NESCOPECK, Pa. — It's the off-season at Drue Chapin & Sons near Nescopeck. The family farm is typically a busy place.
During the off-season, Steve Chapin and his family do maintenance on their farm equipment. There is a lot of green and yellow here. The farm primarily uses John Deere equipment.
"Most of my lifetime, we've had John Deere equipment," Steve Chapin said.
John Deere is one of the world's largest producers of farming equipment. On Sunday, the tractor maker announced an agreement that will allow farmers the right to repair their own farm equipment. Previously, farmers could only use John Deere-authorized parts and service facilities for major fixes.
"I don't think it's going to change much for us," Chapin said.
Chapin went to a John Deere agricultural tech school in Ohio. He then did tech support on farm equipment for seven years.
"We spent a lot of time with laptops, hooking up this stuff, solving problems," Chapin said.
Even so, Chapin says he would most likely not attempt to fix a major issue with his farm equipment on his own.
"If I can't fix it through the onboard diagnostics on the machine, I won't go any further than that. When I was a tech, we had seen problems where things had been changed by accident, and it can cause hours and hours of repairs to correct that," Chapin said.
Many tractors run on advanced computer systems. For example, one combine has more than two dozen computers inside of it.
"There's a lot of computers in there, and they're all talking together. If you change a setting on one computer, it can disable the entire machine if you do something wrong," Chapin said.
Under the new agreement, farmers and independent repair shops can buy access to John Deere's software and manuals. But Chapin says it's important to know what you're doing if you attempt to fix a major issue with a computer inside a piece of farm equipment that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars.
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