On Monday, farming equipment manufacturer John Deere announced it would pay $99 million in a settlement to a class action lawsuit brought on by its customers. The suit accused the company of restricting access to tools and repairs of its tractors and other farming equipment, effectively leveraging a monopoly on the repair market for its products.
The money, if accepted by the farmer-aligned plaintiffs, will go into a fund, then eventually be distributed to Deere equipment owners who can prove they paid for dealership repairs sometime since 2018. In the settlement, John Deere also says it will make repair tools and services more widely available. For the next 10 years, at least.
John Deere has kept tight control over how its customers can fix or tinker with its equipment by disallowing access via software restrictions or requiring machines to be brought to approved shops for repair. That has left thousands of farmers to deal with delayed harvests and millions of dollars in lost profits while waiting for an approved fix.
The difficulty in repairing John Deere equipment has become something of a catalyst for the broader right-to-repair movement—people who advocate for the ability to fix their own products after they have purchased them. To push back against the company, farmers have hacked tractors to get around software restrictions. Local laws have been drafted in farming-heavy states like Iowa to give power back to equipment owners. Advocates have filed many similar lawsuits against the company, including a suit filed in January 2025 by the US Federal Trade Commission. Repair advocacy has been booming, and John Deere is often right in the crosshairs.
“Right-to-repair is almost a misnomer,” says Ethan E. Litwin, an antitrust lawyer at Shinder Cantor Lerner law firm. “This is the fight about ownership rights. What the farmers alleged is that John Deere changed the rules on them once they purchased their tractors and other farming equipment. How can a manufacturer legitimately claim to restrain those rights post-sale?”
Litwin also noted the settlement amount of $99 million, rather than an even $100 million. It’s like when a company charges $9.99 for a product rather than $10, to make it feel like it’s less expensive than it is.
“Clearly that was the maximum that Deere was willing to go because they didn't want to have a nine-figure number in the press release,” Litwin says, comparing the number to similar settlement cases he has seen. “There’s a big PR difference.”
In its settlement, Deere admitted no wrongdoing. By definition, a settlement is bound to be less money than the damages the company is being accused of and the legal costs it would absorb by fighting the case. But repair advocates estimate the losses by John Deere customers as a result of the company's repair restrictions are somewhere in the realm of $4.2 billion. In the lawsuit, antitrust economist Russell Lamb estimated that overcharging for equipment repairs had cost farmers between $190 million and $387 million alone. Deere’s payout winds up being a fraction of those estimated damages, split up between an estimated 200,000 farmers who are likely to be included in the class action dole out of funds.
“The farmers who get restitution will get some chunk of change, but that's not the thing that they care about,” says Nathan Proctor, head of the right to repair campaign at consumer advocacy organization US PIRG. “They're not looking for five grand or something like that in the mail. They’re looking for the ability to fix their equipment because if they can't fix it, they can lose everything.”
Assuming John Deere does what it says and makes its repair tools and equipment more available, there are also bound to be some economic effects on the company as well.
“The true value of the non-monetary relief in this case, I would say, is unknown, but could be very substantial,” Litwin says. “Deere is potentially sacrificing hundreds of millions in profits.”
When asked for comment, a John Deere representative did not address the lawsuit directly, but sent a statement attributed to the company’s vice president of global aftermarket and customer support, Denver Caldwell, which included, “John Deere is aligned with farmers when it comes to repair. We want farmers to be able to fix their equipment. In fact, our industry depends on it.”
The company also pointed to its Operations Center Pro Service, software that customers can use for diagnosis, repairs, and reprogramming. “This access is not theoretical,” said the statement. “It is being used right now by many farmers across the US and Canada.”
Repair advocates aren't convinced, and say the company has made commitments to repair efforts in the past, but undercut them from taking effect in meaningful ways.
“John Deere has a terrible track record of saying one thing and then doing something that is not fully as good as they said that they were going to do,” Litwin says.
“They've earned the skepticism,” Proctor says. “We've done this dance before.”
John Deere is not finished with its repair lawsuits. In 2025, the company was sued by the US Federal Trade Commission over similar repair concerns. Even if Deere does make good on its promises to make repair tools and equipment readily available, the settlement states that the promise is only good for 10 years. After that, Deere could simply choose to change how it manages repair access.
“I intend to be on the case for this until I'm convinced this problem is solved,” Proctor says.
“We're not going to stop advocating for farmers until their equipment belongs to them and does what they want it to, and is not beholden to whatever John Deere deems as an interest to shareholders.”
