The Right-to-Repair Revolution: John Deere Agrees to Monumental $99M Settlement

When you drive through farm country in Iowa or Illinois in late spring, you’ll see them everywhere: those recognizable green and yellow machines that sit at the edge of a recently turned field. They are huge, costly, and quietly essential to every harvest that comes after. The price of a contemporary John Deere tractor can reach $300,000 or higher. It’s more than just equipment for the farmer who owns one. It’s the farm. Because of this, the ten-year battle over who gets to fix it when something breaks has never really been about repair costs. The focus has been on control.

In order to resolve a class action lawsuit alleging that the company monopolized the agricultural equipment repair market by purposefully preventing farmers and independent shops from obtaining the diagnostic software and tools required to service their own equipment, John Deere agreed to pay $99 million. The case was filed as a multi-district complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois in 2022. It claimed that Deere had purposefully designed a system in which an authorized John Deere dealership was the only feasible route to a functional tractor. Deere “wields significant economic power” greater than the combined strength of its next two largest rivals, Case New Holland and Kubota, according to the lawsuit. The business reached a settlement without acknowledging any misconduct.

Sitting with this number is worthwhile. In fiscal year 2025, John Deere reported a profit of $5.027 billion. Approximately one-fifth of a single year’s earnings are represented by the $99 million settlement. For background, the public interest advocacy group U.S. PIRG, which has been monitoring this battle for years, calculated that repair restrictions imposed by all manufacturers of agricultural equipment cost American farmers about $4.2 billion a year. In that sense, the settlement is more of a rounding error than a reckoning. However, the more general terms associated with it are more significant than the check itself.

Deere is required by the agreement to provide farmers and independent repair shops with diagnostic tools and repair resources for a minimum of ten years. The right-to-repair movement has been advocating for access as well as money. the option to contact someone other than the closest Deere dealership if a farmer has a broken combine during harvest week. The ability to identify a fault code on a machine located in a field twenty miles from the closest town without having to wait days for a technician authorized by the factory. In the words of U.S. PIRG’s Nathan Proctor, “The most important thing is for farmers to be able to fix their stuff.” It shouldn’t be necessary to say that sentence. It did for years.

Farmers’ own skepticism has been audible and warranted. Close observers of this case quickly noted that most individual farmers might receive between $300 and $400 after legal fees, administrative expenses, and distribution among an estimated 200,000 eligible claimants. The cost of a single dealer service visit may exceed that amount. A more direct statement was made in a Reddit thread about the announcement: “Here’s your $300 peasant, you’re still not allowed to fix the things you own.” That sentiment, though unfiltered, expresses a genuine annoyance: class action settlements of this type typically feel more like closure for attorneys than justice for those who filed.

It’s also difficult to ignore the fact that Deere has previously traveled this path. In 2023, the business agreed to enhance repair access in a memorandum of understanding with the American Farm Bureau Federation. At the time, critics referred to it as a document full of loopholes, pointing out that Deere could still classify nearly anything as a trade secret or a safety feature in order to prevent access. A close reader of that MOU also pointed out a clause in which the Farm Bureau agreed to discourage state right-to-repair legislation that went beyond what Deere had promised, thereby suppressing the very laws that farmers needed through the use of a farmer advocacy group. Even after a $99 million settlement was reached, the suspicion hasn’t completely disappeared because of this kind of maneuvering.

The Federal Trade Commission’s ongoing antitrust lawsuit is another minor issue that hasn’t been resolved. The FTC lawsuit, which was filed in 2025, essentially restates the class action’s claims that Deere unlawfully prevented independent technicians and farmers from fixing its machinery. Deere is still required to respond in court to the government’s version of these accusations after a federal judge denied the company’s request to have that case dismissed in June of last year. Deere gains some goodwill from the civil settlement. The antitrust exposure does not go away.

Denver Caldwell, vice president of aftermarket and customer support at John Deere, presented the settlement in terms of dedication and innovation, citing the company’s Operations Center Pro Service tool as proof of real advancement. He might be correct that the company has actually changed its stance. It’s also possible that the old approach was too costly to continue due to years of legal pressure, FTC scrutiny, and waning public goodwill—John Deere went from being a cherished rural institution to a corporate villain in about ten years. The company that used to have John Deere stickers on every Wisconsin barn door is now the one that people bring up when discussing the need for right-to-repair legislation. No settlement document adequately explains that reputational shift, and it is difficult to undo.