“It’s your time or your money,” Kellogg told Harvest Public Media.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture expects net farm income to slip to $153.4 billion this year — a 2.6% decline once inflation is counted, with total cash receipts falling $14.2 billion. Also, the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ producer price index for agricultural machinery hit a record 331.1 in July, up about 37% from January 2020.
If you search John Deere’s top-end X9 combine on TractorHouse, you’ll find asking prices as high as $1 million. So it’s no surprise that farmers are holding off. Combine sales have fallen 56.1% in May from a year earlier, and tractor sales have dropped 21.6%, according to the Association of Equipment Manufacturers.
Kellogg would purchase newer machinery if his budget allowed, but it doesn’t. He told Harvest Public Media the farm’s operating money is finite, and some of it has to stay untouched in case there’s a problem with this year’s crop.
So his property is dotted with retired trucks, pulleys and tillage gear, and when a machine breaks he goes hunting through the pile. Parts from one manufacturer, he’s found, often fit another. He pointed to one machine he picked up at scrap value that handles the same work, he said, as a brand-new unit in the $40,000 to $50,000 range.
Old machines can still compete, up to a point
Until a few decades ago, every wave of new technology left the previous generation of tractors and combines behind, so farms tended to run newer iron, Drew Kientzy, an agriculture research analyst at the University of Missouri, told Harvest Public Media. That changed around the mid-90s, he said, when the basic layout of the machines stopped changing much. A combine from the 1970s may still do the job.
Retrofits help too. Kientzy said the ability to add modern technology to older machines is a big reason older equipment can hold its own. Those add-ons carry a price, though, and for some operations, the benefits may not justify the costs.
Donnie Edwards farms roughly 2,000 acres of row crops in Paducah, Kentucky. Putting computer systems across his combine, tractor and sprayer would cost another $100,000, he told Harvest Public Media, and he doesn’t see the extra revenue to justify it. Because he and his son also own a repair shop, fixing used equipment in-house is more practical for them than it would be for most farms.
That’s no small advantage in an industry where John Deere agreed in April to pay $99 million to settle claims it locked farmers out of fixing their own machines.
