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Trained repair professionals at hospitals are regularly unable to fix medical devices because of manufacturer lockout codes or the inability to obtain repair parts. During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, broken ventilators sat unrepaired for weeks or months as manufacturers were overwhelmed with repair requests and independent repair professionals were locked out of them. At the time, I reported that independent repair techs had resorted to creating DIY dongles loaded with jailbroken Ukrainian firmware to fix ventilators without manufacturer permission. Medical device manufacturers also threatened iFixit because it posted ventilator repair manuals on its website. I have also written about people with sleep apnea who have hacked their CPAP machines to improve their basic functionality and to repair them.
PS: he got it repaired.
Short of it is that John Deere is preventing farmers from repairing their own tractors. How much it threatens the food supply, I’m not sure, but there is an obvious connection.
I’ve also read about the John Deere issue as a leading instigator of right-to-repair laws. They weren’t able to provide authorized local repair techs when a tractor breaks down, so farmers were stuck waiting 1-2 weeks for someone to show up while crops were rotting in the fields (think of how fast your fresh fruit rots in your kitchen and then imagine dozens of fields of that crop going to waste). And the biggest insult was when the repair tech drove into town for a $5 part that the farmer had already identified but couldn’t replace because of manufacturer lockouts.
This is correct. And the connection is major. I, as a former farmer, can tell you that repairing my own equipments is a matter of life or death (for my crops). Rice for example, required a constant stream of cold(
rigerriver temp cold) and fresh water for 6 months straight. Non-stop. If my diesel powered water pump breaks and I can’t fix it, I only have a couple of days (if at all) to fix it, otherwise, all that rice is just dead. So, I always had parts available at my house for just in case. I’d also had two diesel water pumps at the river, in case one broke and took a while to fix, so I can fire up the second one. Same thing with my harvesting machine… the list goes on and on. It’s absolutely essential that farmers fix their own equipments. What John Deere is doing should make every human being angry, because this is our food they’re messing with.