Farmers are pretty knowledgeable about the equipment they're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on. The idea they're just picking JD because of name recognition is insulting.
Maybe I'm just in my small bubble and/or the situation in Germany is quite different, but when I look at the farms in the area I grew up in, including my father's farm, then most of them are absolutely loyal to whatever brand their family has been using for centuries. My father didn't even test or look at others brands when he bought his tractors.
I understand that, when they work, the products are amazing, even up to the point that Deere can obtain satellite imagery of a farm and work it autonomously, without the owner of the equipment present.
Many times, the products do not work, and repair is locked to approved equipment that is confirmed and authorized remotely - no authorization, no repair, no operational equipment.
The last Defcon conference shattered the control that the corporation is able to exercise over this equipment, because of bad security design. There is a major effort to rethink (and improve) this control, but everything on the market now is irretrievably broken from the perspective of the embedded electronics preventing unauthorized repairs.
There are other problems, one involving a fatality at a recent union strike, the GPL violations above, right to repair, and the (lack of) staff to correctly address said adversity.
