Over the last decade we have brought you frequent reports not from the coolest of hackerspaces or the most bleeding edge of engineering in California or China, but from the rolling prairies of the American Midwest. Those endless fields of cropland waving in the breeze have been the theatre for an unlikely battle over right to repair, the result of which should affect us all. The case of FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION, STATE OF ILLINOIS, and STATE OF MINNESOTA, v. DEERE & COMPANY relates to the machinery manufacturer’s use of DRM to restrict the repair of its products, and holds the promise to end the practice once and for all.
This is being written in Europe, where were an average person asked to name a brand that says “America”, they might reach for the familiar; perhaps Disney, McDonalds, or Coca-Cola. These are the flag-bearers of American culture for outsiders, but it’s fair to say that none of them can claim to have built the country. The green and yellow Deere tractors on the other hand represent the current face of a company with nearly two hundred years of farming history, which by virtue of producing some of the first mass-produced plows, had perhaps the greatest individual role in shaping modern American agriculture and thus indirectly the country itself. To say that Deere is woven into the culture of rural America is something of an understatement, agricultural brands like Deere have an enviable customer base, the most loyal of any industry.
Thus while those green and yellow tractors are far from the only case of DRM protected repairability, they have become the symbolic poster child for the issue as a whole. It’s important to understand then how far-reaching it is beyond the concerns of us technology and open-source enthusiasts, and into something much more fundamental.
The text of the lawsuit itself can be readily downloaded as a PDF, and from our non-lawyerly pass it seems that at its heart lies the manufacturer’s monopolistic practices by restricting access to software diagnostic and repair tools, rather than the use of DRM itself. Thus should the suit not go Deere’s way, as we read it it wouldn’t undermine the DMCA or the use of DRM, but it would lessen the attractiveness of DRM to a manufacturer by removing their ability to restrict repairers whether they use DRM or not. This would propagate out beyond the farm, and have a consequent effect on the repairability of much more than tractors.
This lawsuit is the latest of many targeting the same issue, and despite having the FTC behind it we’re not certain of its chances of success in the current climate. We hope that decades of these practices causing a modern Deere to be worth considerably less than an old one will inflict enough damage on the brand for its competitors to take note. There was a time when buying a Deere such as the one your scribe piloted over the fields of Oxfordshire years ago was the “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM” of agricultural machinery, while now there’s a seed of doubt as to whether a minor breakdown could cause a lost harvest. That’s not an enviable position for any brand to find itself in, especially by its own hand.
People who cram computers into things for absolutely no good practical purpose except to rent-seek and make things more proprietary and tough to work on should be punished suitably. I vote for public pillory, it’s about time we brought that back for several trivial offenses
Perhaps the medieval little-ease if it’s bad enough. Complete with the face-window that allows passerby to spit in the offender’s face, and they don’t have enough room to move their limbs to wipe it away.
I agree, but computers in tractors are really useful.
The problem is not that they’re installed, it’s the way the manufacturer uses them to squeeze the pips out of the owners
indeed. modern JD tractors are marvels of robotics for being able to remember exactly to the inch where rows of crops are and drive exactly that path, allowing crop to be planted far more densely than would otherwise even be remotely possible.
it just sucks that those same computers refuse to leave the driveway for the smallest thing.
An interesting question would be if someone bought a JD tractor, stripped everything out down to the raw mechanical components, and implemented enough replacement electronics to get it driving again.
Do that near a university big on SLAM like ETH Zurich or MIT or Waterloo and they’d probably jump at the chance to develop the same advanced functionality and write a couple dozzen papers about it.
And that may spiral into electronic replacement “upgrade” kits. Rip out your own tractor’s brains, bend it to your will.
3 steps.
Unless you live in a failed state, there’s that annoying thing in the way called homologation. Then there are also more trivial matters like insurance, yearly roadworthiness check and emission regulations.
You can strip a tractor bare, even get it back running with Arduinos or STM32s – that’s all basic stuff, but good luck getting it road legal again.
This is the case for some parts like gps control but the diesel emissions controls systems have legal language to prevent being modified with explicit protection of the tampering of hardware, software or calibrations as part of the clean air act.
Tractors don’t need to be road-legal to operate.
I’m curious what computers/controllers tractors don’t need. People swear up and down that they just want a basic tractor with proper mechanical levers to control everything, but outside of low-horsepower equipment those just don’t sell.
Spend a working day worth of time in a piece of equipment and you’ll find that automating as many things as possible reigns king in this industry.
At the end of the day, it’s a business and efficiency matters.
Wild how people used to do all this stuff with just a plow and an animal, and still made a living at it. Meanwhile here we are talking about how silicon brains are absolutely essential to growing food out of the ground. Is there a term for this sort of resource creep? Is increased efficiency just making up for decreased wages?
the closest term i’ve seen is jevons paradox, but that refers to increased exploitation of resources rather than exploitation of wages. i guess they are the same thing if you view man as a beast of burden.
It’s predominately driven by increasing efficiencies through reducing inputs, but also reducing operator fatigue. Anyone can throw seed in the ground and something will (usually) grow. That much hasn’t changed for millennia.
However they’re at the point today that farmers will either take soil samples and/or look at past yields to determine how much and where nutrients need to be added to the soil or what population to plant seed at so they don’t over-apply and waste inputs or under-apply and miss out on potential yields.
So in the past where an entire field might get a straight rate of 100 lbs of fertilizer or 30,000 seeds per acre now one may do variable rate application and planting to use those inputs where needed and as needed. Sometimes it’s as simple as planting less seed at the higher spots of a field because the ground will retain less moisture or at the edges of a tree row because there will be less sun exposure.
Then you get into stuff like GPS and auto guide which is predominately a driver fatigue tool, but also allows more precise spacing between passes as well as opening up features like auto-shutoff that will turn off row(s) so you don’t apply/plant in places where you’ve already made a pass. GPS is also a core requirement of variable rate application.
In terms of wages it’s actually the opposite. Wages have had to come up to attract operators and that limited hiring pool is arguably a big driver for the gradual increase in the size of equipment; doing more work with fewer people and machines.
Electronics only get us so far, there are many other things we will continue to work on. Thankfully the Earth is quite large, and we can get away with a few mistakes. (Just not over the long term)
A big part of the picture is declining producer prices, so the farmers have to reduce workforce and increase automation and farm unit sizes to make ends meet. That 5% increase in efficiency may be for the entire profit margin.
This is accomplished through things like farming subsidies to promote over-production, and the distribution and retail chains being bought entirely by very large corporations that become the only option to sell to, so the farmers get paid very little while the food prices at the supermarket keep going up.
In reality, food is pretty cheap. You could easily afford it if there wasn’t all this “service and retail sector” bunk in between you and the farmers: people with hands over fists demanding money for something you don’t need them to do, or just because they can and you have no choice.
If you yearn for those days I’m sure there are still places you can go and run a horse plough but I pretty much guarantee you will be begging for internal combustion if you had to actually put your money where your mouth is and actually work the land manually for anything but a few yards on a show off day.
It’s just the free market at work. Inefficiencies are eliminated as unprofitable, nobody is paying a premium for their groceries just because they were grown by a one man + horse operation.
In 1920 there were 6.5 million farms in the US. by 2022 that number had dropped to 1.9 million despite our population having grown from 106 million to 333 million in that same time frame. In 1920 30% of the US population were agricultural workers, today only 1.2% of our population is involved in agriculture.
Back when a person did all this stuff with just a plow and an animal the bulk of the living they made was subsistence.
Theres a big difference between working a 5-40 acre family farm and the 441 acres of the average farm today.
True but there needs to be a distinction and a reasonable approach – the computers are helpful but locking them down is not, and most of the arguments for doing so are fairly spurious.
PC’s are (mostly) not locked down and that ecosystem gets along just fine, if people tinker with software or settings and mess it up or experience bugs they don’t get to demand a new PC from the manufacturer.
as a vlad the impaler fan i would suggest a different apparatus of punishment.
Just don’t buy their stuff.
Tractor dealers are not like car dealers where each town has more than one. You may have 1 dealer that sells one brand that services 5-10 counties.
Sounds like a great opportunity for a new tractor dealership.
Easier said than done to create a viable product in an established industry and then create the necessary support systems, part replacement, supplies, etc. All services MUST be timely as farming is unforgiving of down time. Then even if you have all that the locality then has to be an unsaturated market.
You are assuming that anyone can open a dealership wherever they want.
will apple be next?
Next on HaD: How Farmer Brown installed a Raspberry Pi/Orange Pi in his John Deere and created the first open source tractor. :)
Pi is not open source.
Open source doesn’t require the hardware to be fully open for it to be an accurate description – the Pi type product is the “open source” brains for your “Open source” tractor because it will support YOUR software and whatever extra hardware you need and all of that can be open source.
Fully OSHW of any real compute capacity is almost non-existent even now RiskV is becoming mature enough to make it plausible to exist, but “Open source” hardware in the sense the Pi and some of these other SBC are, where more than enough is published you can substitute between them, make ’em do basically whatever you want… Not perfect but darn close, and probably better than any other computer you interact with, where the BIOSes are likely just as closed.
It’s more open than a lot of stuff and better supported than all the alternatives. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
Not far off….
https://github.com/AgOpenGPS-official/AgOpenGPS
Doom runs on a John Deere just fine. Here’s one example.
https://x.com/sickcodes/status/1558878687642402816?s=20&t=4vJYhz_01opWQk_x4vMBMQ
Are any of the other major ag equipment manufacturers doing a better job at this?
Most of the ag companies have consolidated into giant conglomerates. See AGCO.
Here is why this is a big deal for farmers. Picture your 100,000 pound piece of equipment stops in the middle of a muddy field. You dont know why because there is only an error code but you cant get access to the service data or software to find out. You call your dealer who says either pay 1,000 dollars to send an on site tech out (whenever he is available) or just have someone haul it out of that muddy field to the dealer 50 miles away for a quick check. Turns out the problem is a 20 dollar sensor but you cant program it without the proprietary software that only the dealer has. Of course you could buy a competing tractor but those are all owned by AGCO with similar repair policies.
this is important because it sets a legal precedent. if jd is forced to stop doing crap like this, i imagine it would apply to everyone in short order.
Don’t forget about the data streams from this equipment. Better read the fine print on any brand of equipment you use.
We might get the option to repair the tractors.
But what about your information or records of seed rates, fertilizer rates, soil temperatures, planting dates, depths, etc..
Engine loading and fuel burn rates and ground speeds.
All of this used to be stored in a farmers head and that made a major difference in who was successful.
What do you do once it’s all moved off into someones (proprietary) software?
You might get the tractor, etc, running.. But what if you signed away your field/croplands data to someone else running the back end programming?
IF you have any doubt of it happening.. Look into facebook/meta and atrium.
Somehow the news coverage (maybe around 4 yrs ago?) of the data exposure (by facebook) seems to have vanished from the media outlets web pages.
Current climate? Are you serious with that?
This is an example of an issue where pretty much all sides of the political spectrum agree. Take the win, everyone push for the right to repair, and get it done! People who own tractors tend to be conservative, and those who want to repair their own tractors often more so. The rest of us may be more likely to want to repair our computers, phones, and maybe cars…and well, pretty much everything because we like to tinker. So in this case we all agree, right to repair is a good thing. Rather than divide, lets unite and get this pushed through!
Why in the world would anyone expect that the FTC under the current administration will do anything positive to address this situation? Wonder how the farmers voted.
Political much…the FTC under ALL administrations has done nothing about this for many years which is why State AGs are involved. Big AG has the biggest lobbyists.
Here’s a look at various JD equipment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WgD1VfPgYg
Note the next-to-last one: fully autonomous
You can think of this equipment like a CNC machine, where the field is the work piece, and the tractor is the mill. Similarly, you set up programs for the operations to perform on the work piece. The operator mostly just needs to get the equipment ready and in place, and from there, computers handle much of the actual work.
Older equipment handles lots of automation just during a single pass along the field, where the operator still has to turn around at the end of each pass to line up for the next. Newer equipment automates even that. The operator is necessary mostly just to keep tanks filled and hoppers emptied. I suppose even that will get automated, if it isn’t already.
Your are focusing on the wrong izsue. Its not advanced features and automation that’s the issue but tying everyday / routine repairs to the company and its bottom line. Fine for corporate, bad for users. In the Midwest a Deere breakdown can take days to fix while a similar fail on older kit can be fixed in an hour or so at much lower cost.
What is DRM?
digital rights management, copy right enforcement locks that prevent anyone not authorized by the rights holder to access, modify, or repair the systems they are integrated into.