Indiana farmers scored a huge win recently when John Deere reached a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission.
Under the terms of the deal, farmers and independent shops will gain access to the same reprogramming tools, fault-code readers, and repair manuals the company’s own dealers use.
This is good news for Indiana’s economy. Forcing farmers to rely on authorized dealer technicians for repairs they can easily make themselves leads to lost time and lost revenue.
In a state that’s 63.2% farmland — the second-highest percentage east of the Mississippi — those losses add up pretty quickly. Now, thanks to this breakthrough agreement between government and industry, farmers can either fix their own equipment or let independent shops vie for their business by being cheaper or faster than the competition.
John Deere deserves particular credit because the company has steadily emerged as an industry leader on right to repair. It asked the Environmental Protection Agency to clarify that the Clean Air Act does not prevent equipment owners from making lawful repairs, a step that helped clear away one of the biggest regulatory obstacles to making right to repair an industry standard.
Last year, Deere also launched a service that gave customers access to more of the diagnostic and repair capabilities they need to service their own machines. Now it has reinforced that right to repair commitment through its agreement with the FTC.
Deere cannot transform the entire industry by itself. But its example raises the cost of inaction for its competitors and should pressure them to offer their customers the same freedom. If they value the farmers who feed this country — or, at the very least, if they don’t want to lose business to Deere! — they should follow the company’s lead.
The right to repair movement isn’t just about saving time and money. It’s about resisting a future in which, as the World Economic Forum famously put it in 2016, “you’ll own nothing and be happy.”
Farmers might legally own their equipment, but you don’t really own something if you aren’t allowed to try to fix it.
Ownership means more than just legal title. It means taking responsibility for something, caring for it well, and trying to be worthy of it. Real ownership builds maturity, competence and virtue.
And right now, real ownership is under attack.
Many of the devices we use on a daily basis now include “smart features” that force us into an ongoing dependent relationship with the manufacturer. In a 2024 essay for The New Atlantis, writer Clare Coffey compared her family’s 1970s radio to digital-age gadgets and all of the downloads, platforms and subscriptions that come with them. “Personal technology used to be a machine,” she wrote. “Now it’s a bureaucracy.”
Thanks to this shift from one-time purchases to ongoing subscriptions, you no longer really own the media you consume. Instead of buying VHS tapes or DVDs, which show you the same movie every time until they wear out, we use streaming services. But none of the content on Hulu or Netflix really belongs to you.
Soon, you won’t really own your car, either. In 2022, BMW began selling vehicles that came with built-in heated seats but charged $18 a month to unlock their functionality. The company quickly abandoned the idea amid massive backlash, but that was only a temporary victory. As self-driving cars that require regular software updates become more widespread, it’s easy to imagine a tiered subscription model becoming the norm.
As more and more of the things we own slip further and further from our control, we’ll continue to lose our sense of agency and become the ideal passive consumers corporations want us to be.
Homeownership remains out of reach for far too many Americans because of market forces and policy choices that are too complex to address here. Fortunately, being a true “owner” doesn’t require buying a home, a stake in a company, or any other expensive asset. Everybody owns something, and how you choose both reveals and forms your character. On the deepest level, ownership is a mindset. It’s about cultivating the spirit of self-reliance that has sustained our republic since the beginning.
And if our leaders hope to preserve that republic, they should do what John Deere and the FTC did: give ownership back to the people to ensure that, to paraphrase the movie “Fight Club,” the things we own don’t end up owning us.
Sovilla and Gerald (Jerry) Mennen are sixth-generation farmers. They operate a grain and livestock operation in Kirklin, Indiana.
This article originally appeared on Lafayette Journal & Courier: Opinion: Thanks to John Deere, Indiana farmers reclaim the meaning of ownership
Reporting by Sovilla and Gerald Mennen, Lafayette Journal & Courier / Lafayette Journal & Courier
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Sovilla and Gerald Mennen, Lafayette Journal & Courier | USA TODAY Network
