The Tractor War

If you buy a machine—be it a smartphone or a combine—you should be able to fix it, right? Big Tech says no. Ordinary Joes say yes. Witness the biggest battle in the right-to repair movement, being fought on farms across America.

- By Peter Waldman and Lydia Mulvany

It’s Husker Harvest Days, Nebraska’s biggest agricultural trade show, and Kevin Kenney is working the pavilions. The engineer, inventor, and inveterate manure-stirrer is trying to be discreet. He has allies here among the sellers and auctioneers of used tractors and aftermarket parts, not to mention among the farmers and mechanics. But enemies lurk everywhere.

Kenney is leading a grassroots campaign in the heart of the heartland to restore a fundamental right most people don’t realize they’ve lost—the right to repair their own farm equipment. By sheer dint of personal passion, he’s taking on John Deere and the other global equipment manufacturers in a bid to preserve mechanical skills on the American farm.

Big Tractor says farmers have no right to access the copyrighted software that controls every facet of today’s equipment or even to repair their own machines, that it’s the exclusive domain of authorized dealerships. Kenney says the software barriers create corporate monopolies—and destroy the agrarian ethos of resiliency and self-reliance.

“The spirit of the right to repair is the birthright we all share as a hot-rodding nation,” he says. Tall and trim at 57, with gray-flecked hair and a passing resemblance to a corn-fed George Clooney, Kenney has kicked up significant pushback against the computerization of U.S. agriculture.