The Deere Settlement Isn't the Finish Line — It's a 10-Year Clock

The FTC’s settlement with John Deere landed like a farm-country victory lap. Ten years of guaranteed access to the same diagnostic software and repair tools Deere gives its own dealers — reading and clearing fault codes, reprogramming components, restarting equipment after an emissions shutdown. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison put it bluntly: farmers are “no longer at the whim of a corporate overlord.”

Read past the press release and the picture gets more complicated. The settlement is real. It’s also temporary, narrow, and — on its own — doesn’t change a single state’s law.

What the settlement actually locks in

The consent decree, resolving the FTC and five states’ antitrust suit against Deere — Arizona, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin joined the FTC in the January 2025 case — runs for 10 years under federal and state supervision. During that window, Deere has to give farmers and independent repair shops the ability to buy the same repair resources it hands its authorized dealer network, and to file compliance reports so regulators can check its work. If Deere backslides, the states and FTC can go back to court and pursue contempt.

That’s a real backstop. It’s also a countdown. A decade from now, the obligation lapses unless something more durable — statute, not settlement — takes its place. Consent decrees don’t outlive the market conditions that produced them; the underlying incentive to lock repairs behind proprietary software doesn’t go away just because one company signed a 10-year deal.

One company, not one industry

The settlement binds Deere. It says nothing about CNH Industrial (Case IH, New Holland), AGCO, or any other manufacturer selling six-figure combines with the same software-gated repair model. Farmers who run mixed fleets — a Deere planter next to a Case tractor — get relief on half their shed.

That’s the gap state right-to-repair law is supposed to close, and it’s exactly the gap that isn’t closed yet.

The law that already exists — and excludes farm equipment

Minnesota passed the nation’s broadest Digital Fair Repair Act, effective July 1, 2024, requiring manufacturers of digital electronic equipment to provide the parts, tools, and documentation needed for consumers and independent shops to make repairs. It’s a genuinely strong law.

It also explicitly excludes farm machinery and tractors, along with motor vehicles and medical devices — the same carve-out pattern that’s let manufacturers keep the leverage in the sectors where it matters most.

Minnesota Farmers Union president Gary Wertish has been pushing to close that hole for two legislative sessions running. His read on the FTC settlement isn’t “mission accomplished” — it’s proof the leverage problem is real, and now there’s a template for what farmers should be entitled to by right, not by the terms of a decade-limited legal settlement. “We will be looking at opportunities to get the farm equipment included back into the Digital Fair Repair Act,” he’s said of the coming session.

Why a settlement can’t do a statute’s job

A consent decree binds one defendant, for a fixed term, under terms negotiated in litigation. A state right-to-repair statute binds every manufacturer selling into that state, indefinitely, and gives farmers a durable legal right instead of a temporary regulatory truce.

Colorado got there first, passing the country’s first agricultural right-to-repair law in 2023 — manufacturers doing business in the state have to provide farmers and independent technicians the same parts, tools, software, and documentation available to authorized dealers, as an ordinary statute rather than a time-limited settlement. No single-company scope.

That’s the model advocates want replicated: not a settlement that expires, but a floor that doesn’t.

What to watch

Two clocks are running at once. The federal one — Deere’s compliance reports, filed to the FTC and the five settling states — resets the political pressure every reporting cycle for the next decade. The state one — whether Minnesota, and other legislatures, actually vote farm equipment back into fair-repair coverage — determines whether farmers in Iowa, Nebraska, and anywhere else without a Colorado-style law get any of this once the federal clock runs out.

The settlement bought farmers ten years and one manufacturer’s worth of leverage. Whether that becomes a permanent right or a temporary reprieve depends on whether statehouses finish the job the FTC started.

Save US Farms is tracking the right-to-repair fight at the federal and state level. Got a repair-lock story from a manufacturer that isn’t Deere? The desk wants it.