Before a January “memorandum of understanding,” or MOU, on a farmer’s “right to repair” his farm machinery, U.S. equipment makers and their farm and ranch customers were locked in a legal and legislative fight over who could fix today’s complex ag machinery — the customer who owned or leased it, or the maker that designed, built and held its warranty.
But, agricultural law experts say, the trumpeted MOU between Deere & Co., the world’s largest farm machinery manufacturer, and the American Farm Bureau Federation, the nation’s biggest farm group, is unenforceable.
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In fact, they explain, the “understanding” offers no binding legal rights to either farmers or manufacturers and doesn’t stop any farmer or farm group from continuing their court and legislative fights for their “right to repair.”
This battle — and its hollow truce — is a fight few foresaw a generation ago. Back then, farmers and ranchers routinely tackled equipment repairs as simple as changing their tractor’s oil or as complicated as rebuilding its engine.
Today’s farm machinery, especially tractors and combines, are driven more by software than diesel and their day-in, day-out performance swings as much on electrons and algorithms as cylinder compression and hydraulic hook-ups.
Farmers quickly learned to both love and loathe this complexity. At peak performance, the machinery is a highly productive, almost-alive partner that eats acres and performs tasks no machine could have even attempted 20 years ago.
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At its worst, however, it’s a silent heap of costly steel and cold cast iron until some fuzzy-cheeked dealer technician shows up to reset an inaccessible switch or override some mysterious, proprietary computer code.
Thus the repair fight: Farmers and ranchers want machinery makers like Deere and CNH Industrial, the owners of Case IH and New Holland, to give them access to the information and tools they need to do what they’ve been doing since the dawn of farming: repair their tools without additional cost or delay.
When private pressure failed to deliver that access, farmers began to lobby both state legislatures and Congress for the right. Civil lawsuits — 16 in total, now consolidated into a federal class action — soon followed.
AFBF claims it worked to secure its Deere agreement — and, on March 9, a similar MOU with Case IH — because its members wanted to dampen the escalating fight while gaining a clear understanding of what they can and cannot repair.