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Farmer Lobbying Group Sells Out Farmers, Helps Enshrine John Deere's Tractor Repair Monopoly (vice.com)
Jason Koebler writes: The California Farm Bureau, a group that lobbies on behalf of farmers, reached a "right to repair" agreement with the Equipment Dealers Association (which represents John Deere and other manufacturers) last week. But the specifics of the agreement were written by the manufacturers, and falls far short of providing the types of change that would be needed to make repairing tractors easier. In fact, the agreement makes the same concessions that the Equipment Dealers Association announced in February it would voluntarily give to all farmers. The agreement will not allow farmers to buy repair parts, break firmware DRM, or otherwise alter software for the purposes of repair.
The divergence from Libertarianism is when they prevented reverse-engineering of the DRM. In a truly free market, John Deere is free to try and lock in as much as possible, and third parties are free to try and break that lock and undercut them.
And how did tractors get this special right, I'm sure game console manufacturers would love to be able to legally lock out the third party controller market...
lol, you obviously haven't compared tractor prices in a while. The reason they stick with John Deere is the high tech pieces can all communicate with each other. Do some research on precision farming, where the everything talks to each other (tractor/planter/sprayer/combine). When the tech has problems, or when a a particular techie farmer wants to do something different it is a pain in the ass. When it works they get increased yield for less expenditures.
Now I know a few who are keeping "an old" tractor in the shed in case they have electronics problems they have something to use for the couple days until it gets fixed. The big farmers don't care because they have multiple units. The guys who really get burned are the little farmers with a mid range $100k tractor that can't afford a backup....but honestly, they are being driven out of business by a lot more things than downtime from computer failures on a tractor.
John Deere isn't the only option, but Case IH and New Holland are really the only other two that are in the same league for broad equipment. Sure you could get a Claas or Gleaner combine if you have a specific need like long crops or higher moisture but you won't have a planter by either of them.