Deere & Company will have to hand farmers the full toolkit to repair their own John Deere equipment, and three of the country's largest egg producers will pay $3.3 million plus donate 53 million eggs to settle price-fixing charges, under two federal antitrust settlements announced this week.

The Federal Trade Commission announced the Deere settlement on Wednesday. It requires the maker of the country's most widely used farm equipment to provide farmers with all the tools, parts, and diagnostic resources they need to do their own repairs. For years, Deere made those resources available only to authorized dealers, which pushed repair costs higher and made servicing difficult for operators outside dealer networks.

The settlement caps a nearly decade-long fight. In 2022, the National Farmers Union (NFU) was one of several groups that filed a complaint with the FTC against Deere. That petition prompted the agency under former President Joe Biden to sue the company in January 2025. President Donald Trump's FTC kept the case alive and ultimately landed the settlement.

"We are happy to see the settlement provide farmers with what they should have had all along: the right to repair their own equipment," NFU President Rob Larew said in a statement.

The terms run for 10 years, with provisions that could extend them if Deere violates the agreement. Larew said that limitation falls short of what farm groups want. "We will keep fighting for a permanent, nationwide right-to-repair law that guarantees farmers fair and lasting access to the tools, parts, and information we need to keep our operations running," he said.

The practical stakes for farm margins are straightforward: dealer-only repair access translated into longer downtime during planting and harvest windows and higher service bills. Independent repair access bears directly on machinery costs, which rank among the largest fixed expenses on grain and row-crop operations.

Earlier in the week, the Department of Justice announced a second settlement, this one with egg producers Cal-Maine Foods, Versova, and Hickman's Egg Ranch. The DOJ, working with 17 states, had sued the companies, alleging they colluded to artificially raise egg prices for years.

"The Antitrust Division is steadfast in our work to protect our nation's citizens from illegal conduct that makes daily life less affordable," Deputy Assistant Attorney General Nicole Sarrine of the DOJ's Antitrust Division said in a statement.

Under the settlement, which still requires court approval, the companies did not admit wrongdoing. Beyond the $3.3 million payment and the 53-million-egg donation, they agreed to prohibitions on communicating with competitors and must adopt antitrust compliance programs.

Some antitrust advocates in agriculture called the outcome weak. Angela Huffman, president of Farm Action, noted that Cal-Maine reported $1.2 billion in profits during the height of the egg price spikes.

"Consumers paid record prices while dominant egg producers reported extraordinary profits," she said in a statement, "yet the result is another settlement that corporations can treat as the cost of doing business rather than meaningful accountability."

Both cases land in a food system that has grown highly consolidated, and both test how far federal enforcers can go in checking corporate control over agricultural markets. For equipment buyers, the Deere terms expire in a decade unless extended, which keeps pressure on Congress for a statutory right-to-repair guarantee; for the egg sector, the DOJ settlement awaits a judge's sign-off before its compliance terms take effect.