Oh, Deere!

Uncanny Valley | WIRED

WIRED

Technology

4.1 • 572 Ratings

🗓️ 12 January 2023

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The tractor company John Deere has faced a lot of criticism for the tight hold it keeps over its products. If someone needs to repair their tractor, they’ve got to do it through John Deere’s official channels, which farmers say creates unnecessary hassles. If a problem arises during harvest time, a days-long wait for a sanctioned repair could spell financial ruin. Now, in an effort to stave off lawsuits from right-to-repair advocates, John Deere is making some concessions about repairability. But the move has been criticized by some advocates, who say the company still has to do more to make its products truly accessible.

This week on Gadget Lab, we dig into the dirt about John Deere and what the repairability of tractors means for the rest of the gadgets out there.

Show Notes

Read Lauren’s story about John Deere. Follow all WIRED’s coverage of the right-to-repair movement.

Recommendations

Mike recommends the book Hippie Food: How Back-to-the-Landers, Longhairs, and Revolutionaries Changed the Way We Eat by Jonathan Kaufmann. Lauren recommends taking the train. Choo choo!

Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Mike.
0:00.7	Lauren.
0:01.2	Have you tried to repair your tractor lately?
0:04.6	Uh, no.
0:06.1	Why not?
0:07.2	I don't have a tractor.
0:09.0	You don't have a tractor?
0:10.3	No, not yet anyway.
0:11.8	Not at this stage of my life.
0:13.3	Okay, so when you get a tractor, let's say you spend $80,000 on it, you go for one of the good ones.
0:19.6	Yeah.
0:19.9	Would you say at that point that you own that tractor? Well, yeah. So then why isn't it easier for you to repair it? Oh, it's difficult to repair tractors? Well, that's what some farmers say. Okay. I don't know. Is this a trick question? Because I'm stumped.
0:53.0	It's not a trick question. It's just a lead into the podcast. So maybe for me, yeah, maybe for all those people who are listening now who are like, really, why are we talking about farmers and tractors today? We should get to it because it actually has something to do with all of our technology devices.
0:54.9	I am eager to learn more.
1:06.7	Hi, everyone. Welcome to Gadget Lab. I'm Lauren Good. I'm a senior writer at Wired.
1:15.1	And I am Michael Killory. I'm a senior editor at Wired. If I sound a little different than I normally do, it's because it's a new year. It's a new me. I have a new voice.
1:25.2	No, I'm actually taping this from a hotel room, just as Mike and our other awesome wired colleagues did last week from CES. Now I'm in a hotel room and I'm dialing in remotely.
1:29.4	But today we want to talk about repairability and specifically about John Deere. Now, stay with me here. John Deere has gotten a lot of flack in recent years for
1:36.0	keeping a pretty tight grip at how customers use the farming equipment that John Deere sells.
1:41.9	When something goes wrong on a tractor and a farmer needs it fixed,
1:47.1	they typically have to go through John Deere's official channels to get that done. They have to go to
1:51.4	an authorized John Deere technician. Now, farmers in right to repair groups have taken issue with that.
	...

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