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

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.

> 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.