Most people’s daily lives involve something that can break, whether that’s the machinery required for work, the computer or cellphone someone uses to conduct business, or the motorized wheelchair that someone needs to move around. Today, right to repair touches everything from the agriculture industry to accessibility. If legislation isn’t passed, the everyman will be fully at the whim of the manufacturer – and you won’t be far behind.
Right to repair is a consumer protection principle that covers everything from consumer electronics and cars to the machinery the agriculture industry relies on. It holds that if consumers own something, they should be able to repair and modify it. Right to repair is a bipartisan issue that is often championed by legislators from both sides of the aisle.
Every state in the U.S. has seen some semblance of right-to-repair legislation proposed, with 57 active bills in 22 states since February alone. Most bills have stalled, and the Midwest hasn’t seen any new protections signed into law since Minnesota signed the Digital Fair Repair Act into law in 2023. Federal legislation has been proposed dating back to 2001, but nothing of substance has been signed into law concerning right to repair across the board.
Where we are
In April 2026, Deere & Company (John Deere) settled multidistrict antitrust litigation over repair services in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, agreeing to pay $99 million to affected farmers without admitting wrongdoing. In July, the Federal Trade Commission, along with Illinois, Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arizona, secured a separate settlement with Deere requiring the company to make diagnostic and repair resources available to third parties. Although the FTC settlement requires Deere to make diagnostic tools available, independent repair providers may still be priced out, with just 10 software licenses costing around $6,000 per year.
John Deere maintains their stance that it has supported consumers’ ability to maintain and repair their equipment through access to manuals, evolving tools, technology and information.
“Today, customers can choose to repair equipment themselves, work with an independent service provider or use a trusted John Deere dealer,” says a spokesperson from John Deere over email. “Our latest offering, Operations Center™ PRO Service, provides advanced repair capabilities including software reprogramming, calibrations, and interactive diagnostics, all designed to help keep equipment running when and where farmers need it most.”
Willie Cade is a right to repair advocate who has spent the past 10 years fighting for consumers’ right to repair and modify their property. Cade is also a board member of Repair.org, one of the leading advocacy groups for the right to repair. Repair.org believes that ownership should be absolute and that the consumer should have the right to use, modify, and repair the product in any way they see fit.
“What you’ll see is while John Deere speaks as if they are making the tools available, they have what’s known in legal terms as a constructive failure to deal,” Cade says. “In other words, they create so many barriers or so many exceptions or requirements, et cetera, that it’s impractical for your local mechanic who’s not inside a Deere dealership to access the tools.”
How we got here
Over the past decade, the agricultural industry has seen a shift as all nonroad diesel vehicles in the U.S. had to adopt tier four emissions standards by 2015. Tier four standard, set by the Environmental Protection Agency, limits the amount of nitrogen oxides that certain engines can emit. These are the same kinds of emissions standards that can be found in cars, trucks, semitrailer trucks and other modern vehicles. Standards vary by vehicle classification, and emissions systems are often managed by an electronic control unit, or ECU, within the vehicle. As ECU-equipped machinery became more common, manufacturers gained greater control over the repair process.
“Starting in approximately 2020, you’ll see a dramatic increase in inflation on dealer costs or repair costs,” Cade says. “So much that repair costs are twice fuel costs per acre these days, according to the University of Illinois [Urbana-Champaign].”
A University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign farm economics report, “Machinery Costs on Illinois Grain Farms,” found that machinery cost per acre rose from 2003 to 2023 from $44 to $162. Adjusted for inflation the 2003 figure would be about $73 in 2023 dollars. This means that machinery costs per acre more than doubled in the past two decades.
Onboard ECUs offer several benefits – fuel efficiency and performance, for example, or theoretically enabling self-diagnostics and easier troubleshooting, although this is far from the case in reality – especially when the ECU itself fails.
“If you have to replace an ECU, you have to get the software through a dealer, and it only can be installed in dealer versions of software, etc.,” says Cade. “Now, Deere claims that their new software for customers called Pro Service will do that. It’s hit or miss.”
Cade says Deere has reduced the capabilities of Pro Service over time. The web-based diagnostic platform, designed for equipment owners, became available to the public in July 2025. The FTC’s order requires Deere to make the diagnostic equipment that was previously unavailable to the public for the next 10 years. When asked about the 10-year support requirement, Cade expressed concern that the tools provided before and after the settlement have little difference between them.
“I think there will be dramatically different market forces at that time period that are very difficult to predict,” Cade says. “In my mind, I want to get a real good solution now and am not quite so worried about 10 years from now.”
That’s like if your TV stopped letting you switch the input and only let you watch cartoons, with nothing you could do about it because the manufacturer wouldn’t release the instructions and software to fix it.
Lacking the letter of the law
“Right now, there are some very good statutes and regulations that are currently being either ignored or being ignored and not being enforced,” Cade says. “The notion that you can pass legislation and that legislation will have the intended effect is not always true. In other words, you can read the black letter law, the statute, and corporations are still not following it.”
Still, even if some companies ignore existing rules, Illinois has no law covering farm equipment that could be enforced, Cade argues.
Illinois state Rep. Michelle Mussman, who represents the 56th District, is one of the legislators working to pass right-to-repair legislation in her state. Right-to-repair legislation is often handled in two ways, according to Mussman: an omnibus bill that covers a range of right-to-repair issues like Minnesota’s Digital Fair Repair Act, or narrower bills focused on specific areas like Iowa’s farm equipment right to repair bill HF2709.
Even with these multiple strategies for legislating, Illinois has not passed broad right-to-repair protections for farm equipment or consumer electronics. One exception is a law providing protections for complex wheelchairs.
“Neither strategy has particularly worked,” Mussman says. “There are a lot of moving parts that can influence that at any given time, including which committee it gets assigned to, the reaction of the committee chair, the reception in the Senate; there’s a lot happening.”
According to Mussman, manufacturers are the main opposition to right-to-repair legislation. They cite concerns ranging from trade secrets to consumer safety and personal information.
Right to repair, as it exists within these proposed bills, can cover a plethora of things. One of those is the ability to modify certain products as seen fit by the consumer. That can include removing limiting safety protections and, in turn, puts the blame on the consumer and not on the company that made it.
“If we can’t build that counterargument, it’s much harder to say this is why it’s needed, and that’s why these particular items that we’ve spelled out in the bill are particularly needed to address these problems the farmers are having,” Mussman says.
Making that case is complicated by farmers’ reliance on John Deere and similar manufacturers. Some farmers fear that if they speak out, Deere could retaliate against them, according to Cade and Mussman.
“The farmers are rather beholden to John Deere,” Mussman says. “If their name is on a list of people who are out there actively working against the best interests of John Deere and they’re moved to the bottom of the repair line, that’s certainly not a risk many of them are willing to take.”
According to Vice in 2022, a Missouri farmer had to complain to the FTC to get his local dealership to work on his tractor. The dealership told him he was not a ‘profitable customer’ because he had made repeated repair-service complaints and written notices to Deere’s corporate office about his dissatisfaction with the dealer’s repairs. There have been no documented cases since of dealerships refusing service to customers.
Cade and Mussman say this fear is one of the biggest obstacles to passing effective legislation. Without the voice of the affected, the need for a bill like this can go unheard. It’s a lot of risk to ask someone to put their family, finances and even their farm on the line for something that may take years to come to fruition, according to Mussman.
“We’re stuck in a little bit of a dance; I am a suburban legislator who had to introduce the bill,” Mussman says. “I don’t have personal experience with needing to go out and repair my tractor. Certainly, for representatives who represent large swaths of people like that, that’s also a lot for them to expose themselves to saying this is a problem.”
Cade has recognized one thing as truly important over his 10 years fighting for these rights both as an advocate and board member of repair.org: getting involved matters, and when it comes down to the affected parties, often fewer than half speak up. In cases such as the Deere settlement, that can mean many people may never be able to pursue litigation against Deere for these kinds of practices. Cade compares this participation to voting and calls an environment that 75% of people don’t participate ‘unacceptable.’
“I don’t care what you do as long as you participate… those who speak up then aren’t so targetable,” Cade says. “It’s no longer just one or two farmers that dealers can put at the end of the line as a punishment for speaking out. It’s hundreds, and the dealer can’t fight against 100 of their customers.”
Rather than focus only on what might happen in the United States, Cade points to approaches being adopted, particularly in Australia. Since 2022, all auto manufacturers in Australia are required to make diagnostic information dating back to 2002 available to third parties. This has allowed the Australian auto industry to create its own proprietary diagnostic tools without relying solely on manufacturers.
“I think that is the solution that needs to happen,” Cade says. “I think it’s inappropriate for an organization who manufactures the equipment to have precise control on the software on a day-to-day basis. It just sets up the opportunity for abuse.”
Today, the United States is still a long way away from the Australian reality, as the U.S. still has no federal right-to-repair legislation. Right now, right to repair is handled as a state issue, which causes problems for the consumer, the state and the manufacturer. Because laws vary from state to state, companies may have to adapt their practices to meet different requirements across the country.
“Every time [a] state wants to customize something a little bit differently, it’s incredibly onerous on a company to be able to meet that, and it’s certainly better for it to be uniform across all the states; we really need the feds to come in and set that precedent,” Mussman says.