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An FTC lawsuit accuses the agriculture machinery giant of illegal repair restrictions that allegedly inflate costs and deny farmers timely equipment fixes. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC), along with attorneys general from Illinois and Minnesota, filed a lawsuit against John Deere manufacturer Deere and Company on Wednesday, Jan. 15, charging the agriculture machinery giant with engaging in practices that allegedly force farmers to rely on its authorized dealers for critical equipment repairs. According to the FTC’s complaint, these alleged tactics have inflated costs for American farmers and deprived them of the ability to quickly fix the tractors and combines they...

Oh, Deere The largest farming-equipment manufacturer in the world, John Deere, unveiled a new crop of autonomous tractors and trucks at CES 2025 earlier this week, as the heavy-machinery giant looks to capitalize on the buzz around all things self-driving. If your immediate thought is that this sounds like a job killer... it is. John Deere has talked up its machines’ capabilities for precisely that purpose: to help alleviate some of the labor-shortage issues that farming faces, with the company’s chief technology officer, Jahmy Hindman, saying that “there is not enough available and skilled labor” to do the kind of...

ohn Deere says they plan to lay off an additional 287 workers. However, the company insists that those jobs are not being moved to Mexico.. “It is important to note these layoffs are due to reduced demand for the products produced at these facilities. They are not related to production moves,” the company wrote in a statement to KWQC-TV. “As we have repeatedly stated, layoffs this fiscal year are due to the weakening farm economy and a reduction in customer orders for our equipment.” John Deere had already announced the layoffs of more than 600 employees at three production plants...

Big news: Last week I messaged executives from Coors Light, Molson Coors to let them know that I planned to expose their woke policies. Today they’re preemptively making changes.. Here are the changes: • Ending participation in the @HRC’s woke Corporate Equality Index social credit system. • No more DEI based training programs. • No more donations to divisive events. • Ending ERG groups in favor of BRG groups open to all employees, no longer designed to focus on race or sexual orientation. • No more supplier diversity goals. • No more executive/employee compensation tied to DEI hiring goals. This...

Local repair shops say electronics manufacturers are not following a new law, meant to eliminate intentional barriers currently in place that make it difficult for them to do their jobs fairly. Nearly two months after going into effect, the conditions of SB-244, the Right to Repair Act, are not being followed by some manufacturers, that's according to a couple local repair shops. “‘Right to Repair’ is the idea you should be able to fix anything you own,” said Liz Chamberlain, Director of Sustainability for iFixit, a San Luis Obispo-based company specializing in creating repair guides and manuals for electronics. But...

Conservative activist Robby Starbuck has gotten Lowe's, Tractor Supply, Jack Daniel's, and John Deere to retreat from identity-based employee policies and donations to left-wing activism. Hardware retail chain Lowe’s is the latest major brand to announce a retreat from “woke” policies, again driven by pressure from conservative filmmaker Robby Starbuck. Starbuck announced Monday on X that he had notified Lowe’s that he was planning another of his now-trademark exposés against the company’s left-wing corporate policies, to which Lowe’s responded by announcing multiple changes to those policies. Specifically, the company will stop participating in the Corporate Equality Index social credit system...

Farm equipment maker John Deere says it will no longer sponsor “social or cultural awareness” events, becoming the latest major U.S. company to distance itself from diversity and inclusion measures after being targeted by conservative backlash... John Deere also said it would audit all training materials “to ensure the absence of socially-motivated messages” in compliance with federal and local laws. It did not specify what those messages would include... John Deere added “the existence of diversity quotas and pronoun identification have never been and are not company policy.” But it noted that it would still continue to “track and advance”...

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John Deere is sparking outrage by laying off American workers and moving more of its agricultural equipment manufacturing to Mexico. Since October 2023, more than 1,000 John Deere workers have either been laid off or pushed into an early retirement across several plants in Iowa and Illinois. In many instances, production that these US workers were responsible for has been shifted to new locations in Mexico. The company was founded 187 years ago. More layoffs are expected later this year - despite John Deere raking in over $10 billion in profit in 2023 while also paying CEO John May $26.7...

Things politicians never talk about when they pander to Greenies.Managing All Electric Farm EquipmentA close friend farms over 10,000 acres of corn in the mid-west. The property is spread out over 3 counties. His operation is a “partnership farm” with John Deere. They use the larger farm operations as demonstration projects for promotion and development of new equipment. He recently received a phone call from his John Deere representative, and they want the farm to go to electric tractors and combines in 2023. He currently has 5 diesel combines that cost $900,000 each that are traded in every 3 years....

A Florida man who evaded deputies earlier this year by escaping into a swamp was caught on Saturday after he tried to outrun law enforcement on a riding lawnmower, authorities said. Dusty Mobley, 40, was located around 9:30 a.m. at a home on Pasco Broxson Circle in Holt, the Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Office said. He was wanted on warrants related to the theft of a $40,000 boat in January. When Mobley spotted the deputies, the sheriff’s office said he switched a John Deere riding lawnmower "into high gear" and tried to flee the scene. Mobley was quickly apprehended after pursuing...

In the latest and largest strike to hit manufacturing in recent months, more than 10,000 UAW-represented Deere & Co. workers officially went on strike at the stroke of twelve between October 13 and 14. Workers roundly rejected an October 1 UAW-negotiated contract with the tractor manufacturer, with 90% of members voting against the deal. The strike will hit 14 of Deere & Co.’s U.S. locations. Half of those factories are in Iowa; the rest are in Illinois, Kansas, Colorado, and Georgia. The strike’s timing comes at an inopportune point for Deere & Co., which has already seen record profits this...

Believe it or not, Deere & Company (NYSE:DE) currently employs more software engineers than mechanical engineers. How is this possible? The farming industry is experiencing significant disruption. Innovative technology is enabling what is called "precision agriculture" to come to fruition. Farmers are able to leverage technology to monitor their crops in ways that were once unfathomable. John Deere's next-generation machines use artificial intelligence (AI) to exponentially increase efficiencies, enabling farmers to reap increased crop yields with less work and lower costs.Deere does not manufacture electric vehicles like Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA), but you may be surprised to hear it is working on...

Over the course of the last six months, a populist movement to weaken the rights of IP holders has swept across the country. Impacting a cross section of politically diverse states, including California, Texas, Hawaii, and Arkansas, the “right-to-repair” movement and its allies succeeded in introducing flawed legislation that would have devastated the intellectual property rights of innovators by using the levers of state government to advantage one competitor over another. Attacks on IP have become more common, yet they tug at the heart of free markets by using government power to take IP from one to give to another....

New York (CNN Business)It's been nine years since Michael Robinson of Columbus, Ohio, nearly lost a major part of his family's legacy. He's still fighting to regain full control of it. In 2012, the 57-year-old married father of four, who is Black, found out someone he'd never met named James E. Deshler II was suing his family members to force them to sell their portion of the 127 acres of Barlow Bend, Alabama, farmland that they'd inherited from Robinson's late grandfather, Joe Ely. The local county auditor's website determined last year that the land is worth more than $212,000. The...

Meanwhile, both IGEA and John Deere believe existing protections under existing consumer law work just fine. "As more products are computerised, and the information and power imbalances between manufacturers and consumers grow, the incentives for premature planned obsolescence that harms consumers is likely to increase. It is important that regulators are equipped with an appropriate legislative framework to investigate new emerging practices that may harm consumers," the ACCC said. In September 2018, the Equipment Dealers Association signed an agreement with John Deere in which the company would begin voluntarily making repair tools, software guides, and diagnostic equipment available for ordinary...

For a few years now, Tesla started selling vehicles with upgradable software-locked capabilities, like 75 kWh battery pack software-locked at 60 kWh or higher power outputs enabled through software updates. The most recent example is offering a $2,000 ‘Acceleration Boost’ for the Model 3 Dual Motor. Now André has launched a new company, Ingenext, to offer those performance upgrades to Model 3 owners at a lower cost. Ingenext’s pitch is that instead of paying $2,000 for Tesla to unlock capability that is already in your vehicle, you buy their system for $1,100 and you get the new acceleration boost and...

When we read about farmers feeling the pinch in their profits due to the trade war with China, we think of farms and crops. A part of the economic story sometimes overlooked is that of companies who depend on agricultural sales, the companies that service farm communities, like Deere & Co. It was announced Friday that the company’s quarterly earnings missed Wall Street expectations. The agricultural equipment manufacturer is feeling the effects of the trade war between the U.S. and China. Since the beginning of the year, Deere stocks have declined 2% and nearly 1% in the past twelve...

To avoid the draconian locks that John Deere puts on the tractors they buy, farmers throughout America's heartland have started hacking their equipment with firmware that's cracked in Eastern Europe and traded on invite-only, paid online forums. Tractor hacking is growing increasingly popular because John Deere and other manufacturers have made it impossible to perform "unauthorized" repair on farm equipment, which farmers see as an attack on their sovereignty and quite possibly an existential threat to their livelihood if their tractor breaks at an inopportune time. "When crunch time comes and we break down, chances are we don't have time...

Ride-on lawn mower manufacturer Cox Industries might only employ 60 people today from 160 a decade ago, and has suffered three break-even years because it hasn’t rained enough, but co-owner Ken McColl says the Australian economy still can’t afford businesses like his to disappear. “We have 400 separate suppliers, almost all of them local small businesses,” McColl tells BRW from Cox’s 20,000 sqm factory headquarters at Acacia Ridge, Queensland. “From the makers of a specialist washer, to the electricians and plumbers and maintenance people here at the factory. I’m not even counting our bank, insurer or sandwich shop around the...