Farm equipment giant John Deere has inserted language into 556 of its product manuals acknowledging customers can use mechanics of their own choosing to repair emissions control devices, newly unearthed documents show.
Last fall, John Deere employees combed through 2,406 of the company’s post-2011 powered equipment guides and determined 23% lacked repair-related verbiage required under federal emissions guidelines, according to a defect report and remedial plan summary obtained by Agri-Pulse through a Freedom of Information Act request. Title 40 of the Federal Code of Regulations requires that manufacturers' maintenance instructions clearly state “a repair shop or person of the owners’ choosing may maintain, replace, or repair emission-control devices and systems.”
At some point prior to the search, EPA officials had informed the company they believed several of its products “did not conform to EPA regulations with regard to their emissions warranty statement,” according to EPA spokesperson Remmington Belford. John Deere subsequently recalled the manuals.
“John Deere has conducted a voluntary recall consistent with EPA regulations to address these potential nonconformities,” Belford said in a statement. “While EPA has authority to compel this kind of remedy, most manufacturers choose to voluntarily recall products to address potential nonconformities as John Deere has done here.”
Deere and Co. did not respond to requests for comment.
The Illinois-based farm equipment manufacturer has long been reluctant to grant outside entities access to the software embedded in its machines, a source of consternation for some farmers wanting to service their own equipment or have third-party technicians make certain repairs.
In the past, Deere executives cited Clean Air Act obligations as a reason they were concerned about expanding customer access to software. Bad actors could illegally tamper with emissions control systems, which the company could be held liable for, John Deere Customer Support Manager Grant Suhre told a panel of Connecticut state legislators in early 2022.
"If we don’t comply with their requirements, they can, up to and including, stop us from building engines," Suhre said of EPA at a 2021 hearing before Nebraska state legislators. "Nothing runs like a Deere becomes a bit of a moot point if there’s no engine.”
If EPA finds flaws in emissions control systems, the consequences can be severe. Earlier this year, the agency forced the recall of 3,500 RAM diesel vehicles due to emissions control configurations by engine manufacturer Cummins that violated the Clean Air Act. Cummins also agreed to pay a $1.675 billion penalty.
But while manufacturers need to produce vehicles that comply with emissions standards, it’s not their responsibility to keep customers from illegally tampering with purchased equipment, it's EPA's, according to Administrator Michael Regan.
Regan, who waded into the repair discussion last year at the behest of National Farmers Union President Rob Larew, said “nothing in the Clean Air Act or the EPA’s regulations limits a manufacturer’s ability to provide service tools and information to consumers and independent repair facilities for the purpose of repairing their equipment.”
“The act, implementing regulations and the EPA’s policy and practice are aligned in preventing tampering not by limiting access to independent repair, but rather by enforcing the prohibition against tampering against any party that does so,” Regan told Larew in a letter.
The company finished updating all of the 556 owners’ manuals by May 1 of this year, John Deere Emission Audit Analyst Travis Wibben wrote in an email to Allen Duncan, director of EPA’s diesel engine compliance center.
“We found all the manuals that were missing the required wording,” Wibben told Duncan on May 28. “All of those manuals have been updated and published. They are available to customers on a serial number basis.”
The company also sent out letters informing customers of the change by May 1, according to the email. “John Deere thanks you for your business, and sincerely apologizes for any inconvenience this issue may have caused,” John Deere Product Support Director Chris Davison said in one letter that was received by Missouri farmer Jared Wilson on May 8.
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A draft version of this letter John Deere employees presented to EPA officials last December indicates that in the statement, the company was planning to put the word “qualified” in front of “repair shop or person of the owner’s choosing.” But the term was later scrapped, emails show. It’s unclear from the emails whether the EPA required John Deere to take it out.
“We have moved forward with removal of the word ‘qualified’ from the text block,” Wibben informed Duncan and Byron Bunker, another EPA official, on Dec. 22.
Nevertheless, the word “qualified” is still part of the statement in at least 35 of the company’s handbooks, an Agri-Pulse review has found. For instance, it appears in one manual for 5090E, 5090EL, and 5100E tractor models. It is used in another for three Hagie self-propelled sprayer models.
Just because John Deere added EPA-required language to its manuals doesn’t mean the company will loosen its grip over the software inside tractors and other pieces of farm equipment, argued Willie Cade, a "right to repair" advocate and member of the Nebraska Farmers Union. Customers and third-party repair shops can use a tool called “Customer Service ADVISOR” to diagnose machine problems and download manuals, but repair advocates like Cade say this has limited capabilities compared to a version used by authorized John Deere dealers.
Willie CadeCade said fully repairing emissions control devices requires equipment to be connected to the dealer version of Customer Service ADVISOR rather than the customer version. “It’s like somebody gives you a padlock, but they don’t give you the key,” he said of the situation.
Between June 11 and 22, Cade looked at 105 publicly available owners’ manuals for 268 common pieces of John Deere equipment and found the EPA-required statement had been added to 67 of them. John Deere’s recall applied to manuals for engine families certified by the agency since 2011 but Cade’s dataset also includes guides for equipment sold before then, which could be why some of them did not include the statement. Additionally, it represents only a small, hand-picked sample of overall manuals published by the company.
Still, Cade noticed that the language was missing from an operator's manual for the 5075GL orchard tractor, which the company first announced in 2018. That means it would have been manufactured later than 2011. That manual also covers five other specialty crop tractor models — 5090GV, 5075GN, 5090GN and 5100GN.
None of the manuals Cade looked at presented the notice on the front page. Twenty-three display it on page 2, while seven show it on page 3. The notice appears between pages 74 and 658 in the other 37 manuals he found it in.
Front-page inclusion of such language isn’t a requirement under the EPA-crafted regulations John Deere sought to comply with when making the changes. But Cade believes the company’s choice to relegate it to later pages violates the Clean Air Act, which stipulates similar information should be provided “in boldface type on the first page of the written maintenance instructions notice.”
“They’re complying with the regulation, not the law as written,” he said.
Agri-Pulse independently verified Cade’s analysis by downloading the same 105 owners’ manuals and searching for keywords from the newly added language, but did not look at any other guides published by the company. Therefore, the dataset presents a limited and incomplete picture of the overall state of the company’s handbooks.
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