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title = "John Deere Tractors Hack"
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*First read in Vice Magazine, 2017. Retold in Rijeka, 2022.*

A group of North American farmers who have been pushing back against the monopoly of John Deere over their agricultural machineries. John Deere, an agricultural machinery giant, has been using embedded software and a licensing agreement to effectively prevent farmers from having their tractors repaired or modified by anyone other than John Deere’s authorized repair partners who have the diagnostic software needed to detect a malfunction or optimize the work of a tractor. However, farming can be a time-critical operation, and malfunctioning equipment can spell doom for a farmer. As farms tend to be in remote, sometimes hard-to-reach places, authorized repair can arrive too late. A license agreement that John Deere required farmers to sign in 2016, which effectively forbids unauthorized repair, acknowledges as much when it states that farmers can not sue John Deere for “crop loss, lost profits, loss of goodwill, loss of use of equipment … arising from the performance or non-performance of any aspect of the software.”

Such limitations on the right to repair are common, yet they rarely can have such devastating effects. For this reason, farmers started to resist this extortion by buying cheap versions of the John Deere firmware software and passkey generators from the Polish and Ukrainian crackers to hack the existing software on their tractors. This allows them to repair malfunctions but also to improve their equipment, such as by having it run on methane produced from pig manure. And while circumvention of software protection can be legal, the license agreement made it unlawful to do so, implying that farmers have no way but to resort to piracy and disobedience to reclaim their equipment.