Machinery, Equipment and the Installed Base

On 15 January 2025 the Federal Trade Commission sued Deere & Company in the federal court for the Northern District of Illinois, joined at filing by the states of Illinois and Minnesota. The complaint was about tractors and combines that had become computers on wheels. Modern Deere machines could be fully diagnosed and repaired, the FTC alleged, only with software and tools that Deere made available to its authorised dealers and not to farmers or independent repair shops. Owners therefore had to wait for a dealer's technician, often during harvest, when a stopped combine costs a farmer far more per hour than the machine's depreciation, and pay the dealer's rates. The FTC alleged that Deere's restrictions were unlawful, steered repairs to its dealers and raised prices.

The case had a decade of history behind it. Farmers and repair shops had campaigned for years for a "right to repair" farm equipment, and states had begun to legislate it. Deere, for its part, had spent the same decade turning its machines into a platform: guidance using corrected satellite positioning, telematics and a data service, computer vision from Blue River Technology, which it bought for $305 million in 2017 and which became its See & Spray system, and software features that could be unlocked by licence on existing hardware. The business logic was to move revenue from one-time machine sales towards recurring revenue from the machines already in the field. The same locks that protected that revenue made independent repair harder.

On 8 July 2026 the FTC and five states announced a settlement, filed as a proposed order. Deere must make repair resources available to farmers and independent repair shops on terms comparable to those it gives authorised dealers, file compliance reports and pay each of the five states $1 million for costs and fees; reports describe a ten-year term (reported). A separate private class action was reported settled for about $99 million in April 2026. For the industry the settlement turned a commercial choice into a legal baseline, dealer parity on repair information, and posed the question that runs through this chapter: who captures the decades of parts, service and data that a machine generates after it is sold?