The feds are coming for John Deere over the right to repair

I'm not and do not know American farmer so I'm asking a genuine question, why did they keep buying Deere tractors ?

I know for a fact that there are competitors, in Europe we have many other brand of tractors. It would make no sense to buy something that you know you can't repair.

I'd imagine you buy whatever color of machine you can get at your nearest dealer.

I'm not a farmer, just friends with some. Driving through tiny towns in rural America you often see small-time John Deere dealerships and repair shops. They are very very well established. I've heard that they have trade-in and financing programs that are very attractive; for many farmers their only option is to go with what is local and has the minimum down up front.

JD has a good reputation for reliability, and at least in the area where my family farms, green tractors retain their resale value better than most. Also a well built-out dealer network for support. A key factor for my brother's operation is that a large regional JD parts depot is a 20 minute drive away. With any other brand, the mechanic might tell you: "Well, we can have the part here in two days." versus "If you drive to the depot now and pick up the part, I can have you running by the end of this afternoon." During spring planting and fall harvest, that is a big deal.

Thanks for that.

Not so much nearest dealer, but nearest large repair-parts warehouse, even if you drive a few more miles to the dealer.

The specialist machinery that Deere makes is really well refined and good at what it does and the fact that farming in the US has consolidated a lot over the decades so the median tractor is bought by some "large enough that they don't really care" business of a farm who doesn't really care because they'll be buying aa maintenance contract and getting rid of the thing in X years anyway.

JD is like the IBM of farm equipment.

I am a farmer, although one that isn't big enough to buy new equipment. Essentially, what happens is that only the big operators buy new – or more likely lease new – where they only keep it for a season or two. They aren't apt to be too worried about right to repair as the machine will be under warranty the entire time they keep it. Once it goes onto the used market, well... You're at the mercy of what is on the used market.

So despite their big flaws (repairability), they still are better than their competitor ?

I know a few farmer in Europe, despite being better if you tell them they can't repair their engine, they would get very angry and never buy this brand again. When things break its faster to repair themselves because they already repaired it many times.

But here farms are much smaller than in the us, so it might be a matter of priority. If you have so much land than loosing a day on repairing something makes you lose more money, it makes sense to go with John Deere.

On the other hand, these farmers all have several tractors and old equipment like 40 years old so that when a thing break they can still use another even if less efficient to do the job.

As sibling comments have said, wide availability of parts and specialists is a big part of it. Big time ops can have people on staff, but most mom and pops will lean on the service shops. Either way though, you need to have parts physically nearby so you can be back up and running in hours rather than days. When your hay is down and rain is in the forecast, waiting days instead of hours can be the difference between a great harvest and a field full of ass grass. In the north american west, when your irrigation is broken and it's July/August, you may only have a day or two before crops start drying and wilting. If you're lucky, you'll get it back up before permanent damage starts.

In many rural areas, John Deere is the closest and/or only option, so you have to choose between freedom and inconvenience, or technological slavery and safety. As we've seen with the general public, most people will go with the latter. Your insurance premiums are certainly cheaper that way.

I guess I don't really understand this argument in an age of near-overnight shipping. I am not a farmer, but I have maintained EOL equipment like refrigerators, fancy stoves, a MB 240D, chainsaws in a small mountain town (ie, far from parts sources). I tend to have the next obvious replacement parts on the shelf already. So for instance I have brake pads for a 2001 Toyota Tundra on the shelf.

Though I am not a farmer I have spent time with the spouse's family out in W Minnesota and all of them were farmers. I did not get the impression that they were useless around a wrench, welding rig, or electrical circuits.

An argument I could buy about Deere's brand loyalty is that (I know nothing about this beyond farmer hearsay) the current generation of farmers seems to really like the GPS automation. Grandpa can go a lot more years these days, is the point. I'd be curious about the accuracy of that anecdata.

It was the bait and switch - it's the end of most incredibly successful capitalist corporations. The reputation JD built was very well earned so they defacto became the everyman's tractor and for good reason.

At some point all corporations start to trim expenses or generate new revenues from existing avenues - so that reputation was used to get everyone kinda trapped in their JD world that was essentially made "unrepairable" overnight.

This is the same thing Monsanto did with seed, Dow chem with Roundup and Microsoft with windows for a non farm example.

Once you envelop an ecosystem of products and services the people within that system are largely at the mercy of it. Apple and their batteries intentionally being made to fail scandal a few years back is another great example.

It's just the numbers are much bigger in the agricultural world than the consumer tech world. The tractor that has essentially a SaS contract/required yearly operating expense for maintenance and upkeep might cost millions in the first place. Many farmers have machine shops that are plenty capable of repairing tractors - bc they've always done so.

JD is trying to fundamentally change the game - it's not the farmers fault for being a loyal customer for 10-40+ years, as many farmers today inherited farms that already had JD equipment from their fathers/grand fathers.

JD is exploiting that and their supply chain to make tractors and farm equipment glorified rentals.

> I tend to have the next obvious replacement parts on the shelf already

What I was going to say, moreover when you have a tool that is critical to your job, you get a second one. It doesn't have to be a great one, it can be the old one that kept failing so you decided to buy a new one, whatever but just good enough to save your life Incase your critical equipment fails.

Farmers like the automation bc it's increasingly a single farmer running a family farm and even corporate farms can't find people to employ - hence the widespread employment of illegal immigrants, it's practically and functionally necessary for the agricultural industry in the United States today to have access to cheap, off books and unregulated labor.

I live near a farmer that owns a several thousand head dairy, the company that transports the milk to the creamery that he also owns and the brands that creamery sells to local business - he just keeps buying farms as soon as they go up for sale, anything in the area.

He rips out the homestead and leaves only building that he will use immediately and plows the entire acreage - not a tree in sight. Those trees between fields exist bc of the dust bowl in the 30s - we literally already kno what happens when people do that, he doesn't care at all.

The land he owns is larger than the estates barons of old would rule over - larger by a lot.

Once he automates and all the land outside the cities are owned by him and ppl like him - it can stay that way indefinitely... much like the dark ages. That's their goal - a permanent divide between the rural and urban populations.

This seems like a tangent but it's not - the family farms are being pushed and bought up by the farmers that willingly play JD's games bc they kno only so many can.

JD doesn't want millions of repair contracts with farmers - they want to consolidate that into something more controllable.

Ahh, IBM - another great example of a company that attained a near universal adoption by setting the standards of quality - literally established what we thought a computer was and then just went to shit.

IBM couldn't get their supercomputer/AI that McDonalds funded to correctly run a drive thru - the project was literally shelved. It can play chess tho ;)