People still type "is John Deere woke," then argue about a memo from July 2024. The published file already has the number. John Deere scores 59 out of 100, and the label on the page is woke. Not extremely woke. Not a zero. It was not on today's boycott screen. The brands that were already have a post. This one is the file.
What July 2024 actually changed
In July 2024, after an online pressure campaign by Robby Starbuck, John Deere said it would stop sponsoring "social or cultural awareness" events, and it named Pride parades as the example. It said it would audit company-mandated training and take out "socially motivated messages." It said diversity quotas and pronoun identification "have never been and are not company policy." Those sentences are the company's, as reported by CBS News and kept on the brand page. Quote them as a statement. Do not upgrade them into a ruling, and do not treat them as a score of zero.
The same statement did not end the counting. CNN reported that Deere would continue to track and advance the diversity of its workforce. A company can cancel a parade check and keep the spreadsheet. Customers who heard "we quit DEI" heard a bigger sentence than the one Deere issued. Customers who heard "nothing changed" missed the parade exit. Both misses are why a middle score exists.
HRC docked points. It did not close the file.
The Human Rights Campaign answered in September 2024. It docked Deere 25 points on the 2025 Corporate Equality Index, cutting the listed score from 95 to 70, according to HRC's own announcement as cited on the brand page. A 25-point dock is a receipt. It means the prior listing was high enough to cut, and it means HRC treated the pullback as real. It does not mean the policies behind the old score were deleted from the handbook.
The 2026 index line is easy to misread. The brand page records that HRC assigns Deere an "unverified" 100 based on policies still on the books, and that the company has not submitted a 2026 CEI survey. Unverified is not Deere coming back to apply for a perfect score. It is a leftover listing after the form stopped. Pride sponsorships are gone. Survey participation is gone. The page says inclusive policies are what remain. BuyWokeFree does not copy that unverified 100. The published score here is 59.
Shareholders kept the board's line
In February 2025, shareholders rejected an anti-DEI reporting proposal from the National Legal and Policy Center. The margin on the brand page is 98.7 percent. The board urged a no vote and said the company treats employees "fairly and inclusively," as reported by HR Dive. A rejected proposal is not a program inventory. It tells you the owners, at that meeting, did not require a public report. It does not tell you which training modules survived the 2024 audit. If that audit produced a public list of deleted lines, it is not in this file. Do not invent the list.
The other direction had a receipt too. The National Black Farmers Association called for a boycott and for the CEO to resign, according to Agriculture Dive, as recorded on the page. That is a demand from a critic, not a sales chart and not a court order. One side wanted more rollback. The other side wanted the rollback undone. Neither side rewrote the 59. The brand page is also explicit about the quiet year: no major new DEI controversies have been verified in 2026. Do not recycle July 2024 as if it posted this morning.
Why 59, not 10 and not 100
The score is a pile, not a vibe. Years of Pride sponsorship put points on the file. A CEI history high enough to be docked from 95 put points on the file. A workforce-diversity commitment the company said would continue put points on the file. The parade exit, the training audit, and the "quotas are not policy" sentence are why the pile stopped short of the companies that still sit at 100. Leave the old sponsorship years out and you are writing a press release.
A shopper needs the number before the caption. The label on the page is woke. That is the word next to 59. It is not the extremely woke label that sits on the perfect scores. Partial is the honest word. Full would be a different page. If the question is the equipment category rather than one name, the mapped page is Non-Woke Industrial Engineering Brands. That page is the scored set. A 2024 memo is not a category.
The store people compare it with
The argument in a farm town is often the store, not the factory. Tractor Supply is published at 10 out of 100, mildly woke. The summary on that page says June 2024 made it the first Fortune 300 company to fully roll back ESG, DEI, and LGBTQ+ commitments after the same style of pressure campaign. "Fully," in that sentence, is the page's word for Tractor Supply. It is not the word the Deere file supports. Ten is lower than 59. Ten is still not a published zero. Use 10 as 10. Do not promote it to a halo because it is lower than the tractor company.
The scored shelves for that comparison are Non-Woke General Merchandise Brands and Non-Woke Retail Brands. Walk those if the errand is a store. Stay on the Deere page if the errand is a tractor company.
Caterpillar is the other heavy-equipment name in the published set, at 35. Lower than Deere. Higher than Tractor Supply. This article does not add a Caterpillar controversy. The score is the only Caterpillar fact being used. The ladder is 10, 35, 59. If someone asks for a published zero in that set, this pull does not have one.
What you can say out loud
You can say John Deere is 59. You can say the July 2024 statement, as reported by CBS News, ended sponsorship of Pride parades and said quotas were not policy. You can say CNN reported that workforce-diversity tracking would continue. You can say HRC docked the 2025 index from 95 to 70. You can say the 2026 HRC line on file is an unverified 100 tied to a survey the company did not submit. You can say shareholders rejected an anti-DEI reporting proposal by 98.7 percent in February 2025. You can say Tractor Supply is 10 and Caterpillar is 35.
You cannot say the score moved in 2026. The page records no major new DEI controversy verified this year. You cannot turn a boycott call into lost revenue. You cannot read "unverified 100" as Deere re-applying for a perfect HRC score. You cannot call a partial retreat a full one because Tractor Supply sits on a different page at 10. The parade stopped. The file did not reset.