Yesterday’s announcement of American Farm Bureau signing a right-to-repair Memorandum of Understanding with John Deere was welcome news for farmers as they have been struggling to fix some equipment themselves, especially as supply chain hurdles continue.
Two southern farmers were in attendance for the signing and they are how this will benefit their operations.
“One of our sons is our mechanic on our farm and we are very limited to what we can do with our new equipment because we haven’t had this access before. As a matter of fact, during harvest season, our combine was down for 7 days waiting on the dealership to come out with their computer to fix it. If we could’ve had the accessibility to do it ourselves, we could’ve done that because it was a very easy fix, we just didn’t have the ability to do that,” said Alabama farmer, Mark Byrd.
“Because of the labor shortage and other shortages that we’ve had across the United States, it’s been difficult for our dealers to hire technicians and people to work on equipment. Because of this Memorandum of Understanding, it gives us the availability to do some of that work ourselves, and it’s a huge success for farmers and also the American Farm Bureau simply because down time is very critical with the equipment we have and what we use on our farms,” said Tennessee farmer, John Chester.
