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This is the book’s farm chapter. No legal training is needed to read it. It asks what American food would cost if farm equipment had followed the bicycle’s path instead of the car’s, and it answers with the prices farmers pay here and abroad for the same makers’ machines.

A forty-four-horsepower Mahindra tractor sells in India for roughly $7,300. The same company sells a forty-one-horsepower Mahindra in the United States for $27,992. A combine harvester rated for one hundred horsepower costs an Indian farmer about $28,000 to $30,600. The smallest combine the same company sells in America costs about $646,000. These numbers are not typos.

The objection arrives immediately, and it is fair. The two Mahindra tractors are not identical machines. It does not move the argument. Even on a generous feature-adjusted estimate that adds four-wheel drive and the closest match on amenities, the India-bought Mahindra would still cost $9,000 to $10,500. The mechanical gap is small. The price gap is enormous.

Some of that spread reflects genuine regulatory overhead — engineering, documentation, compliance labor, legal risk. Much of it reflects what happens in a protected marketplace, where regulation makes it difficult for low-cost competitors to discipline incumbent prices after patent rights expire. What an American farmer pays is the combined cost of compliance overhead and a structure that shelters producers from the competition expired patents were supposed to restore.

The question here is narrow. What would American food cost if farm equipment had followed the bicycle’s path instead of the car’s?

Before 1970, Tractors Were Not Regulated Like Cars

The first thing to notice about the American tractor is what it was not. Before 1970 the tractor was not born into the federal highway apparatus that captured the passenger automobile. It was an off-road machine first and a road user only incidentally, and the federal government’s pre-1970 relationship with it ran mostly to youth labor rules. It did not extend to what could be manufactured and sold.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) confirmed this in its 2016 rulemaking on agricultural equipment lighting, acknowledging that it had not historically regulated most agricultural equipment because such equipment was not designed primarily for public road use. That is the critical legal distinction. Tractors did not begin on the automobile’s regulatory path. They began, functionally, on the bicycle’s. Because tractors started with no federal product rules, every rule added after 1970 stands out as something new: one more obstacle to remanufacturing patent-expired farm equipment.

The Three Regulatory Layers

The capture of the tractor did not happen in one legislative act. It happened in stages, which is what makes it harder to see and easier to dismiss.

Layer One. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) became effective in 1971. By 1976 its agricultural rollover rule, 29 CFR 1928.51, required rollover protective structures and seatbelts on tractors manufactured after October 25, 1976, when operated by employees. The rule was targeted, not total. It turned on employee use, not every private owner, and small farms with fewer than ten employees were exempt from routine enforcement. But it established the principle that for a federally relevant class of tractor use, the new machine had to embody design features earlier generations had not. Once that principle exists, later layers are easier to justify.

Layer Two. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) nonroad diesel regime is where the ratchet truly bit. EPA’s nonroad rules expressly cover farm tractors and agricultural equipment. Tier 1 was finalized in 1994, Tiers 2 and 3 in 1998, Tier 4 in 2004. A new tractor could no longer be a durable machine with a proven layout and a reliable engine. It had to be a compliance platform — catalytic converters, diesel particulate filters, selective catalytic reduction, and the diagnostic electronics to monitor all of it.

Here is the asymmetry that matters constitutionally. Old tractors may stay in service. Pre-standard engines may be rebuilt as they were, and a rebuilt certified engine is held to the standards of its own model year, not today’s. But a company that wants to sell a newly manufactured tractor must cross the modern emissions gate. EPA is not saying yesterday’s machine is unlawful. It is saying, more subtly, that yesterday’s machine may remain in use, but if you want to make a fresh one for today’s buyer, you must satisfy requirements written decades later. That is the structure that preserves patent expiration on paper while destroying its practical value.

A later chapter, How a Remake Is Built and Certified, shows that federal aviation law has gone further, letting new airplanes be built to an older year’s standards — but only for the holder of the original certificate.

Layer Three. In 2016, NHTSA adopted 49 CFR Part 562, implementing the lighting and marking provisions Congress mandated through the Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act (MAP-21). Standing alone, the rule would not be decisive. Placed beside OSHA’s rollover requirement and EPA’s emissions framework, the pattern crystallizes. Tractors are not subject to one sweeping federal tractor code. They are fenced in by layers — workplace safety for covered employees, emissions certification for new powertrains, road-use standards for new equipment — each narrowing the space for simple, low-cost remanufacture of patent-expired designs.

If the law recognized a grandfathered remanufacture pathway for patent-expired tractor designs older than twenty years, the public could finally obtain the benefit the Constitution contemplates: competitive production of formerly patented machines after the patent term ends.

The Price Gap

The combine harvester gap shows the architecture in full. A John Deere W70 sold in India is a one-hundred-horsepower self-propelled wheeled combine priced at ₹26.5 to ₹29 lakh, about $28,000 to $30,600, with a maximum capacity of 2.5 acres per hour. The smallest combine Deere sells in America, the S7 600, is a 334-horsepower rotary machine; the two are not the same class, which is why the comparison that follows is made by daily capacity rather than sticker price. The S7 600 is listed at about $646,000 and, with a twenty- to thirty-foot platform, harvests seventy-eight to one hundred sixteen acres a day.

So the American machine costs twenty-one to twenty-three times more up front while delivering three to five times the one-day output. On cost per unit of daily harvesting capacity rather than sticker price alone, the Indian Deere comes out roughly five to seven times cheaper. Taking five as the conservative floor, a productivity-equivalent combine built on patent-expired technology should cost on the order of $130,000 rather than $646,000.

These are not isolated price distortions. Mahindra, Sonalika, and TAFE export tractors and farm equipment to between eighty and one hundred fifty countries. Sonalika alone produces more than 120,000 units a year. They build machines meeting ISO 9001 and multiple regional safety certifications. Their products cannot enter the American market at their natural prices because of the same architecture that blocks every other category of patent-expired durable goods.

None of this is a recommendation to import a foreign tractor or combine. The machines called for here would be built new in America, by American workers, on designs that already belong to the American public. Foreign-owned companies already build tractors and combines in American plants, and some might take up remanufacturing too; that question is outside the scope of this book.

The Bicycle Thought Experiment

Here the bicycle comparison stops being an analogy and becomes a projection. No one regulates which bicycle a manufacturer may produce, and the market delivers both affordability and continuous safety improvement without a federal gatekeeper. We do not have to guess what the same freedom would do for tractors, because we can look at the countries where it already happens. Across forty-three countries individually named on the public sales-network maps of ZX Auto and Mahindra alone, patent-expired vehicles and farm equipment are legally sold and in many cases manufactured. A Kenyan farmer buying a Mahindra tractor pays a fraction of what a Kentucky farmer pays for a machine of similar capability. He is not getting a worse machine. He is getting one whose price reflects the actual cost of manufacturing a proven design rather than the cost of satisfying a regulatory architecture written decades after that design matured.

From the Dealership to the Dinner Table

Tractors and combine harvesters are not discretionary luxuries. They are the capital backbone of food production, and when federal regulation inflates the cost of manufacturing them, the inflation does not stop at the dealership. United States farm production expenditures hit roughly $500 billion in 2023, per the Department of Agriculture — a two-year increase of 28 percent, the sharpest on record, with farm machinery and equipment purchases alone running about $19.4 billion. When a combine costs $646,000 instead of $130,000, the farmer amortizes that gap across every bushel of grain. The consumer pays for it at the grocery store.

The Grocery Cost Projection

Suppose the constitutional case succeeds, and patent-expired designs become legal to remanufacture across every sector. The requirements are minimal. A licensed engineering firm certifies the product as an authentic reproduction of the expired-patent design, and the labeling discloses which standards it meets and which it does not. The buyer knows what he is getting.

The cost reduction would not be confined to tractors and combines. It would reach every manufactured input in the food supply chain — the combine that harvests, the eighteen-wheeler that hauls, the refrigeration unit that preserves, the machinery that mills and packages.

Follow the food dollar. Per the Department of Agriculture’s Food Dollar Series, the farm share of every retail dollar Americans spend on food is 15.9 cents, and the marketing share is 84.1 cents. Americans spent $2.58 trillion on food in 2024. The food dollar runs roughly 45 to 60 percent manufactured-goods-dependent when every input is traced honestly, and observed international price ratios in that category run from 3:1 to 20:1.

In a competitive economy where remanufacturing exists across every sector, grocery prices fall 35 to 50 percent once the market fully adjusts. On $2.58 trillion in annual food spending, that is $903 billion to $1.29 trillion per year. A family spending $1,000 a month on groceries would spend $500 to $650 instead — $4,200 to $6,000 a year back in the family’s pocket, not from a subsidy and not from a tax cut, but from the competition the Constitution was designed to deliver.

The Patent Question Inside the Tractor

The core mechanical patents underlying the modern agricultural tractor — three-point hitches, hydraulic remotes, power take-off geometries, the diesel engine architectures used in pre-emissions farm equipment, transmission designs reaching back to the 1960s — expired decades ago. Bonito Boats v. Thunder Craft (1989) and Kimble v. Marvel Entertainment (2015) hold the anti-re-protection rule: when a patent expires — and the Constitution grants it for “limited Times” only — the design enters the public domain, and the expired monopoly may not be revived. The right to remanufacture on that foundation — free of the patent monopoly, though not immune from all regulation — is the inference this book defends.

The federal architecture just walked through — OSHA’s rollover rule, EPA’s nonroad emissions tiers, NHTSA’s lighting and marking requirements — does not formally cancel that right. It blocks every practical exercise of it. A farm-equipment company that wants to manufacture a new copy of a 1975 John Deere 4430, certified by an independent engineering authority as a faithful reproduction, currently has no lawful path to do so.

The tractor did not follow the bicycle’s path. It was pulled, later and more slowly than the automobile but just as effectively, into a regulatory architecture that grandfathers old machines while blocking new, affordable remanufacturing of patent-expired proven designs.

The Model T Bracket

Consider what the automobile’s own history shows. When Henry Ford introduced the Model T in 1908 at $825 — roughly $18,000 today — a working family could buy one for about four months of wages. By 1925 mass production had driven the price to $260, about $4,500 today. No federal agency told Ford what he could manufacture, and competition and standardization did what they always do when left alone. A century later a 2026 Ford Explorer starts at roughly $38,000 — eight to ten months of median household income. The car costs roughly twice as much in labor-hours as it did a hundred years ago, despite a century of manufacturing improvement that should have driven the price the other way. The Model T was on the bicycle path. The Explorer is on the regulatory-ratchet path. The difference is not technology. It is law. The regulatory ratchet did not stop with cars. It reached into the barn.

How Farmers Help Restore the Back Half of the Bargain

The constitutional path is the durable one, and who files the case is the work of the plaintiff chapters. Nineteen categories are ranked there, and the independent family farmer represented through his association is one of them. The strongest candidates are organizations whose missions and memberships already align with the injury — the National Farmers Union, with more than 200,000 family farms across thirty-three state divisions, among them. What follows a ruling is the work of the policy chapters. The family farmer reading these pages will see the equipment line of his operating budget redrawn there. All that is missing is the association president or board member who decides to be the name on the complaint.

Farm bankruptcies were up 46 percent in 2025, and equipment costs are a central driver. About 58 percent of the products available in American commerce are blocked from remanufacturing after patent expiration. The grocery bill is the worked example.