Close All Tabs - To Hack a Tractor: How Farmers Won the Right to Repair

Episode Date: March 25, 2026

What do pissed off farmers and broken McFlurry machines have to do with each other? More than you’d think. Both are part of the story behind the modern right-to-repair movement. In this episode, Jason Koebler, tech journalist and co-founder at 404 Media, explains how an unlikely alliance between Midwestern farmers and electronics repair technicians helped win right-to repair protections across multiple states — and why the farmers’ fight to fix their own tractors is far from over.  Guest: Jason Koebler, tech journalist and co-founder of 404 Media Further Reading/Listening: It Is Now Legal to Hack McFlurry Machines (and Medical Devices) to Fix Them — Jason Koebler, 404 Media   The Walls Are Closing in on John Deere’s Tractor Repair Monopoly — Jason Koebler, 404 Media EPA Affirms Farmers’ Right to Repair — Lisa Held, Civil Eats The Latest Repair Battlefield Is the Iowa Farmlands—Again — Boone Ashworth, Wired  How John Deere hijacked copyright law to keep you from tinkering with your tractor — Luke Hogg, Reason Magazine  Tractor-Hacking Farmers Are Leading a Revolt Against Big Tech's Repair Monopolies — Jason Koebler, Vice  Why American Farmers Are Hacking Their Tractors With Ukrainian Firmware — Jason Koebler, Vice Read the Transcript here Email us at [e-mail] Follow us on ⁠Instagram⁠ and ⁠TikTok⁠ Credits: Close All Tabs is hosted by Morgan Sung. Our team includes producer Maya Cueva, editor Chris Hambrick and senior editor Chris Egusa who also composed our theme song and credits music. Additional producing support by Gabriela Glueck. Additional music from APM. Audio engineering by Brendan Willard. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is our Director of Podcasts. Ethan Toven-Lindsey is our Editor in Chief. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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If you've ever tried to order a McFlurry at McDonald's and couldn't get one, you're not alone. There's this kind of meme where if you want a McFlurie, you have maybe like a 50% chance of trying to order it and the cashier saying that the machine is broken. Jason Cabler is a tech journalist and co-founder of 404 Media. That's the worker-owned independent tech publication. And so it became this kind of like nationwide phenomenon where people were trying to order McFlurries and basically half the time they couldn't get them. There was this guy who created a McFlurie tracker that would track like the thousands of

McDonald's locations that didn't have McFlurries at any given moment. It's called McBroken.com, and it shows up as an interactive map of McDonald's locations all over the world. If a store has a working ice cream machine, it gets a green dot. If its machine is down, that's a red dot. When the McFlurry tracker launched in 2020, the U.S. was scattered with red dots. And sort of like as this cult item, people got like really frustrated with this state of affairs. Conspiracy theories started spreading about why the McFlurie machines were always broken.

You are not ready for how diabolical the McFlurie conspiracy rabbit hole really is. I am talking about the McDonald's ice cream conspiracy. And oh boy, is it bigger and more sinister than you might think. Rumor has it that the machine isn't always broke. It just needs cleaning. That last one is actually the closest to the truth. The franchises that I spoke to, they were like, we know how to clean the machine. We just don't know how to reset it so that it actually works again.

You see, only an authorized repair tech from the company that made the machines could get them running again. Essentially what was happening was you just needed to reset the McFlurry machine. Like there was a series of buttons that you needed to hit, like a code that you needed to enter, and it would go into this like refresh mode. And it's not that it was like so difficult to repair the. McFlurray machines. It's just that the franchises didn't have this code. Only the authorized repair attacks had the code. But there weren't nearly enough of them to repair all of the machines. So the employees were stuck. They would have to wait a long time to actually get their machines repaired. And then you multiply that by all the McDonald's in the United States and you get a situation

where like McFlurray machines are broken all the time. Then something happens that was kind of surprising. So what happened was folks in the Rights to Repair movement, they basically argued to the federal government that it should be legal to bypass this artificial password slash code that was preventing McDonald's franchises from fixing and resetting their machines. The right to repair is a consumer rights movement that advocates for people's ability to repair and maintain their own things. And they actually won, and now it's legal to hack your McFlurie machine in order to repair it. I think they're still broken more often than people would like, but for the most part, it's like a better state of affairs. At the time of writing this narration, McBrooken.com reports that roughly

9% of the world's McFlurray machines are broken. Still a lot of red dots, but way down from before. Okay, but this episode isn't just about McFlurie. McDonald's employees getting the ability to maintain their own equipment is part of a much bigger story. The Right to Repair Movement. We've been diving into this movement over the last few weeks. We've looked into DIY vape monitors and the legal fights over electronic repairs, like fixing laptops. And here's the interesting part. Jason says that a lot of the right to repair protection we have now exists because of farmers,

who've been fighting for this for more than a decade. It's actually a pretty direct line. Like, basically the problem that McDonald's franchises have had fixing McFlurie machines, farmers have had fixing their John Deer tractors, their combines, their harvesters, like all sorts of different farm equipment. And farmers got very pissed. And they essentially joined the Right to Repair Movement where they were basically saying, like, it's a political movement to essentially like free,

free the tractors from this tyranny. Today, we're getting into a relatively unknown piece of right to repair history. The world of farmers, gray market tractor hacking, and an unlikely alliance with DIY repair nerds, a partnership responsible for many of the right to repair protections we have today. This is Close All Taves. I'm Morgan Sung, tech journalist, and your chronically online friend here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives. Let's get into it.

As usual, we're starting with a new tab, farmers and the right to repair. Jason has been covering the right to repair for almost a decade. And like many who get interested in the movement, his story begins with a mishap. I had a MacBook and I got drunk one night. I was watching a comedy special or something and I fell asleep. And I woke up and I kicked the laptop off of my bed. It landed like face down on the screen and the LCD broke. The like actual Glaston break, but the LCD behind it broke.

And I was, I don't know, like 21 years old. I didn't have a lot of money. I had kind of just bought this MacBook and I needed to get it fixed. It had like, you know, a rainbow screen. I couldn't see anything on it. So Jason took his broken MacBook to the Apple Store, and guess what they quoted him to fix this $1,000 laptop? $800. I didn't have $800 at the time, so I just started Googling how to fix MacBook. And I came across this website called I Fix It, which is this community of people who create repair guides.

And I saw that with a simple like 65 step process or something, like a really long process that it was possible to fix the problem that I had. And I just needed to find the part. And so I went on eBay and I found the LCD screen for my MacBook and I found one for $50. He ordered the part and a couple tools and spent a long night painstakingly replacing the screen. Disconnecting little tiny wires and like unscrewing tiny little small small. screws and losing the screws and then finding them again. By the end, I had fully fixed my computer, and I used that computer for like six more years, and it worked no problem. And the total cost to me

was like, I don't know, 70 bucks with the parts and the, you know, the screen. And the sleepless night. The sleepless night for sure. It awakened something in me where I was like, huh, why did Apple want $800 to do this? Maybe because it was so hard for me to fix it, but I did fix it nonetheless. And so I started looking into this and started learning that, you know, this is actually like the business model of a lot of electronics companies where they'll sell you the gadget, but then when it breaks, the repair cost is so high or so inaccessible that you'll either just buy a new one or you'll pay them to repair it. This is a common theme. A lot of people we spoke to described a moment when they started asking why things were so hard to repair. And once they noticed, it

couldn't unsee it. So Jason started reporting on the right to repair, mostly covering the obstacles and fixing consumer tech, iPhones, laptops, that kind of thing. He also went to repair conventions and profiled some of the leaders of the movement. He became the reporter on the repair beat at Vice, where he worked at the time. And then one day, a few years in, he got an email from a farmer. saying, hey, like, you're writing about this problem of fixing MacBooks, but we are facing the exact same problem in agriculture. And it's pretty crazy because tractors cost upwards of $100,000. Sometimes they cost like half a million dollars. Like, we're not talking about a $1,000 MacBook. We're talking about something that is core to someone's livelihood is really time sensitive

because, you know, like, if a tractor breaks while you're trying to plant during these really tight planting windows, or, like, if you're trying to harvest during these really tight harvest windows, the crops will just overripen and die. And so they were like, this is really critical, but we're facing the exact same thing. Like, John Deere is controlling all of the repairs. We can't get the parts. It's really expensive. We have to wait sometimes for, like, days or weeks, depending on, you know, how busy the repair people are. Like, you should come to Nebraska and see what we do. And so, he did.

And it was there that Jason learned about the underground community of farmers, trading pirated software so they could hack their tractors. Not for any crazy mods, but just to get them to run. Next, we head to Nebraska after this break. Support for a key QBD podcast comes from Xfinity. to the Xfinity five-year price guarantee, you're guaranteed five years of reliable Wi-Fi with our best equipment, no annual contracts, and no fees.

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Let's open a new tab. The Tractor Hacking Problem. So Jason Kebler was reporting for Vice at the time, covering the right to repair movement. when a farmer reached out and invited him to Nebraska. He spent a few days there and met with multiple farmers who all had the same issue with their tractors. What has happened is for decades and decades and decades,

farmers have considered themselves to be incredibly self-sufficient. When something breaks, like they know how to change the oil, they know how to change different sensors, they know how to change different parts on their tractors. That hasn't necessarily changed. But what changed is that John Deere, which is the most popular tractor manufacturer in the country, has started adding these technical protection measures to tractors.

So it's not that there's like anything wrong with the replacement parts or it's not that the farmers don't know how to do these repairs. It's that there's just like an artificial code that they need in order to make it talk to the tractor that they have. Sound familiar? It's the McFlurry Machine debacle all, over again. These protection measures are like digital locks put in place by copyright holders. They're used in digital games or e-books or tractor software. Getting around them could be considered

copyright infringement. And a lot of them are sort of legacy farmers where their dad was a farmer, their grandma was a farmer on that same land. And for decades, it was like, well, my dad fixed the tractor. Like, why can't I fix the tractor anymore? And I think that not being able to do that makes them feel disempowered and like they don't own their farm anymore. Like the success of their farm has been outsourced to John Deere or like a major ag tech company. Not getting a McFlurry because McDonald's employees don't have the digital key to reset the machines. Annoying.

But not having the key for farm equipment during the peak of harvesting season, financially devastating. They used to do this repair all the time before tractors were so computerized. It's the same general process. They do it. It won't turn on. They have to call a John Deer dealer, authorized repair person. They're told to wait a day or two days or a week. And all that time, they're losing money.

And, you know, these farms run on such small margins already. So they're mad and they're like, my crops are dying. Like, what can I do? And so they just start, like, Googling around. And one farmer told me basically that he learned that because of some European Union law, the Ukrainian version of this software was available and also could work with the American version of a John Deer tractor. And so we pulled up to this farm and he met us with a laptop, like a really old think pad. and he had this he had like a USB dongle

that was like a USB dongle to like a tractor port dongle that basically is like connect to the computer of the tractor Jason wanted to see it himself the farmer told him that you could

download the software from a torrent site aptly named the Pirate Bay or you could try to join a web forum which on its surface was about car repair and modification. Jason did the latter. He found one, and after he requested entry, he got an email with a link to a third-party website.

On that website, he had to buy a $25 car diagnostic tool. But they didn't ship him the tool he purchased. Instead, they sent him a password to join the forum. And then on there, there was like all of these threads about different versions of John Deere software that you could download and how to use it and like all these guides and things like that. And so it was just like a few farmers who were really fed up and they like learned that this was possible. They went into these modification forums. Like it's really affiliated with people who like modify their cars to, you know, make them run faster or like overclock the engine, like that

sort of thing. It's like that was some of the other stuff that was happening on this forum. And then there was like a whole separate section where it was like agricultural equipment. It was like how to like make your Mustang go faster or like how to replace an air intake sensor in your John Deere tractor. The forums had all this software that you could download and sold the cables that dongle that Jason mentioned to connect a tractor to a computer. The farmer showed Jason how it worked. He like opened his laptop, connected the laptop to his tractor, and he ran the program and then was able to like activate the part that he was showing me, which was some sort of like emission sensor or something like that. And it was really crazy because I had actually just spent a day with another farmer who didn't have this dongle and didn't have this software. And he was trying to fix the exact same thing.

And he was like, look, I can't. Like, I put the new part in, but I can't activate it. It just now my tractor won't turn on. It doesn't work. It was like, well, this guy has figured it out somehow. Tractor hacking was full of legal landmines. The software was technically pirated, which raised all these questions around copyright and licensing agreements.

Farmers started speaking out and connecting with people from totally different industries facing similar issues. And so, an unlikely. Alliance was born between legacy farmers and tech repair DIYers. Time for a new tab. Big Tractor versus Farmers. And tech nerds? So farmers had actually found a way to keep their equipment running, but it wasn't exactly

on the up and up. And there was always the chance that John Deere would implement a fix to foil these hacking attempts, and the farmers would be back at square one. To find a permanent solution, they needed help. They eventually got connected to groups like I Fix It and some of these other electronics repair people who had already been talking about this problem in electronics and realizing that it was the same problem for farmers as well. One of the most outspoken advocates for farmers actually has roots in the tech world, Kyle Weans, the co-founder and CEO of the repair community, I Fix It. Kyle's background is in computer programming, but then a friend asked him for help bypassing his tractor's sensor issue. Both Kyle, a software engineer and repair expert, and his farmer friend, a pretty adept DIYer, were stumped.

They started lurking in agriculture forums and realized that this was actually a very common issue in the tech world and in farming. Kyle wrote about this whole experience in Wired in 2015, advocating for a copyright exemption for farmers to fix their equipment. Okay, buckle up. We're about to dive into copyright law. So, in 1998, the U.S. passed a law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA. It basically modernized copyright law for the digital age. There's one part of the DMCA that matters for a story, Section 1201. It governs technical access to all kinds of machines, like the McFlurry Machine or tractors. The software lock on McFleurie machines is allowed.

to exist because of Section 1201. But there are also exemptions to this law, rules that decide who gets to bypass these software locks, and how. Every three years, the Librarian of Congress revisits these exemptions. And every three years, rights repair advocates have pushed to expand them. In 2015, I Fixit and other digital rights groups successfully won an exemption for land vehicles. That exemption allows owners to modify their vehicles. computer programs, as long as it's for legal repair.

This includes tractors. And though that sounds promising, the reality was still extremely thorny. For instance, was it legal to pirate software for repair? Unclear. Plus, third-party hacking, aka taking the tractor to a local repair shop, was still super illegal. Then there was this other sneaky part of it, licensing agreements. Around the time the Copyright Office approved the last, land vehicle exemption, John Deere started requiring farmers to sign contracts, promising that they

wouldn't modify their tractor software. So hacking your own tractor, even to fix it, could get you sued for breach of contract. Hacking someone else's, even as a repair tech, could get you arrested for copyright infringement. I've watched many hearings at state houses where farmer will go up and they'll talk about this problem, and then a lobbyist for John Deere or for an industry group will say, okay, but if you give farmers access to this stuff, they might modify their tractors in a way that makes them unsafe. They might modify them in a way that causes them to fail emissions tests. And for the first few years, this argument was really persuasive to lawmakers who didn't really understand the problem. But then there was just so much kind of momentum behind this problem.

It became worse and worse and worse over the years as older tractors started getting phased out and farmers started buying more computerized tractors and more people started having this problem, it became like a much stronger political movement. And over the last few years, there's been quite a lot of gains for farmers, both through like negotiated agreements with John Deere, but then also through state level legislation that has passed that does enshrine some of these right to repair ideals. So each exemption cycle, the right to repair movement makes some progress. And the impact snowball. The 2018 exemptions allow third-party repair technicians to bypass the digital locks for land vehicles, like tractors, which means that repair

tax are also allowed to hack tractors now, for repair, of course. In 2021, the land vehicle exemption was expanded to cover all consumer electronics, like smartphones and TVs. And then in 2024, it expanded again, this time for food preparation equipment. That's right. I'm talking about the McFlurry machine. For the first time ever, McDonald's store operators are now allowed to fix their own ice cream machines. Can you believe it? But when it comes to tractors, it's still very much illegal to make and distribute the software that breaks these digital locks.

And it's also still technically illegal to buy the tools that you need for tractor hacking. I mean, it's like really complicated. It's like the concept is so simple. It's like the farmers just want to be able to fix their tractors. But then the actual details of it are incredibly complicated in terms of what they can fix, when they can fix it, how they can fix it, which software they need, where they can get that software, which parts. John Deere hasn't made it any easier either. Let's get into that in one last tab. Can farmers finally fix their tractors?

The answer is they can do more. than they could do when I first started covering this. But what's happened is John Deere has made some repairs accessible and some parts accessible, but some parts are still not. And as farming gets more high-tech, it's called precision agriculture, like a lot of tractors now essentially drive themselves. They're guided by GPS and cameras and all these sensors. There are increasingly things that are still not able to be fixed by the average farmer. But by and large, the situation is better now. It is legal to hack a tractor now.

And when I say it's legal to hack a tractor, it is legal to hack your own tractor to fix your own tractor. It's not legal to hack your tractor and make it drive 100 miles an hour. Right now, it's a situation where kind of like the devil is in the detail. where farmers still want more. And I think they also want better protections because a lot of what's happening right now is John Deere is kind of voluntarily saying,

okay, you can fix these things and we can decide what you can fix. And the farmers want it enshrined in law saying, no, anything that your dealer can fix, we should also be able to fix, essentially. A lot of farmers also, I've heard from, they'll go to buy a part that they need to fix their tractor and it just won't be in stock. And so the dealer that sells them will not say,

like, you can't have this part. They'll just say, oh, we don't have it. And it's on back order. And maybe it's on back order for months. And so like, functionally, they are not able to access the parts that they should be able to access just because there's not anything in the legislation that says these companies have to sell you parts and they also have to have them in stock at all times. And so compliance is a really big problem. And then also just like what's the enforcement going to be because very often the penalties are like a slap on the wrist, if that. So although seven states now have right to repair laws, only two of them have laws that cover farm equipment. So how does that complicate the issue for farmers who started this movement?

What is the state of fixing their tractors like for them? The fact that only some states have passed this legislation actually complicates things for everyone, not just farmers. It complicates things for John Deere as well because you're a big company. Like companies generally don't like regulations, but if there are going to be regulations, they want the regulations to be the same everywhere so that they don't have to comply with 50 different laws and 50 different states. And if you're a farmer, it's like, well, you want the same rights that someone in another state might have. And so it has created a bit of a patchwork system. That said, the fact that there is right to repair legislation in some states

has made things better for all farmers because it's not like John Deere can sell a part in one state and prevent that part from traveling to another state. And it can't like release a repair guide in one state and not have that repair guide be shared over the internet. And so what's happened is like the fact that some of these states have passed laws has made the situation a lot better for everyone. The right to repair is an issue internationally, but these roadblocks are especially prevalent in the U.S. Jason said that other countries either have stronger consumer protection laws, a more widespread

culture of DIY repair, or they don't enforce copyright laws as strictly. That's why farmers depended on pirated Ukrainian software for tractor hacking. So the right to repair movement is a very important. isn't uniquely American. But what is unique about it for Americans is that it's a political movement that both sides can agree on. Right to repair is one of the few things that I've ever covered as a journalist

where there is like very broad bipartisan support. Like this is not a Republican issue. It's not a democratic issue. It is like everyone is pissed about this. It's like a lot of the farmers I spoke to are like pretty like very conservative, not all, but a lot of them are very conservative. A lot of the electronics repair people are very liberal.

They're facing the exact same issue. And this is something that they've been able to find common ground on. And there's only been like a few polls about right to repair that I've seen. But it's an issue where like 90% of Americans agree that this is something, this is an ideal worth fighting for. In the last few days of Joe Biden's presidency, former FTC Chair Lena Kahn filed an anti-trust lawsuit against John Deere. When Trump took office, the second time, his administration dismantled a lot of Lena Kahn's antitrust efforts. But they decided to keep pursuing the lawsuit

against John Deere. That's how bipartisan this is. This is an issue that affects everyone, legacy farmers and tech DIYers alike. I, for one, am beefing with a company that makes my fridge. The sensor on the ice dispenser is broken, but the company doesn't sell that. They have to replace the entire fridge door. The door is back ordered and hasn't been in stock all year. And once it is in stock, I'll probably have to wait for an authorized repair tech to come by and install it. So now I have this fridge that has all these cool, app-controlled features, but I'm still manually filling the ice tray. I didn't even want a smart fridge in the first place.

But I didn't have a choice because my apartment building already had an exclusive contract with a company that makes it. According to Reddit and the many repair guides I found online, I could probably replace the sensor myself. However, doing that might violate my lease. So I'm back to using old-fashioned ice trays. The right to repair is a constant fight. Companies love malicious compliance. You know, doing things that are technically legal but still unproductive. Some advocates are pushing to repeal Section 1201 of the DMCA.

altogether, or at least reform it so that the exemption process for software locks is less cumbersome. At least things are starting to look up for farmers. John Deere had argued that the FTC lawsuit should be thrown out, but last year, a judge ruled that it can and should move forward. Equipment manufacturers, like John Deere, have long argued that they limit independent repair to comply with emissions regulations in the Clean Air Act. Last month, the EPA issued new guidance that said that, actually, they aren't allowed to do that. The Clean Air Act can't be used to stop farmers from fixing their own stuff. And then, also last month, lawmakers in Iowa voted to advance a bill that would allow farmers to repair their equipment, including tractors.

The big tractor lobby isn't as strong as it used to be. And every day, people gain a little more of the right to repair tractors, and maybe, flooring machines and everything in between. Okay. Now let's close all these tabs. Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios and is reported and hosted by me, Morgan's son. This episode was produced by Maya Cueva and edited by Chris Agusa, who also composed

our theme song and credits music. The Close All Tabs team also includes editor Chris Hambrick and audio engineer Brendan Willard, additional music by APM. Audience Engagement support from Mahas Sanad. Jen Chien is our director of podcast. and Ethan Tov and Lindsay is our editor-in-chief. Some members of the KQA podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco, Northern California Local.

This episode's keyboard sounds were submitted by Alex Tran and recorded on his white, Epo Maker, High 75 keyboard with Fogredin Red Samurai Key Caps and Gatoron Milky Yellow Pro V2 switches. Do you like these deep dives? Are you closing your tabs? Then don't forget to rate and review us on Spotify. Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to the show. Maybe drop a comment, too. And if you really like close all tabs and want to support public media,

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