A flourishing black market of John Deere parts exists online, connecting farmers in rural America with counterparts in Eastern Europe to buy unlocked firmware crucial to tractors. If you're surprised by the idea of Nebraska farmers working together with Ukrainian suppliers to defeat a tractor company, well, welcome to the bizarre fight over "right to repair."

Those who use the black market, documented in a report by Motherboard, claim they are driven to it by restrictive licensing agreement by Deere, one of the largest tractor companies in the world. Those restrictions would bar the tractors' users from fixing its hardware or software themselves, but such rules are currently being challenged by so-called "right to repair" legislation working its way various states at the moment, including farming-heavy Nebraska.

One reason right to repair has been such a contentious issue in ag states is that time is a crucial commodity since crops are reliant on seasons. "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, said during testimony to his state's legislature earlier this month. "Most all the new equipment [requires] a download [to fix]."

Right to repair legislation would invalidate John Deere's license agreement, updated last October, which has severe restrictions that prohibit nearly all repair and modification to farming equipment. Until then, Motherboard's reporter found "dozens of threads from farmers desperate to fix and modify their own tractors" online. The programs available on these forums range from diagnostic devices to data link drivers that allow computers to talk to tractors.

The company responded to the existence of the black market without specific comment, but noting the safety risks inherent in downloading such software. "Software modifications increase the risk that equipment will not function as designed," the company said. "As a result, allowing unqualified individuals to modify equipment software can endanger machine performance, in addition to Deere customers, dealers and others, resulting in equipment that no longer complies with industry and safety/environmental regulations."

Lydia Brasch, the state representative who introduced the Right to Repair legislation, told Popular Mechanics last month that farmer have known how to fix their tractors "for decades, generations even." That knowledge, as the very existence of the forms shows, has moved from the mechanical into the digital.

Source: Motherboard

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