For years, American farmers have complained about a frustrating paradox: they could buy a $500,000 combine harvester outright, yet couldn’t fix it themselves without calling a dealer. The machines they owned were, in a meaningful sense, not entirely theirs. Now, John Deere is paying $99 million to settle a class action lawsuit alleging it deliberately monopolized the repair market for its agricultural equipment — a resolution that, depending on whom you ask, either marks a turning point for the right-to-repair movement or amounts to little more than a rounding error for one of the world’s most profitable equipment manufacturers.
The settlement, announced in late June 2025, resolves claims brought by a class of farmers who argued that Deere & Company used software locks, proprietary diagnostic tools, and restrictive dealer agreements to ensure that only authorized technicians could perform certain repairs. As Wired reported, the lawsuit accused Deere of forcing farmers into a bottleneck — one where the company controlled both the equipment and the only permissible pathway to keep it running.
The mechanics of the alleged monopoly are straightforward. Modern Deere tractors and combines run on embedded software systems that govern everything from engine timing to hydraulic pressure. When a component fails or throws an error code, the machine often requires a proprietary diagnostic tool to clear the fault and resume operation. Farmers, even those with decades of mechanical experience, couldn’t simply replace a part and get back to work. They needed a Deere dealer — or a Deere-authorized technician — to plug in and authenticate the repair. In planting and harvest seasons, when downtime can cost thousands of dollars a day, that dependency wasn’t just inconvenient. It was financially punishing.
The class action, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, alleged that this arrangement violated federal antitrust law. Plaintiffs argued that Deere had unlawfully tied the sale of repair services to its equipment, creating a secondary market in which it faced no meaningful competition. The complaint pointed to Deere’s dealer network — roughly 2,000 locations in North America — as the enforcement arm of this strategy. Dealers, the suit claimed, were contractually prohibited from sharing diagnostic software or tools with independent repair shops.
Deere denied wrongdoing. The company has consistently maintained that its software restrictions exist to protect equipment integrity, ensure safety, and preserve emissions compliance. In court filings, Deere argued that opening its diagnostic systems to anyone could lead to improper repairs, voided warranties, and even environmental violations if engine software were tampered with. These are not frivolous arguments. Modern agricultural equipment is extraordinarily complex, and the stakes of a botched repair on a machine operating at highway speeds in a field are real.
But farmers weren’t buying it. Not anymore.
The $99 million settlement fund will be distributed among class members who purchased or leased certain Deere equipment and paid for dealer repairs during the class period. Individual payouts will vary, and after attorney fees and administrative costs, many farmers may receive relatively modest checks. For context, Deere reported net income of $7.1 billion in fiscal year 2024. The settlement represents roughly 1.4% of a single year’s profit.
That math hasn’t escaped the attention of right-to-repair advocates. Gay Gordon-Byrne, executive director of the Repair Association, told multiple outlets that while the settlement sends a signal, it doesn’t fundamentally change Deere’s business model. The company can absorb $99 million without altering its approach to software locks or dealer exclusivity. What would change things, Gordon-Byrne and others argue, is legislation — and on that front, the picture is more complicated.
The right-to-repair movement has gained remarkable political momentum in recent years. Colorado passed an agricultural right-to-repair law in 2023, the first state to do so, and several other states have since introduced or passed similar measures. In January 2023, Deere signed a memorandum of understanding with the American Farm Bureau Federation, pledging to make diagnostic tools and repair manuals available to farmers and independent shops by 2024. The company did release a customer-facing diagnostic platform, but critics say it falls short of the full dealer-level access that would enable truly independent repair.
The federal government has also weighed in. The Federal Trade Commission issued a 2021 report criticizing manufacturer restrictions on repair across multiple industries, from smartphones to tractors. The FTC’s report, titled “Nixing the Fix,” found that such restrictions disproportionately harmed small businesses and rural communities — precisely the constituencies that Deere’s equipment serves. President Biden signed an executive order that same year encouraging the FTC to pursue right-to-repair enforcement.
And yet enforcement has been halting. The FTC has taken action against a handful of companies for illegal warranty voiding — telling consumers that third-party repairs would void their warranties, in violation of the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act — but no major antitrust case against an agricultural equipment manufacturer has gone to trial. The Deere settlement, by resolving the claims before a verdict, leaves the underlying legal questions unanswered. Does software-locked repair constitute an illegal tying arrangement? Can a manufacturer’s control over diagnostic tools create a monopoly in an aftermarket? These questions remain unresolved at the appellate level.
The settlement does include some non-monetary terms. According to court filings reviewed by multiple publications, Deere agreed to certain transparency measures regarding repair information and diagnostic access. But the specifics are narrower than what legislation in Colorado and other states requires. The practical effect may be limited.
For the farming community, the frustration runs deeper than any single lawsuit. Talk to enough farmers in the Midwest and you’ll hear a consistent refrain: the relationship between Deere and its customers has shifted. What was once a partnership — the farmer and the green-and-yellow machines that built American agriculture — now feels more transactional, more controlled. Older farmers recall a time when they could rebuild an engine in their barn over a weekend. Their grandchildren, operating equipment with more computing power than early spacecraft, often can’t change a sensor without a dealer’s blessing.
This isn’t unique to Deere. AGCO, CNH Industrial (which makes Case IH and New Holland equipment), and Kubota all employ similar software-dependent architectures. But Deere, as the dominant player in North American agricultural equipment with roughly 60% market share in large tractors and combines, draws the most scrutiny. Its brand is synonymous with farming itself. When farmers feel locked out of their own machines, the betrayal feels personal.
The broader implications extend well beyond agriculture. The Deere settlement arrives at a moment when software-defined products are becoming the norm across industries. Automobiles, medical devices, home appliances, even wheelchairs — all increasingly rely on embedded software that manufacturers can use to control the aftermarket. The question of who has the right to repair a product they’ve purchased is, at its core, a question about ownership in the digital age. If you can’t fix it, do you really own it?
Some legal scholars argue that the existing antitrust framework is ill-suited to address these questions. Traditional tying doctrine, developed in an era of physical products and mechanical parts, doesn’t map neatly onto a world where the “tie” is a line of code. A farmer isn’t being forced to buy a specific brand of oil filter. They’re being required to use a proprietary software handshake to activate a component they’ve already purchased and installed. The distinction matters, and courts have struggled with it.
Others see the settlement as evidence that the legal system is working, if slowly. The fact that Deere agreed to pay $99 million — without admitting liability — suggests the company’s lawyers assessed real litigation risk. A trial could have produced a verdict far larger, and perhaps more importantly, could have established precedent that other plaintiffs’ attorneys would exploit across industries. Settling was, in this reading, a calculated business decision.
So where does this leave farmers? In the short term, they’ll receive some compensation for repair costs that many believe were inflated by Deere’s alleged monopoly practices. In the medium term, the real action is in state legislatures and Congress, where right-to-repair bills continue to advance. And in the long term, the answer may depend on whether the agricultural equipment industry can be persuaded — by market pressure, legal liability, or regulation — to open its platforms in a way that genuinely empowers independent repair.
Deere, for its part, appears to be hedging. The company has made public commitments to expanded repair access while simultaneously investing heavily in precision agriculture technology, autonomous equipment, and subscription-based service models that could deepen its control over the post-sale relationship. Its “See and Spray” technology, which uses machine learning to identify and treat individual weeds, and its autonomous tractor program both rely on proprietary software that farmers will need Deere to maintain. The more sophisticated the equipment becomes, the harder it is to argue that a farmer with a wrench and a laptop should be able to service it alone.
But that argument cuts both ways. The more dependent farmers become on a single company’s technology stack, the more urgent the competition concerns. A farmer who has invested millions in Deere equipment, Deere-compatible implements, and Deere’s data platform faces enormous switching costs. That lock-in gives Deere pricing power in the repair market that has little to do with the quality of its service and everything to do with the absence of alternatives.
The $99 million settlement won’t resolve this tension. It may not even be remembered a decade from now. But it is a data point — one of many accumulating in courtrooms, legislative chambers, and farmhouse kitchen tables across the country — in a long argument about the terms on which Americans will use the machines that feed them. The tractors keep getting smarter. The question is whether the people who buy them will retain any meaningful control over how they’re maintained.
For now, the checks will go out. The lawyers will collect their fees. And somewhere in Iowa, a farmer will still be waiting for a dealer tech to drive two hours to clear a fault code that a five-minute software reset could fix.
That’s the $99 million question. And it still doesn’t have an answer.
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