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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.
If farmers do not actually own the vehicle they pay for, but instead only receive a âoelicense to operate the vehicleâ as John Deere claims, shouldn't repairs all be at the cost of John Deer, and any losses due to mechanical or software failure mean John Deere is liable for damages...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
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.