I spent years chairing the House Agriculture Committee listening to farmers explain the same frustration in a dozen different ways: they owned the equipment, but they didn't control it. They'd bought the machine outright, sunk their own capital into it, and still had to ask someone else's permission just to open the hood.
They needed someone else's permission to fix it and, given the current rules on the books, they often have no choice but to pay a dealership hundreds of miles away to do it for them, even when they can do it themselves with the help of a cheap local repair shop.
Multiply that by every planting season and every harvest, when a single broken sensor can mean a lost day of cutting or planting at exactly the wrong moment, and you start to understand why Freedom to Fix became one of the biggest political issues for farmers across the country.
On Wednesday, President Trump delivered.
John Deere and the Trump administration reached an agreement, joined by five states, that locks in farmers' access to the same repair tools the company's own dealers use — not as a one-time gesture, but for years to come.
I'm not arguing every repair belongs in a machine shed. Dealers and factory-trained technicians still certainly have a place, especially for complicated or safety-critical work. But it’s beyond clear by this point that the choice of who fixes non-sensitive equipment parts — the owner, a local mechanic, or the dealer — should belong to the farmer that owns the asset and no one else.
Washington loves to talk about farmers during election season and then forgets about them until campaign season starts up again.
The sad reality is that, despite having specialty committees in place, regulations all too often get written by people who've never set foot on a farm. By the time anyone in the Capitol notices the damage, another planting cycle has already come and gone.
Farmers are patient by necessity — they have to be, given what they do for a living — but they shouldn’t be ignored or pushed to the side.
None of this would have been possible had the Trump administration not gone out of its way to put the Nanny State in check, which is all farmers and manufacturers ever wanted.
Back in February, the Trump EPA clarified that the Clean Air Act doesn't stop farmers from making a lawful repair, so long as the equipment goes back into compliance afterwards. The agency issued this guidance in direct response to a request Deere made asking for exactly that clarity.
No farmer should have had to wonder whether fixing his own equipment might put him on the wrong side of federal regulators. It took Deere's willingness to press the issue to get federal regulators to say so plainly.
In 2023, John Deere, AGCO, CLAAS of America, CNH Industrial, and Kubota also reached Freedom to Fix agreements with the American Farm Bureau Federation covering roughly three-quarters of the farm equipment sold in the U.S., opening up better access to diagnostic tools, software and manuals. Deere has also built out Operations Center PRO Service for machine-specific diagnostics and, on compatible equipment, controller reprogramming — with material downloadable for offline use, useful in the parts of farm country where cell service still doesn't reach.
Right-to-repair has now been completely solved. All work is done on this front.
Is this the biggest pro-farmer win of the Trump years? I won't pretend to rank it against tax relief or trade wins. But on the specific question that farmers have been raising with me for the better part of a decade — who gets to decide when and how their own equipment gets fixed — I haven't seen anything come close.
I've sat across the table from enough farmers to know they don't care about the politics of this. They care about getting their equipment fixed without driving two counties over to do it. This week, that got a little easier.
It shouldn't have taken this long. But better late than never.
Conaway is a former member of Congress from Texas. He chaired the House Agricultural Committee.
Editor’s Note: Do you enjoy Townhall’s conservative reporting that takes on the radical Left and woke media? Support our work so that we can continue to bring you the truth.
Join Townhall VIP and use promo code FIGHT to receive 60% off your membership.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member