Sadly, agriculture is a large part of the "right to repair" movement and one of the groups that would benefit the most from it, as they've been repairing their own equipment for a long time and John Deere et al have been closing down as much as they can so people can't repair their own stuff.

And that's the group of people make it possible for us to stuff down all this food we're consuming, and somehow lawmakers find it OK to not give them more rights...

Oh yes, I definitely agree, and I support the rights of farmers to repair the equipment they use. The carve out for agricultural equipment is clearly a concession to John Deere lobbying.

John Deere sees value in IoT data gathered from its equipment to do all sorts of predictive analysis. That very much undercuts the basis of American food production, which relies on government subsidies for a variety of reasons. I ultimately believe that this value is derived by front running American farming subsidies, a complex form of insider trading. An existential crises is brewing in American farming that repairing tractors is on the forefront of.

However, fixing a combine harvester is definitely a different prospect to modifying your game console or cell phone. We can acknowledge that. I still think that farmers are capable of repairing and modifying the equipment they depend on to make a living and provide all of us with food. But there definitely needs to be some form of safety regulation.