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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.
I'm not sure if Mahindra does the same thing or not; but I've noticed a few ads for them up here now and then, on radio stations where ag people might be listening.
The Deere hats are seen by some as being as American as the flag almost; but real patriots don't sit still for shit like this. I'd be all over this if I were in marketing for those other companies. Suggested slogan: "Shoot your Deere this season".
whore
You can bet a son or daughter in-law of some California Farm Bureau board member recently landed a $300K/year no-show "chairman" job at a Deere funded NGO. Some $200K and $150K/year vice-chairmen spots were doled out as well.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
There's a lot of factors that work against them here.
At this point, it's an effective monopoly. They'll call it "market leader," but their "lead market position," makes it hard to produce cheaper tractors, or to compete in the same market for new equipment, either at scale or dollar for dollar.
For large farms, it works in their favor, so the biggest of the big appreciate having single vendor suppliers with dedicated staff and a rotation of equipment. So the big bucks still favor them anyway, and that's not likely to change.
However, this hits small farms especially hard. The equipment is good, but it's far more complex than your average commuter vehicle. Blow a sensor and your land lies fallow for a few days because the system will refuse to start the motor. You need an authorized repairman to come out, suss it out, source a replacement, and fix it. Half the time it's just them putting their authorization code in to restart while you're chasing daylight. Imagine every time your computer crashes, you'd need to get a microsoft tech out - even if you're running linux - to authorize you to reboot your machine? That's a 300-450 cost, a few hundred for the appointment plus $150/hr.
Not only that, these farms are on a fairly high risk/reward system. They have to pay out now, and the weather and markets dictate later what their effort was worth. They're risk adverse. It's hard to go with a new tractor, system, etc. Sure, the ability to fix it yourself is great, but not if you're required to exercise that right 5x more than you would with the known brand.
So there are folks out there trying to make replacements, but it's like trying to sell linux to the stereotypical mom. Sure, it can do as much, and yeah, technically it might be able to do more than that old chestnut, buuuuuuttt.... well, find a folk who refers to "the facebooks" and starts browser searches with "please," and see how far you get with them installing, configuring and using linux on their own. Oh, and it costs more than windows too.
That's the problem with a monopoly, it doesn't compete fairly in a capitalist market. They've locked down the product, the repair and replacement parts AND the repairmen, and ensured there's no realistic competition in any of those markets, and unlike apple, who's faced a lot of flack for attempting to deliberately lock out third party parts or repairs, they've successfully lobbied state and federal governments to double down on their farm equipment cartel. They're actually trying to make it not only difficult to do manually, and impossible to get the parts elsewhere, but they're trying to make it literally illegal. The claim is that you COULD modify software or settings which impact emissions and other features, which are protected by law, and therefore consumers can't be allowed to do so.
The fact that they could get a farmers right lobby group to effectively cave shows the power of their monopoly, and that's just another sign that it's not a free market.
> If you want to make a controller for a game console expect to buy a license.
So a special agent in every house, and watching your every move? To each his own I guess. Personally, anyone who buys a piece of hardware/software and takes it home should be allowed to do what they want in the privacy of their home. And even be able to share what they learned with anyone they want. That is the only way to have a free society and freedom of speech. Now the government doesn't have to allow you to make a profit, and we can agree on reasonable terms to require licenses for profiting if it is built on the work of others... But making it illegal to figure things out, find the truth so to speak, and share it should not be infringed by the government in the USA. Those who want that are not the friends of the people.