Two icons of rural America. Two activist pressure campaigns landing within weeks of each other in the summer of 2024. Two very different responses — and two very different woke scores to show for it. If you fuel your truck at one and finance your tractor at the other, you deserve to know exactly where each company stands. So we put Tractor Supply head-to-head with John Deere on the BuyWokeFree Woke Scale. The verdict isn't close.
The Scores: 10 vs. 59
Tractor Supply earns a 10/100 woke score — landing in our "mildly woke" tier, about as clean as a Fortune 300 retailer gets. John Deere sits at 59/100, squarely in "woke" territory and nearly six times higher than its farm-store rival. That 49-point gap is the whole story: when the heat came, one company turned the dial all the way down, and the other turned it halfway and called it a day.
Both scores are built from the same six research-based criteria we apply to every brand: ESG commitments, DEI programs, PRIDE sponsorships, the HRC Corporate Equality Index rating, political contributions, and CEO Action for Diversity participation. Here's how the two stack up.
Tractor Supply: The Company That Listened
On June 27, 2024, Tractor Supply did something no Fortune 300 company had done before. After a three-week social-media campaign led by conservative activist Robby Starbuck, the Brentwood, Tennessee retailer announced it would eliminate all DEI roles, retire its DEI goals, stop submitting data to the Human Rights Campaign, withdraw its carbon-emissions targets, and end sponsorship of "nonbusiness activities" like Pride festivals and voting drives, as reported by NPR and CNBC. Corporate giving was redirected to agricultural education, animal welfare, veteran causes, and land and water conservation.
This wasn't a quiet edit to a webpage. It was a full, public reversal across every category we measure. ESG carbon goals: gone. Formal DEI apparatus: dismantled. Pride sponsorship: ended. HRC data submission: halted, which collapses the company's CEI footprint. The activists who pushed for it declared victory, and the predictable counter-pressure followed — the National Black Farmers Association called for CEO Hal Lawton's resignation and LGBTQ farm groups organized a counter-boycott, according to The Advocate. Tractor Supply didn't budge. As of 2026, the rollback remains fully in effect — legal advocacy groups were still publicly warning the company about it well into 2025, which tells you it stuck.
That's why Tractor Supply scores a 10 and not a zero: it remains a massive publicly traded retailer with a corporate-giving and HR footprint, and we don't hand out perfect not-woke scores to Fortune 300 companies on the strength of a single year. But on the merits of what it actually did, Tractor Supply is the clearest "go woke, get corrected, stay corrected" story in corporate America.
John Deere: The Half-Retreat
John Deere got the same Robby Starbuck treatment just weeks later, and its July 2024 response looked similar on the surface — but the fine print matters. Deere announced it would no longer sponsor "social or cultural awareness" events such as Pride parades, would audit all company training materials to strip out "socially motivated messages," and stated flatly that diversity quotas and pronoun identification "have never been and are not company policy," as reported by CBS News.
So far, so good. But then came the hedge. According to CNN, the very same statement confirmed Deere would continue to track and advance the diversity of its workforce. The company reshuffled its employee resource groups rather than abolishing them, repositioning them around "professional development" and recruitment. This is a partial retreat — a company trimming the most visible, most criticized programs while keeping the underlying diversity machinery running. The Human Rights Campaign noticed too: in September 2024 it docked John Deere's Corporate Equality Index score as part of a wave of companies pulling back, but Deere kept enough of a relationship with the HRC framework to register on our radar.
Add in Deere's political-contribution profile and a still-intact ESG reporting apparatus, and you get a 59. John Deere wants credit for responding to its customers while quietly preserving the parts of the agenda its base objected to. On our scale, a half-measure earns a half-measure score.
The Six-Criteria Breakdown
The contrast is sharpest when you line the two up criterion by criterion:
- ESG: Tractor Supply withdrew its carbon-emissions goals outright. John Deere kept its ESG reporting apparatus intact.
- DEI: Tractor Supply eliminated DEI roles and retired its goals. John Deere trimmed the branding but openly continues to "track and advance" workforce diversity.
- PRIDE: Both ended Pride-parade sponsorship — a rare point of agreement, and a real win driven by customer pressure.
- HRC CEI: Tractor Supply stopped submitting data entirely. John Deere stayed close enough to the HRC orbit to get publicly docked rather than vanish from it.
- Political contributions: Both maintain corporate PAC giving; neither rollback touched the checkbook.
- CEO Action for Diversity: Tractor Supply's housecleaning swept up its formal diversity-pledge posture; Deere's softer approach left more of its institutional commitments standing.
The Verdict
If your question is "which is less woke," the answer is unambiguous: Tractor Supply, by a mile. Faced with identical pressure, Tractor Supply executed the most complete corporate DEI rollback in America and has held the line ever since. John Deere blinked, gave its critics a few headlines, and kept the engine running underneath. A 10 versus a 59 isn't a photo finish — it's the difference between a company that changed course and a company that changed its press release.
For shoppers who want to skip the corporate weather-vaning altogether, there are farm-and-ranch suppliers that never had a DEI program to roll back. My Patriot Supply (woke score 1/100) covers emergency food, seeds, and preparedness gear, and Bowers Tool Co. (2/100) makes American tools without the politics. You can browse more vetted options on our non-woke Retail brands and Industrial Engineering brands pages. Spend where your values are already the policy — not where they became a policy only after a boycott.