Many U.S. farmers say they’re locked into an more and more pricey, dependent relationship with John Deere, the $100 billion firm that producers about greater than half the farm gear within the U.S.
“To place that in perspective, that’s half of America’s farmers beneath the thumb and management of John Deere,” mentioned Joe Maxwell, the co-founder of Farm Motion and former Lieutenant Governor of Missouri, at a current press convention. But farmers’ relationship with the company extends lengthy after shopping for a tractor or mix—for the lifespan of their gear when it inevitably wants restore.
Together with the gear itself, John Deere controls the marketplace for repairing that gear, and in recent times it has actively prevented farmers and plenty of unbiased sellers from diagnosing malfunctions or making many repairs. As we have now beforehand reported, farmers and advocates have been more and more calling for the “proper to restore” their gear as half of a bigger motion that spans industries. They’ve usually singled out John Deere’s restrictive practices.
Right this moment, farmers and advocacy teams took their resistance a step additional, submitting a 40-page criticism with the Federal Commerce Fee (FTC), asking federal regulators to take enforcement motion and examine John Deere for participating in “unfair strategies of competitors and unfair and misleading commerce practices.” The Nationwide Farmers Union, together with native farmer unions in among the largest agricultural states—Missouri, Nebraska, Montana, Wisconsin, and Iowa—are petitioners, alongside Farm Motion and restore advocacy nonprofits.
“Lots of of hundreds of farmers cross our proverbial fingers that nothing breaks as a result of we will’t repair it, and we all know it’ll take the dealership days and even weeks to get us operating once more.”
