Don’t be fooled by the miles of grain blurring into one endless golden field as you blast past on I-88. Those stalks only look interchangeable.

Farm equipment today can see each individual plant and know which is a crop, which is a weed. A John Deere combine rattling across the Gaesser Farms in Ankeny, Iowa, can recognize what type of grain is being harvested, consider the direction of the wind and the slope of the ground before adjusting itself accordingly, orienting among the corn and soybeans with far more precision than the smartphone in your pocket can tell you where you’re standing.

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As with smartphones, “right of repair” is a hotly debated issue among farmers, one that causes some Deere owners to sue the company, claiming it was hampering their ability to fix the expensive combines they’d purchased.

“Deere also prohibits farmers from doing their own repairs on Deere equipment,” the American Economic Liberties Project wrote. “Farm machinery is now so technologized that even a basic repair job requires interacting with software that Deere owns. It is zealous about its copyrights on that code — which forces farmers to pay a Deere dealer to fix things rather than maintaining their equipment on their own.”

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