A flourishing black market of John Deere parts exists online, connecting farmers in rural America with counterparts in Eastern Europe to buy unlocked firmware crucial to tractors. If you're surprised by the idea of Nebraska farmers working together with Ukrainian suppliers to defeat a tractor company, well, welcome to the bizarre fight over "right to repair."

Those who use the black market, documented in a report by Motherboard, claim they are driven to it by restrictive licensing agreement by Deere, one of the largest tractor companies in the world. Those restrictions would bar the tractors' users from fixing its hardware or software themselves, but such rules are currently being challenged by so-called "right to repair" legislation working its way various states at the moment, including farming-heavy Nebraska.