Iowa lawmakers voted to advance state House bill 751 final week, laws that will guarantee farmers within the state can freely restore their very own agricultural tools, like tractors. This Tuesday, the invoice was renamed to House File 2709, and will probably be voted on once more. Ought to the political winds align, it should undergo the Iowa Home and Senate earlier than the Iowa Legislature adjourns on April 21.
The invoice is the primary of almost 57 state bills supported by restore advocates throughout the nation in 2026. Lots of them give attention to farm tools in states like Oklahoma, Wyoming, Delaware, and West Virginia. Restore advocates hope a win in Iowa—the second-highest-grossing state within the US for agricultural merchandise, behind California—will assist additional legislative and broader efforts to make telephones, automobiles, and different units extra repairable.
“This is not only a blue state factor; this is not only a Colorado activist factor,” says Elizabeth Chamberlain, director of sustainability for the right-to-repair advocate arm of iFixit. “Its actual. Farmers have bother repairing their tools and need change.”
Farmers and their tractors have lengthy been a focus of the right-to-repair motion, the ever-growing world effort to let product homeowners fix their own devices and tools with out producer approval. Farmers who use tractors to plant, domesticate, and harvest crops typically have to restore their tools whereas they work. Ready for producer approval to get one thing mounted, or taking the time to carry the tools to an permitted dealership, could cause delays, frustration, and missed alternatives to reap crops.
The Iowa invoice defines which agricultural tools it covers, together with tractors, trailers, combines, sprayers, balers, and different tools used to domesticate and harvest crops. It excludes plane and irrigation tools, together with jet skis and snowmobiles.
Producers would even be required to offer homeowners with knowledge—documentation, like manuals, and entry to embedded working software program—on their tractors, together with future patches and fixes, all with out charging for it or requiring authorization for web entry. The invoice additionally limits using digital locks—software program restrictions that stop accessing options with out producer approval.
Oh Deere
Probably the most distinguished opposition to the Iowa invoice is tractor producer John Deere, which has an extended historical past of opposing repair efforts and irritating farmers who need to take more control of their tools. The corporate remains to be preventing a lawsuit the US Federal Commerce Fee levied against John Deere in January 2025 for “illegal” repairability insurance policies. The corporate has lobbied against the Iowa invoice and outright opposes its passing.
“John Deere is steadfast in supporting farmers’ capability to restore their tools,” wrote a John Deere consultant in an announcement responding to WIRED’s inquiry. “And we again that up by providing industry-leading self-repair instruments and assets to each tools homeowners and different service suppliers.”
John Deere factors to its on-line repair hub that catalogs methods its product homeowners can restore their merchandise. Chamberlain says it’s true that John Deere provides self-repair choices, however they aren’t at all times in step with the fact of what farmers have to make fixes within the second.
“Finally, it doesn’t matter if the overwhelming majority of repairs are attainable if there’s a restore that takes your tools down and which means lack of harvest or having to attend weeks for a seller consultant to return out,” Chamberlain says.
John Deere has mentioned it helps third-party and self-repair of its tools earlier than. In 2023, John Deere and the American Farm Bureau agreed to a memorandum of understanding about how the corporate would enable entry to repairs on its merchandise in response to restore legal guidelines passing in states like Colorado. However restore advocates criticized the move, saying the memorandum did little to make John Deere adhere to new rules.
