Sponsors (3)
The bill substantially expands owners' and independent repairers' rights to parts, tools, data, and circumvention for farm equipment—lowering repair costs and increasing competition—while raising OEM compliance costs, IP and cybersecurity risks, potential safety concerns, and new regulatory burdens that could affect prices and long‑term product investment.
Farm equipment owners (especially farmers and rural communities) gain legal access to parts, full diagnostic documentation, software, and repair tools on fair, non‑restrictive terms, reducing downtime and repair costs.
Independent repair providers get parity access to tools, software, and documentation (and legal ability to circumvent protections for repair/interoperability), expanding local competition and consumer choice for repairs.
Owners can obtain owner‑generated equipment data to support better farm management, precision agriculture, and third‑party services.
OEMs will face added compliance costs and new potential penalties (including daily fines for repeat violations), which may be passed on to buyers as higher equipment prices or reduced manufacturer services.
Requiring disclosure of firmware, SBOMs, diagnostic data and permitting circumvention raises intellectual‑property and cybersecurity risks by expanding information that could be exploited or misused.
Allowing circumvention and restricting OEM control (registration/pairing/online authorization) could enable unsafe or improper repairs and make equipment more vulnerable to malicious actors, increasing safety and cyber risks on farms.
Based on analysis of 6 sections of legislative text.
Requires OEMs to provide farm equipment owners and authorized independent repairers access to parts, tools, documentation, firmware, and owner data on fair and reasonable terms, with DMCA carve-outs and FTC enforcement plus penalties.
Official title: Require original equipment manufacturers to make available certain documentation, parts, software, and tools with respect to farm equipment, and for other purposes.
Introduced October 28, 2025 by Peter Welch · Last progress October 28, 2025
Requires farm equipment manufacturers to make repair-related items — including parts, tools, documentation, firmware/software, and owner-generated equipment data — available to equipment owners and, with owner permission, to independent repair providers on "fair and reasonable" terms. It creates statutory carve-outs to anti-circumvention law for diagnosis, maintenance, interoperability, security research, and non-infringing modification; directs a federal commission to write implementing rules consistent with existing Clean Air Act rules; and gives the FTC enforcement authority plus specified civil monetary penalties for repeated refusals to provide required repair access.