For tech-weary Midwest farmers, 40-year-old tractors now a hot commodity

[Leroy N. Soetoro]

http://www.startribune.com/for-tech-weary-midwest-farmers-40-year-old-
tractors-now-a-hot-commodity/566737082/

Tractors built in 1980 or earlier cause bidding wars at auctions.

Kris Folland grows corn, wheat and soybeans and raises cattle on 2,000
acres near Halma in the northwest corner of Minnesota, so his operation is
far from small. But when he last bought a new tractor, he opted for an old
one — a 1979 John Deere 4440.

He retrofitted it with automatic steering guided by satellite, and he and
his kids can use the tractor to feed cows, plant fields and run a grain
auger. The best thing? The tractor cost $18,000, compared to upward of
$150,000 for a new tractor. And Folland doesn’t need a computer to repair
it.

“This is still a really good tractor,” said Folland, who owns two other
tractors built before 1982.

“They cost a fraction of the price, and then the operating costs are much
less because they’re so much easier to fix,” he said.

Tractors manufactured in the late 1970s and 1980s are some of the hottest
items in farm auctions across the Midwest these days — and it’s not
because they’re antiques.

Cost-conscious farmers are looking for bargains, and tractors from that
era are well-built and totally functional, and aren’t as complicated or
expensive to repair as more recent models that run on sophisticated
software.

“It’s a trend that’s been building. It’s been interesting in the last
couple years, which have been difficult for ag, to see the trend
accelerate,” said Greg Peterson, the founder of Machinery Pete, a farm
equipment data company in Rochester with a website and TV show.

“There’s an affinity factor if you grew up around these tractors, but it
goes way beyond that,” Peterson said. “These things, they’re basically
bulletproof. You can put 15,000 hours on it and if something breaks you
can just replace it.”

BigIron Auctions, a Nebraska-based dealer that auctioned 3,300 pieces of
farm equipment online in two days last month, sold 27 John Deere 4440
tractors through 2019.

The model, which Deere built between 1977 and 1982 at a factory in
Waterloo, Iowa, was the most popular of the company’s “Iron Horse” series
of tractors, which used stronger and heavier internal components to
support engines with greater horsepower. The tractors featured big, safe
cabins, advancing a design first seen in the 1960s that is now standard.

A sale of one of those tractors in good condition with low hours of use —
the tractors typically last for 12,000 to 15,000 hours — will start a
bidding war today. A 1980 John Deere 4440 with 2,147 hours on it sold for
$43,500 at a farm estate auction in Lake City in April. A 1979 John Deere
4640 with only 826 hours on it sold for $61,000 at an auction in Bingham
Lake in August.

“Those older tractors that had good care and good maintenance, that’s good
property,” said Mark Stock, co-founder of BigIron.

The tractors have enough horsepower to do anything most farmers need, and
even at a record price like the $61,000 the tractor in Bingham Lake
fetched, they’re a bargain compared to what a farmer would pay for a newer
tractor with similar horsepower.

The other big draw of the older tractors is their lack of complex
technology. Farmers prefer to fix what they can on the spot, or take it to
their mechanic and not have to spend tens of thousands of dollars.

“The newer machines, any time something breaks, you’ve got to have a
computer to fix it,” Stock said.

There are some good things about the software in newer machines, said
Peterson. The dealer will get a warning if something is about to break and
can contact the farmer ahead of time to nip the problem in the bud. But if
something does break, the farmer is powerless, stuck in the field waiting
for a service truck from the dealership to come out to their farm and
charge up to $150 per hour for labor.

“That goes against the pride of ownership, plus your lifetime of skills
you’ve built up being able to fix things,” Peterson said.

The cheaper repairs for an older tractor mean their life cycle can be
extended. A new motor or transmission may cost $10,000 to $15,000, and
then a tractor could be good for another 10 or 15 years.

Folland has two Versatile 875s manufactured in the early 1980s in Winnipeg
and bought a John Deere 4440 last year with 9,000 hours on it, expecting
to get another 5,000 hours out of it before he has to make a major repair.

“An expensive repair would be $15,000 to $20,000, but you’re still well
below the cost of buying a new tractor that’s $150,000 to $250,000. It’s
still a fraction of the cost,” Folland said. “That’s why these models are
so popular. They’ve stood the test of time, well built, easy to fix, and
it’s easy to get parts.”

He also said the modifications to newer diesel engines on tractors can
cause mechanical problems, and the carbon footprint of an older tractor
can be mitigated by using biodiesel, which is produced from soybeans grown
in Minnesota and extends the life of an engine because it includes better
lubricants than conventional diesel fuel.

Combine all that with nostalgia for the tractors of a farmer’s youth, and
30- or 40-year-old tractors are in high demand. That’s a shift from 30
years ago, Peterson said.

In 1989, 30-year-old tractors really were antiques. A 1959 tractor at that
point would have sold for $2,000 or $3,000 and looked like a different
species from the tractors in operation in the 1980s.

But tractors from the 1970s and 1980s aren’t so dramatically different
from tractors produced in the 2000s, other than the irksome software, and
at a time when farmers are struggling financially, older tractors can make
a lot of business sense.

Folland said his corn crop was better than the Minnesota average in 2019,
despite the fact that he farms on the Canadian border and uses 40-year-old
equipment.

“The main reason we do this is to make money,” Folland said. “Older
equipment is a way to reduce your cost per bushel to become more
profitable.”


--
No collusion - Special Counsel Robert Swan Mueller III, March 2019.

Donald J. Trump, 304 electoral votes to 227, defeated compulsive liar in
denial Hillary Rodham Clinton on December 19th, 2016. The clown car
parade of the democrat party ran out of gas and got run over by a Trump
truck.

Congratulations President Trump. Thank you for cleaning up the disaster
of the Obama presidency.

Under Barack Obama's leadership, the United States of America became the
The World According To Garp.

Obama sold out heterosexuals for Hollywood queer liberal democrat donors.

President Trump has boosted the economy, reduced illegal immigration,
appointed dozens of judges and created jobs.