Admittedly I have never worked in the agriculture industry, but I have been a mechanical engineer for multiple industries before I became a software engineer (a good 5 years I was in a position where I quoted customers). You really cannot imagine that out of the 44B gross revenue and 5B net, that a "non tiny fraction" was not related to right the repair? Collections of receivables + Proceeds from sales of equipment on operating leases is north of half of the 44B gross. How much of that gross would have not existed should there been a third party market to repair and service exist products? I honestly can't give a number but I doubt its "tiny". Look at the car industry, about 20% of the global revenue is aftermarket. You simply cannot naively think that "right to repair" only effects the service contracts. Theres aftermarket parts and 3rd party repair shops that COULD have been a bigger market without John Deere's anticompetive practices.

Yup. The two things John Deere did was make it impossible to diagnose problems with software lockouts and they did software locks for common parts. Imagine, for example, needing to pay $1000 to replace an oil filter because you needed to buy the official John Deere oil filter and have the John Deere technician drive out to install it and flash the tractor to start up with the new filter.

That's what John Deere was up to.

Also, I'd point out that tractors are, by and large, actually pretty simple machines. At their core they are an engine and a hydraulics system. Not much more. The most fancy tractors will obviously have a lot of creature comforts in the cab. GPS, auto steering, AC, etc. But the actual things that do the thing are effectively just solid metal parts that plow through the field or cut down the crop.

Tractors, because they are so simple, but also because they all operate at lower speeds than other vehicles, are almost immoral machines. My family literally has a John Deere from the 40s that starts up just fine. We also have a Massie from the the 70s that still operates just fine. And our newest Massie from the 00s is still doing farm work. The only reason we got the Massie in the 70s was because it had more horsepower than the John Deere from the 40s. And the only reason for the 00s tractor was because it had a closed cab with AC and more horsepower.

It would not shock me to learn John Deere was also integrating some planned obsolescence to speed up the turn over of their tractors.