Dr Elizabeth Chamberlain, Director of Sustainability at iFixit: “John Deere had more lobbyists in the building than there were congresspeople. It was wild.”

Today, iFixit is a global brand renowned for leading the fight to give consumers and businesses the ability to fix the products they own. While many associate iFixit with everyday technology such as phones and laptops, its initial campaigning work has close ties to the automotive and agricultural sectors.

Something that cropped up, if you’ll excuse the pun, when I interviewed Dr Elizabeth Chamberlain, iFixit’s Director of Sustainability. And our timing is perfect: she has inside knowledge on a recent victory against the agricultural colossus John Deere.

It’s part of a decade-old fight for right to repair. Their latest battle ended in July 2026 when John Deere settled a case brought by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The result means that for the next decade, John Deere has to provide anyone with the same repair tools and software that were previously confined to their authorised dealers. Make no mistake, this is an enormous victory fought over many years.

But, as you’ll hear from Dr Chamberlain, the war isn’t yet over.

Our readers are familiar with the high costs of business IT but the financial scale of agricultural technology is staggering. Does that change the dynamics of the repair argument compared to consumer electronics?

Absolutely. A combine [harvester] costs as much as a house. I think farmers, for that reason, become invested in being able to repair their own stuff economically. However, a huge part of the fight with John Deere has been about data.

Agricultural data is increasingly the biggest business driver for farm equipment producers. They want data about how a bad rain year affects the crops or what happens when there’s a certain amount of moisture in the air.

They can sell that data to other agricultural firms, so some farmers are asking for control. Some want the ability to download, understand and make sense of it.

John Deere has not allowed farmers access to that or allowed them to decide whether their data goes back to the mothership, so to speak.

Why do farmers want right to repair?

One reason that many farmers want to fix their own problems is to avoid costly delays whilst a John Deere engineer arrives on site. As you may imagine, farming is greatly dependent on the weather. Waiting a week for official support in a remote location could cause the destruction of acres of crops, purely because it has rained. This can be catastrophic for the farmer’s business. When traditional support channels fail, some farmers take matters into their own hands to get Deere’s support.

We’ve heard stories of farmers having equipment break down out in the field and waiting months for dealers to call. We also hear from farmers who yank out the hard drive that’s collecting data. They immediately get a call from their dealer saying, “Hey, we’re not getting a signal from your tractor anymore”. That’s the way to get their attention.

You’ve been fighting John Deere for over a decade, so clearly they’re not going to give up easily…

John Deere has a huge monopoly that they are gonna fight hard to protect. The first time we ran an agriculture-specific bill, John Deere had more lobbyists in the building than there were congresspeople. It was wild.

We won an agricultural right to repair bill in Colorado that John Deere has not been complying with. It takes attorneys general a long time to build a case. We don’t know if they’re working on pursuing John Deere. Last year, a consolidated lawsuit against Deere with a bunch of different complaints from Illinois farmers resulted in a settlement. It was watered down to the point that we were pretty confident it wouldn’t solve farmers’ problems.

When the latest John Deere decision came through, how did iFixit feel? Was it a final victory or the end of chapter one?

You can understand why, having won against Deere repeatedly, we are holding our horses when it comes to excitement. As a coalition, this is a solid win. It should force Deere to do some of the things they haven’t done. The FTC has enforcement muscle and they have proven that they are willing to go after companies that are not following right to repair laws. So, we’re hopeful.

How did a company which is known for fixing phones begin fighting a tractor manufacturer?

We have been fighting the John Deere fight for almost as long as we’ve been fighting right to repair. That wasn’t intentional at the start. I helped launch iFixit’s advocacy arm initially in 2012. That’s the same year that Massachusetts passed an automotive right to repair law.

Kyle [Weins, founder of iFixit] read it and realised “This is the same problem we’re seeing in electronics – manufacturers cutting out independent repair”. A couple of years later, he met Gay Gordon-Byrne. She’s was a server salesperson, who was collecting data about server failures after recognising that manufacturers were also cutting out independent repair.

How do you prepare for a campaign which could take decades to resolve?

Even before there were wins, the Right to Repair US advocacy story has been a steady track of more and more and more success. Bills got further. We had more state champions who were enthusiastic about running bills with us and we were running a wider variety of bills.

Things didn’t always go our way for a long time. We did not pass anything for the first eight years of running bills in the US. I think that things moving faster in Europe was also encouraging. Either way, we’re seeing wins and enough wins to keep the machine moving.

From the outside, manufacturers and OEMs are really slow on repairs. How do they explain their tardiness to you when challenged?

We hear things that aren’t true, like repair will make things more expensive. That gets used as a bogeyman, which claims that if we pursue repairability, then the unit cost is going up. There are places where that’s true. Repairable connectors are more expensive and investing the development cost into repairable design takes time and human hours. That costs money. That’s real.

So often, even if the unit cost of the device goes up, for the company as a whole, the service cost goes down. Any improvements they make in repairability make it easier for them to fulfil warranty requests or easier to have a robust second-hand market for their products.

We get approached by engineers saying, “I love your mission. I’m all for it. I am losing this argument. I am being told to stop doing this in our products, and I need your help.”

We help them go to the decision-makers and make the case for repairability. We say, “Here’s why this is going to bring your service cost down. Also, look at the incredibly positive press that Google’s gotten from it or that Logitech’s gotten from it. It is a selling point that makes you look good to the tech world.”

This is something that consumers care about and tech enthusiasts care about. Wins in repairability pay benefits both in decreased service costs and in getting a lot of positive eyes on your company and the work that you’re doing.

Although iFixit is the beacon for the repair movement, there are major advocates in other parts of the world. Can you explain how global alliances are vital to campaigning?

It is important to have a coalition of groups that have different areas of expertise, understandings of local governments and know how to push things through.

In the US, our success has everything to do with the fact that we are paired with Gay Gordon-Byrne. She’s connected with server industry groups and then the Public Interest Research Group that have 25 student chapters. We’re connected to this grassroots network that we’re able to tap into whenever we’re in a state that has run bills.

It is not a coincidence that almost all the states where we’ve passed right to repair have a local PIRG network. They’re able to tap students and have them out literally knocking on doors, making calls and doing vote counts.

Similarly, The Restart Project is the biggest advocate in the EU. It has the understanding of how legislation works and how to push things through in Brussels. It wouldn’t have been possible to have had the successes in Europe without them.

In terms of general sustainability, what do you find moves the needle more for you? Is it the economic argument that this is gonna benefit their consumers, or is it the environmental reality of e-waste?

It depends so much on the legislator and on the jurisdiction. The e-waste argument has been really effective for us in Europe. As the Director of Sustainability, I’m heartened that there is somewhere that we can talk about the huge cost of e-waste to the environment.

That doesn’t work for us in most of the US. The e-waste argument doesn’t land for some legislators. We have to be careful about when we deploy that argument. We make clear the reality of right to repair, which is that across the political spectrum around the world it polls at like 80%. People want to fix their things.

Ultimately, in winning over legislators who’ve been reluctant, that personal connection has been the thing that’s worked. We’re able to get to them and say, “Hasn’t there been a time in the last year or two or three where you have had a broken whatever and had trouble getting it fixed? Or you’ve learned that the screen replacement on your phone is gonna cost three quarters as much as a new phone?”

They respond, “Yes, that has happened to me”. The personal experience is the thing that has made it possible, more than anything, to get repair legislation over the finish line.

For our readers who deal with glued-in batteries or software locks daily, how can they support iFixit’s work and the momentum of right to repair?

The biggest thing is following your local repair advocacy organisation. That could be Repair.eu, The Restart Project, Repair.org or CanRepair. There are networks of repair advocates in every major jurisdiction, so find your local group. If there isn’t one, start one.

The second is that as legislation passes, it is really important that consumers keep demanding the repair materials that they’re entitled to. One pushback we get from manufacturers is, “Nobody has asked us for materials”. This ignores the fact that they have conditioned us out of asking for decades and that a lot of people don’t know that this law passed and they can ask for these materials. So if people aren’t asking, it makes it harder for us to push for stronger regulations.

So my call to everybody is: if something breaks, ask for the manual. Ask for the parts you need. If you don’t get them, let iFixit know.