Agriculture has always been the foundation of society. 

Humanity was nomadic and pastoral until the widespread development of agriculture, which allowed us to settle in a singular location and found a society. Agrarian lifestyles enable the production of excess food, allowing human attention to fall elsewhere.

With the ability to allocate human attention to other focuses, we can form a society that produces other goods, education, government, inventors, scientists, artists and so much more. Without farming, society as we know it and the necessities we enjoy as people in modern society would cease to exist. 

It follows that without farmers, none of these things are possible. If no one produces the food for society, then society starves.

Why are farmers some of the most downtrodden people today? They are constantly abused and exploited by corporate America and overlooked by legislators who focus on lining their own pockets with the money of said corporations.

John Deere, the number one manufacturer of farm equipment, is no exception.

John Deere is currently being sued by Illinois and Minnesota, alongside the Federal Trade Commission, who protest John Deere’s unlawful monopoly on repair services. 

As technology has advanced, so have the products provided by John Deere, with many previously mechanical systems being replaced with electronic control units, governed by software in lieu of steel. John Deere has refused to provide the necessary tools required to perform repairs on these systems, a practice not shared by the automotive industry. 

The automotive industry has allowed independent service providers to access the software of their vehicles for years for not just repairs, but customization, allowing the program of vehicles to be altered, or “tuned.” Independent service providers have not been able to provide the same service for consumers of John Deere products, as they maintain a monopoly on expensive repair services. 

This allows John Deere to price gouge one of the poorest communities in the country while already charging hundreds of thousands of dollars for necessary pieces of equipment that incur fuel costs, maintenance costs, taxes, lubrication, and many more. 

John Deere is not the only exploitative corporation targeting our most essential workers. Syngenta and Corteva are two pesticide manufacturing companies that use loyalty programs and rebates, the return of sums of money after purchasing a product, to prevent other providers of competitive products from breaking into the market. 

These companies have active lawsuits against them coming from North Carolina, while the afflicted farmers live in a range of nine states. These companies use predatory loyalty practices to stop potentially cheaper and more effective products from other companies being bought by their clients.

These policies have been proclaimed predatory, artificially inflating prices and lowering the profit margins of an already struggling profession. Farmers from these nine states have been given the green light to sue these companies for their predatory practices. 

Sadly, the justice system does not always side with the vulnerable population. In September 2024, Corteva, Bayer, Syngenta and other companies won a lawsuit claiming that they were inflating the price of seeds and crop protection chemicals by boycotting platforms that would provide cost comparisons.    

Corporations that comprise a trillion-dollar industry will stop at no end to squeeze every last penny from the producers, hoarding immeasurable wealth behind armies of attorneys and lobbyists. Small farmers are the cornerstone of our entire nation, and we should not allow them to be exploited by billion-dollar companies with machiavellian morality.

All juice is worth the squeeze when the juice doesn’t have the money or the means to fight back. The alien legal landscape is nearly impossible to navigate without wealth or education, two metrics shown to fall the lowest in rural America.

The food on your table is produced by human hands, not by shareholders lurking behind concrete abominations and Powerpoint presentations.