Companies / John Deere
Company case
John Deere
Parts pairing, the right to repair, and the same switch that bricked looted tractors
John Deere has spent much of the past decade in right-to-repair disputes with farmers and state attorneys general over tractors, often priced in the six figures, that cannot be serviced independently. The mechanism is parts pairing: each replacement component is electronically bound to a specific machine and embedded firmware rejects parts that were not paired through dealer-only diagnostic software.
In 2023 the company signed a memorandum of understanding with the American Farm Bureau Federation, agreeing to expand access to those tools. In January 2025 the Federal Trade Commission, joined by Illinois and Minnesota, sued Deere, alleging the commitments had not been met. Chapter 19 files the case with HP's consumable authentication, Nest Secure's shutdown and Humane's server closure as one design: the consumer buys an object, the manufacturer retains control of it.
The same architecture cut the other way in May 2022, when Russian troops looted 27 Deere machines from a dealer in occupied Melitopol and moved them 700 miles to Chechnya. On arrival the equipment was inoperable, remotely disabled through the same VIN locking, GPS tracking and dealer-only diagnostics farmers had spent a decade contesting. Chapter 21 lists Deere with Nespresso and Gillette as a company that converted hardware into ongoing revenue.
Where it appears in the book
- Chapter 19 — preview and sources
- Chapter 21 — preview and sources
Paraphrased from Tangibles: How Software Turns Hardware into Platforms (2026). Sources for every figure are on the reference pages.
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