, a right-to-repair advocate and director of the Theo Brown Society, whose grandfather, Theo, served on the Deere & Company board and worked as an engineer for the company, said he is cautiously optimistic.
“I'm also not foolish because I've been working on this for 10 years now, and there have been many, many promises made and not kept,” Cade said in an interview with WVIK. “[T]here's a requirement that Deere reports to the court for every 60 days until everything is implemented and then annually thereafter. And any complaints that are submitted to John Deere should be part of the report that they supplied to the FTC. So I think it will be incumbent upon industry groups like farmers union and the commodities groups for them to be able to work with their membership and provide— so that their membership can provide input to those reports. There needs to be validation that indeed all of the capabilities that are provided to dealers are indeed provided to the independent service providers.”
In a statement following the announcement, Deere & Company states, “Today’s agreement reinforces John Deere's long-standing commitment to helping customers and independent service providers maintain and repair their equipment. For decades, we've continued to expand access to repair resources, diagnostics, service information, and software tools, and recent innovations like Operations Center™ PRO Service build on that work. We welcome the opportunity to continue demonstrating how these tools help customers diagnose issues, maintain equipment, and choose the repair option that works best for them—whether that's doing the work themselves, working with an independent provider, or partnering with their local John Deere dealer. You can also find more information on our customer repair and maintenance tools at Deere.com/runityourway.”
One farmer disagrees with John Deere's claim of long-standing commitment to customers.
Jared Wilson is a farmer in Bates County, Missouri. Last month, he filed an objection to the proposed settlement, claiming it does not end the company’s monopoly on repair tools.
“John Deere developed a new program called ProService that is supposed to provide us [with] the same functionality that dealerships have in terms of repair tools for agricultural equipment,” Wilson said in an interview with WVIK. “One of the most interesting things about ProService right off the bat is that it requires you to agree to end-user license agreements that give John Deere carte blanche data collection of all of your machine-generated data. So in order to use these repair tools, John Deere is constantly harvesting my yield data, my planning data, and they get to keep all that, aggregate it, sell it, and I provide them a lifetime license to do that. And I really don't like the concept of bundling data collection from John Deere with the repair tools that I need to fix my tractor. So that's one of the biggest problems.”
Wilson states the monetary relief is also negligible.
“It's probably less than what John Deere would pay if they took this case to trial. There's a good chance that they have insurance that's going to pay for it. So it provides absolutely no disincentive for companies to act like this in the future,” Wilson said.
Cade claims the monetary relief amounts to 79 cents per acre over an eight-year period.
“And I've done some analysis of some invoices for farms. One farmer spent over $600,000 in that 8-year period on repairs and parts, and he would get somewhere around $1,000 back,” Cade said. “So it's a very, very small amount and certainly doesn't cover the monopolistic access that John Deere has enjoyed over the last 8 years. So, I mean, we have to remember that John Deere for the last 10 years has been operating illegally. Now they won't admit that in the paperwork. But that is the basis of all of this: they've been operating illegally.”
On top of the monetary relief, Wilson believes there is a carve-out in the settlement proposal that will allow the company to continue its withholding of services.
“Any future repair tools that Deere creates, they're not required to provide it to independents or, you know, producers until they've rolled it out to at least 50% of their dealer network,” Wilson said. “And there's all kinds of specialized equipment in agriculture. A cotton picker comes to mind where Deere could roll out repair tools for those individual pieces of equipment and never have to make it available to their entire geographic footprint. And it's just not acceptable.”
Wilson shared an instance in which his Deere combine became inoperable, and he had to travel to a dealership, where multiple sensors were replaced, but the issue persisted. Finally, the dealer noticed the issue was with the system’s product improvement program.
“So they finally figured out that it was an exhaust gas recirculation valve, and that also requires the ECU [engine control unit] to be reflashed to accept the part,” Wilson said. “And they'd had that part in stock the entire time. If I had known where we were in the repair process, I could have just bought it, put it on my machine, and, if I had the tools, reflashed my ECU and been running probably within a couple of hours. And instead, it cost me 4 days and tens of thousands of dollars of grain on the ground. And that's a common story that has happened out here in farm country for quite a few years.”
Claimants have until September 14 to opt out of the settlement; those who remain will no longer be allowed to sue Deere & Company over repair issues. Wilson states that at this time, the settlement is not viable to him, and he will opt out unless a better deal is offered.
“And I think that that's why people who, you know, don't necessarily have a connection to agriculture should be interested in this, because this is the model many corporations are trying to adopt: purchasing something as a subscription service, whether you recognize it at the time or not. And I don't think that that's in the best interest of our society,” Wilson said.
The federal District Court for Northern Illinois has scheduled a Fairness Hearing on October 29th, in Rockford, Illinois.
