A federal settlement requiring John Deere to open its repair software and diagnostic tools to independent shops and farmers has renewed attention in Montana to the wider issue of consolidation in agriculture — and the limits it places on producers’ everyday choices.
The Settlement and Its Scope
The Federal Trade Commission reached an agreement with Deere & Company that gives farmers and independent repair technicians access to the software and tools needed to diagnose and fix Deere equipment. Previously, that access had been tightly restricted, forcing many producers to rely exclusively on authorized dealerships for repairs — a constraint critics said inflated costs and limited options, particularly in rural states where dealer networks can be sparse.
David Shaw, principal deputy director of the FTC’s Bureau of Competition, said the agency routinely scrutinizes major mergers and investigates conduct that may unfairly restrict competition in a given market. He summed up the agency’s posture on large corporations with a pointed phrase: “Big isn’t bad, but big behaving badly is bad.”
Shaw also encouraged agricultural producers to flag potentially anticompetitive practices through the FTC’s antitrust complaint portal, signaling that the Deere settlement may be part of a broader enforcement push rather than an isolated action.
Montana Perspective: Choice and Competition on the Farm
For Montana producers, the repair access issue is one piece of a larger pattern. John Wicks, an organic farmer and board member of the Montana Farmers Union, said consolidation across the agricultural sector has steadily narrowed the options available to growers — not just for equipment servicing, but for purchasing inputs and selling crops as well.
Wicks framed the underlying concern in straightforward terms. “It’s really just about choice,” he said. “Competition is healthy for the economy, and it’s healthy for the producers to put those choices in their hands.”
That argument resonates in Montana, where farming and ranching operations are often large in acreage but small in financial margin, and where the distance to alternative suppliers or service providers can itself be a competitive disadvantage. When a single equipment manufacturer or a consolidated grain buyer controls the practical options available to a producer, the effects compound quickly across a season.
FTC Eyes the Fertilizer Sector Next
Beyond equipment repair, the FTC has opened an investigation into the fertilizer industry — another input market where consolidation has drawn complaints from farm groups nationwide. Fertilizer prices spiked sharply in recent years, and some agricultural advocates have argued that the structure of the market, dominated by a handful of large producers and distributors, limited competitive pressure on pricing.
Shaw indicated the agency reviews conduct across agricultural input and output markets, though he stopped short of detailing the scope or timeline of the fertilizer inquiry. The investigation adds to a picture of increased federal scrutiny of the supply chains that underpin American farming.
What Producers Can Do
Shaw’s call for producers to self-report anticompetitive conduct reflects a practical enforcement reality: regulators often depend on those closest to the market to surface specific incidents of price-fixing, market allocation, or exclusionary dealing that might otherwise go undetected at the federal level.
Montana Farmers Union and similar organizations have long argued that individual producers lack the legal resources and market leverage to push back against large corporate actors on their own. A more active FTC posture, in their view, helps level a playing field that has tilted toward consolidation for decades.
Broader Context
Agricultural consolidation has become a cross-partisan concern in Montana, where farmers and ranchers make up a significant portion of the economic and political base. Republicans and Democrats alike have raised concerns about the bargaining power available to producers when input suppliers, equipment manufacturers, and commodity buyers all operate in concentrated markets.
For a state where the rural energy and infrastructure challenges already add operational costs for producers, the availability of independent repair options and competitive input markets carries direct economic weight. Whether the FTC’s current enforcement emphasis translates into lasting structural change in agricultural markets remains to be seen, but the Deere settlement has given producers a concrete early example of what federal intervention in this space can look like.
