Right to Repair: Hackers, Farmers an Unlikely Pair

To avoid the draconian locks that John Deere puts on the tractors they buy, farmers throughout America’s heartland have started hacking their equipment with firmware that’s cracked in Eastern Europe and traded on invite-only, paid online forums, writes Jason Koebler for Motherboard.com.

Tractor hacking is growing increasingly popular because, Koebler argues, John Deere and other manufacturers have made it impossible to perform “unauthorized” repair on farm equipment, which farmers see as an attack on their sovereignty and quite possibly an existential threat to their livelihood if their tractor breaks at an inopportune time.

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“When crunch time comes and we break down, chances are we don’t have time to wait for a dealership employee to show up and fix it,” Danny Kluthe, a hog farmer in Nebraska, told his state legislature earlier this month. “Most all the new equipment [requires] a download [to fix].”

The nightmare scenario, and a fear I heard expressed over and over again in talking with farmers, is that John Deere could remotely shut down a tractor and there wouldn’t be anything a farmer could do about it.

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A license agreement John Deere required farmers to sign in October forbids nearly all repair and modification to farming equipment, and prevents farmers from suing for “crop loss, lost profits, loss of goodwill, loss of use of equipment … arising from the performance or non-performance of any aspect of the software.” The agreement applies to anyone who turns the key or otherwise uses a John Deere tractor with embedded software. It means that only John Deere dealerships and “authorized” repair shops can work on newer tractors.

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“If a farmer bought the tractor, he should be able to do whatever he wants with it,” Kevin Kenney, a farmer and right-to-repair advocate in Nebraska, told me. “You want to replace a transmission and you take it to an independent mechanic—he can put in the new transmission but the tractor can’t drive out of the shop. Deere charges $230, plus $130 an hour for a technician to drive out and plug a connector into their USB port to authorize the part.”

Head on over to Motherboard.com to read Koebler’s full story on how farmers are dealing with Right to Fix in the U.S.

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Avatar for Nate D Nate D says:

There’s a lot of misleading and just plain inaccurate information in Koebler’s article, I hope everyone takes what he’s written with a grain of salt. My impression reading his article is that he’s someone who has taken issue with the agriculture industry. Ultimately, software in a tractor is the same as software in a car or on an iphone, it’s protected by copyright law, but that doesn’t mean farmers can’t do their own mechanical repairs on equipment. The only instance they would need someone from a dealership is if there’s a software problem, and many dealerships are dedicating support personnel that can handle these issues remotely, minimizing down time and helping save customers from a field service call…