The bill is the first of approximately 57 state bills supported by reparations advocates across the country in 2026. Many of them focus on farm equipment in states like Oklahoma, Wyoming, Delaware and West Virginia. Repair advocates hope a victory in Iowa – the second-highest earning state for agricultural products in the US after California – will help spur legislative and broader efforts to make phones, cars and other devices more repairable.
“This isn’t just a blue state thing; this isn’t just a Colorado activist thing,” says Elizabeth Chamberlain, director of sustainability for iFixit’s right-to-repair advocate arm. “It’s real. Farmers have trouble repairing their equipment and they want change.”
Farmers and their tractors have long been the focus of the right to repair movement, an ever-growing global effort to let product owners fix their equipment and tools without manufacturer approval. Farmers who use tractors to plant, cultivate, and harvest crops often need to repair their equipment while working. Waiting for manufacturer approval to fix something, or taking time to get equipment to an approved dealership, can cause delays, frustrations, and missed harvest opportunities.
The Iowa bill defines what farm equipment is covered, which includes tractors, trailers, combines, sprayers, balers and other equipment used to cultivate and harvest crops. This does not include jet skis and snowmobiles as well as aircraft and irrigation equipment.
Manufacturers will also be required to provide owners with access to data-documentation, such as manuals, and embedded operating software, including future patches and fixes, on their tractors without charging for it or requiring authorization for Internet access. The bill also limits the use of digital locks – software restrictions that prevent features from being accessed without manufacturer approval.
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The most prominent opponent of the Iowa bill is tractor manufacturer John Deere, which has a long history of opposing repair efforts and frustrating farmers who want to take more control over their equipment. The company is still fighting a lawsuit filed by the US Federal Trade Commission in January 2025 against John Deere for “unlawful” repairability policies. The company has lobbied against the Iowa bill and is outspokenly opposed to its passage.
“John Deere is steadfast in supporting farmers’ ability to repair their equipment,” a John Deere representative wrote in a statement responding to WIRED’s inquiries. “And we support this by offering industry-leading self-repair tools and resources to both equipment owners and alternative service providers.”
John Deere points to its online repair center that catalogs how its product owners can repair their products. Chamberlain says it’s true that John Deere offers self-repair options, but they don’t always correspond to the reality of what farmers need to repair in the moment.
“Ultimately, it doesn’t matter whether most repairs are possible if a repair occurs that breaks your equipment and means a loss of crop or having to wait weeks for a dealer representative to arrive,” says Chamberlain.
John Deere has previously stated that it supports third-party and self-repair of its equipment. In 2023, John Deere and American Farm Bureau agreed to a memorandum of understanding on how the company will allow access to repairs on its products in response to repair laws passed in states such as Colorado. But repair advocates criticized the move, saying the memo did nothing to force John Deere to comply with the new rules.
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