John Deere will pay $99 million to settle a class action lawsuit accusing the company of blocking farmers and independent mechanics from accessing repair materials for agricultural equipment.
The settlement requires Deere to provide repair resources for 10 years on a license or subscription basis, and to enable offline reprogramming and diagnostics on equipment by end of 2026. That second point matters: farmers currently depend on authorized Deere dealers for basic software functions, a dependency that costs time and money in industries where downtime is measured in harvests.
The full settlement document, available on DocumentCloud, details exactly what repair access looks like under the licensing terms, which is where the devil lives. Read it before assuming this is a clean win for right-to-repair.
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