US farmers make progress on right to repair with John Deere

Mar 22, 2023

For some time now original equipment manufacturers have denied farmers the right to repair their own machinery. John Deere and the American Farm Bureau developed a memorandum of understanding, earlier this year to change that.

This is a major shift for the agriculture sector, where Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) in both Canada and the United States have restricted farmers’ ability to access the technology embedded in their products, including diagnostic and repair codes and service manuals.

While this is not a free for all, there is an understanding that John Deere’s intellectual property must be preserved. US farmers can also be assured that emergency repairs in the field, in a timely manner, on their John Deere equipment won’t end up in prosecution.

The new MOU signed by John Deere and the American Farm Bureau also has the potential to serve as a model for other manufacturers and in other jurisdictions like Canada and hopefully soon.

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Source : Small Farm Canada

Video: Seeing the Whole Season: How Continuous Crop Modeling Is Changing Breeding

Plant breeding has long been shaped by snapshots. A walk through a plot. A single set of notes. A yield check at the end of the season. But crops do not grow in moments. They change every day.

In this conversation, Gary Nijak of AerialPLOT explains how continuous crop modeling is changing the way breeders see, measure, and select plants by capturing growth, stress, and recovery across the entire season, not just at isolated points in time.

Nijak breaks down why point-in-time observations can miss critical performance signals, how repeated, season-long data collection removes the human bottleneck in breeding, and what becomes possible when every plot is treated as a living data set. He also explores how continuous modeling allows breeding programs to move beyond vague descriptors and toward measurable, repeatable insights that connect directly to on-farm outcomes.

This conversation explores:

• What continuous crop modeling is and how it works

• Why traditional field observations fall short over a full growing season

• How scale and repeated measurement change breeding decisions

• What “digital twins” of plots mean for selection and performance

• Why data, not hardware, is driving the next shift in breeding innovation As data-driven breeding moves from research into real-world programs, this discussion offers a clear look at how seeing the whole season is reshaping value for breeders, seed companies, and farmers, and why this may be only the beginning.