There is something wrong with the tractor. The water-in-fuel sensor, a small device embedded in the John Deere machine that monitors the integrity of its diesel engine, is disconnected. And I’ve got to fix it.
I’m not a mechanic or a farmer. I’m poking at a laptop at John Deere’s corporate office in Santa Clara, California. There’s a cable connecting the computer to a 5130ML tractor sitting on the grass nearby. A bright red notification sits on the screen, telling me something is wrong. I type in a question and the software pulls up instructions and a few images from the user manual that matches the serial number of the machine.
I wander over to the tractor and find the parts modeled on the screen. I spot the sensor, with two very obvious dangling wires that need to be connected together. I press them together, hear a little click, then step away and look back at the screen. The notification has cleared. Everything seems to be fine. In just a couple minutes, all by myself, I’ve fixed the water-in-fuel sensor. This fix was an easy one. It’s a WiF, really.
The John Deere employees surrounding me offer their congratulations. They’ve all been very patient with me, someone who has written several articles for WIRED about their company’s seemingly steadfast reluctance to let anyone but its official technicians repair its products.
In the group is Jahmy Hindman, senior vice president and chief technology officer of John Deere, who has flown in from Illinois. Hindman has worked for the company for 30 years. In that time, John Deere has thrived in an era of technological advancement. He’s here now to show off the company’s self-repair software Operations Center Pro Service, a system that pairs with nearly every electronic-enabled machine John Deere has made.
“It is owner-friendly,” Hindman says. “I think that’s always been our intent.”
Lots of farmers would beg to differ.
Oh Deere
John Deere is the largest agricultural machine manufacturer in the US. In the past couple decades, machines of this ilk have become far more technologically advanced, loaded up with controllers, radios, and sensors. Many newer machines are equipped with 4G wireless connections that enable the collection of precise location data and other metrics. Some tractors can even run without a human operator at all, guided by built-in software systems to run autonomously on predetermined paths.
Over the last decade, John Deere has become a big target of the ever-growing right-to-repair movement. The company’s high-tech software systems also come equipped with digital locks, which require official, dealer-sanctioned approval to access. If you want to fiddle with a part, or replace it with an aftermarket alternative, those software restrictions can block those attempts.
That frustration has manifested in multiple lawsuits and even federal action. In April, the company agreed to pay out a $99 million settlement to its equipment owners to pay back burdensome repair costs. In July, the company settled a separate lawsuit brought by the US Federal Trade Commission that would require the company to make its products more repairable. John Deere did not admit wrongdoing in either case. Repair advocates say the two measures have been insufficient, both in financial terms and as requirements that will actually change Deere’s behavior.
Pro Tip
John Deere disagrees, of course, citing its recent efforts to make the case that its self-repair program works just fine.
The company introduced its Pro Service in 2025. Prices start at an annual cost of $195 per individual machine. For bigger operations or independent repair shops, the price to access every machine in John Deere’s fleet starts at $4,995 a year. That access for agricultural and turf services costs $5,995 per year.
Pro Service lets owners connect Deere’s software to their equipment via Wi-Fi or cable. Based on the serial number of the machine, the software can be used to find information from manuals and John Deere’s broader data services to diagnose any maintenance the machine needs. John Deere also recently introduced an AI chatbot called JD to its Operations Center self-repair software tool, but I did not have a chance to use that version during my visit. The AI features are meant to make it easier to find information about the components in any given machine.
“As the tractor products grow in size, they also grow in number of controllers that are necessary in order to make it all work,” Hindman says, noting that in some cases tractors can have upwards of 50 controllers. “So it can be super complex.”
Theoretically, Pro Service is the ultimate platform to find any equipment information and diagnose any problem. If something goes wrong, the software will guide you through a fix. Some features in Pro Service can be downloaded and used offline in case a connection isn’t working when something needs fixing. You can customize the layout to your liking and keep track of the full history of the software updates on each machine. If you need a new part, the software will helpfully serve you a link to the product in John Deere’s shop. It feels as smooth as scrolling through an Amazon page.
Kelli Sullivan, a group product manager of marketing automation and governance at John Deere, is the person leading the demo. She says owners are in full control of their data and can choose whether to share it with John Deere or an independent repair shop, or keep it private.
Data as a Service
The thing John Deere does seem to struggle with is enticing people to use its Pro Service, or even making its customers aware of it. (That’s the reason I’m here at this demo.) A year on, John Deere says its service has about a thousand daily users—a relatively small number, given that there are somewhere around 1.8 million farms in the US.
“We’re just trying to get the word out,” Sullivan says. “We have a suite of tools that are already available in our customers’ hands that allow them to do those things.”
Jared Wilson is a farmer in Missouri who uses Deere machines to care for his 3,000 acres of corn and soybean crops. He is also a named plaintiff in the $99 million lawsuit against John Deere who has called that payout ruling “fundamentally flawed.” When I describe my demo experience to Wilson, he laughs, saying the service works best on particularly simple repairs.
“If you have multiple failures, you have to figure out where to start,” Wilson says. “If you have three different or four different diagnostic codes, where do you start in the tree to figure out what’s wrong?”
Wilson does not use Pro Service. He doesn’t know anyone who does, saying the farmers he knows tend to use cracked versions of the software they find on gray markets instead of giving their money to John Deere. Even with Pro Service, he says, farmers don’t always trust that John Deere will give farmers the tools they really need to fix their stuff.
“It’s taken a class action lawsuit and FTC action to get them to come this far,” Wilson says. “If you believe what they’re saying now—that this is actually it and we’re getting everything we’ve asked for—then I’ve got some oceanfront property in Arizona to sell you.”
One of Wilson’s biggest concerns with using a service like Pro Service, he says, is that it’s almost impossible to compare the dealership version of the software with the customer version of the software for parity. (Hindman says the versions of the software are all the same.)
Part of the problem are PIPs, or product improvement plans, which is a term John Deere uses to identify potential or existing problems in its machines. John Deere can issue a PIP, which then goes out to let people who own a particular piece of equipment know there’s an issue with the machine. But those missives only go out after the system has gathered the information that an improvement might be needed in the first place.
If a user faces a novel problem with how a machine works, it would still take time for that issue to get back to John Deere, which would verify it, then issue a PIP in Pro Service. In the meantime, the person dealing with the broken tractor won’t have the needed information to figure out exactly what is going on. Ideally, many of them would like to be able to troubleshoot the problem themselves, without having to use the company’s proprietary software.
“They’re still not giving us access to that next level that we have to have for some of the most difficult problems that we encounter,” Wilson says.
Willie Cade, a board member of the advocacy group Repair.org and frequent critic of John Deere, takes that a step further.
“They’re just monopolists that want to make money and as much as they possibly can,” Cade says. “Their real customer is not the farmer. Their real customer is Wall Street.”
At the demo, I ask about the repair advocates and what they get wrong about John Deere. Hindman says he doesn’t mind the pressure.
“We have the best intentions of making sure that we have the ability to give customers the tools that they need to keep their equipment up and running,” Hindman says. “We share that goal in common. Are there things that we need to continue to work on? I’m sure that there are. But let’s not forget that we are a long way towards moving the needle to a much better state.”
The repair advocates are still pushing on John Deere. Agricultural equipment like tractors are some of the most durable goods, built to last for years and even decades of hard manual labor. If society isn’t able to establish a precedent to let people fix these machines, advocates argue, it becomes harder to pass legislation or judicial rulings that would solidify people’s rights to fix their own personal devices.
“This is an issue that’s concerning agricultural equipment,” Wilson says. “But it’s really the vanguard of a much bigger and persistent problem that affects every aspect of our society.”
The post I Fixed a Tractor Using John Deere’s Self-Repair Service. Farmers Aren’t Sold on It appeared first on Wired.
