Welcome to Moving Iron with Casey Seymour and Greg Peterson, the podcast for anyone and everyone involved and interested in the business of equipment. If you want to understand what trends and market forces are impacting the price of your iron, you've come to the right place. Buckle up, it's time to move some iron.
Hello and welcome to Moving Iron Podcast. This edition of the Moving Iron podcast is brought to you by John Deere. I've got Greg 'Machinery Pete' Peterson to talk about what's happening in the marketplace. Greg, how you doing today?
I am doing well, Casey. How about you?
Can't complain, man. I don't know what it's like up there. I'm in Kansas City today. It's like 82 degrees, so it feels like summer outside.
Eat some barbecue out on the deck or something.
Yeah, no kidding, right? Yeah, it's going to be a nice night to go sit outside somewhere and have dinner. It's a little windy though, I'll give you that.
Casey, do you regularly talk to weather folks on Moving Iron here?
Are they saying what is it? What's the warm pattern? Is that El Nino?
They're thinking that it'll be... So Sean Haka, that's on here a lot, he's a commodity guy, but he does weather modeling and those kind of things. And he's talking about El Nino coming in in like the fall, which would make it... it's a drier, if I remember right. I get all confused, but if I remember right, for Brazil it makes it dry and for the US it makes it wetter.
And then there's some other stuff that goes talks about like ocean temperatures and these different things. But anyway, we're headed to a path where we're supposed to have really good growing conditions this spring.
I've heard up here in Minnesota where we are, we're about eight or nine inches short on moisture on snow this winter, and I think February was about two degrees warmer than normal. So, starting to kind of worry a little bit about emerging drought, but hopefully maybe a little bit of a wetter pattern. Hopefully not right at planting time, but...
Well, we got to get to the summer first. That's the bad part before we start seeing anyway. And where I'm out in the panhandle, Nebraska, where I'm at, I think we got the first rain we've gotten probably... it feels like a year, if not a lot longer, because it's just... and we got a quarter of an inch.
Haven't had any snow. It's been really warm. So we're in a really bad spot. But if you look at the drought monitor, so is everybody else. So it's not really looking like a good year.
Mother nature, and not much... just like commodity markets, not much we can do about it, huh?
Not a lot you can do about it. No.
Plant and pray. That's all you can do.
That's all you can do. Well, Greg, let's talk a little bit about what's going on in the auction marketplace. You had a couple auctions that you followed over the weekend. Talk a little bit about what you saw there.
Yeah, super busy, Casey. You know, we've talked about how March is the busiest month on the calendar for auctions. There's regional consignments and online sales all over the place, plus there tend to be a lot of farmer retirements this time of year. And boy, what we've been seeing is really strong. I know we talked last week, we were highlighting some prices from a particular day, I think February 24th. As I monitored through the end of last week into early this week, again, very strong. So just a couple things that popped. I know again, pre-DEF anything is just... it's actually getting hotter.
Canning Auctions had a sale in Murphysboro, Illinois on Saturday, and they had a really sharp-looking '01 John Deere 9200 four-wheel drive. So you know, 25 years old, 3,260 hours. You're not going to find those every day. But from a hard cash auction standpoint, it brought 102,000 bucks, which I mean, you got to go all the way back to April of 2014 to find one sold that high. So you're talking 12 years.
And that same day last Saturday, again, if you back up a little, you know, older pre-DEF into the vintagey type thing, we had a couple sales that just blew the doors off. We had a 1086 International on a sale in Delhi, Iowa this past Saturday, March 7th, go for 385 with 4,504 hours on it. Same sale, an International 766, '73 model, the 414 motor went for 189. So again, no shortage of aggressive buyers for that type of equipment.
Two days before that, last Thursday, Strawberry Point, Iowa, my friend Joel Everett with Joel's Tractors and Auction, he had a sale and he set a record on a Ford 8730, you know, kind of an older one there. You don't see a ton of that. Brought 365.
And that sale also had an International 1568, the old V8, which back in the day you couldn't give them away for a nickel. But this '75 model, original hours, 4,510 original hours, went for 55,000, which is the third highest one I've ever seen. So on that end of the market, obviously that's folks with money, strong balance sheets. It's kind of why we're seeing land values, I think, for the most part, continue to be very strong.
A little bit later model equipment last Thursday, really nice auction out in kind of north central Ohio. It was Bloomville, Ohio. United Country Walton Realty and Auction had the sale. The farmer's name was Kenny Calb, and Kenny had a really nice '09 Case IH 7088 combine, 2,017 engine hours on it, came in at 825. Which if you go into machinerpete.com and punch up 7088s, what you're going to find is that's the all-time highest auction price on a 7088 with over 3,000 engine hours, and not by a little bit. Previous high was 70,250 bucks, and this was 825.
Kenny also had a Magnum 7240, '95 model. Super sharp, had been repainted, but the hours were original. 4,379 hours. That did 765, which I think was the third highest ever over 4,000 hours. So those were just a couple that were bouncing around last week, Casey.
And maybe one more I'll share out kind of out your way, out in Colorado. Schreider Real Estate Auction. They get around. I mean, they're out in Columbia City, Indiana, but Luke and those guys, they get out west, do a lot of land sales obviously. But they had a sale for Dunham Farms this past Thursday, March 5th, and they had a couple Massey Ferguson items. A WR 9980 swather, 57 hours on it, for 139.
And that's the fifth highest auction price ever on a WR 9980, but the highest that were over 850 hours. And then a large square baler, which we've talked a lot about over the years. Those can be kind of tough historically, but they had a Massey 2290, 19,978 bales through it, and that brought 119,000 bucks. That's the second highest hard cash auction ever. The only higher one I saw was a year ago out of... I think it was... I can't remember the town, but it was in New Mexico, probably like 128,900, a '23 model.
So yeah, last few days, good condition used stuff, same trend. The dollars are holding together pretty good.
Yeah. Well, yeah, you're seeing that same level of equipment in that price range there that you're looking at, where most times during these downturns like this, you see that stuff really heat up and it really takes off. And like we've talked about several times, that particular segment of equipment has been hot basically since October, and it's just getting hotter as each day passes.
So not much change on that front. If anything, the value of that stuff is actually starting to creep up a little bit. Be interesting to watch to see if you start seeing that kind of spill over into some of the other... some newer stuff, where you see... not like one- and two-year-old stuff, but some of that stuff maybe three- to five-year-old stuff, where you start... typically when that starts to get gobbled up, that three- to five-year-old stuff kind of falls into that next niche.
Yeah, now that I think about it, I mean, as we're recording this this afternoon, there were a bunch of sales closing. A couple of them did have very late model equipment. I think Merit Auctions had one for six dealers. I think it was Ziegler Ag, it was Greenway, it was AKRS, it was Red Power Team, a bunch of them. And I think they... I remember counting, I think they had eight '24 and '25 model tractors. A lot of loader tractors, so they'll probably do okay. But I'll be pumping those numbers into the website, machinerpete.com, here this afternoon, and yeah, real anxious to see how that comes out.
Yeah. Yeah.
So I'll be interested to watch how things go because you typically see that fluid. On the flip side of that too, though, you start looking at the amount of equipment that's available for sale right now. There's not a lot on a lot of it, right? And especially at the dealership lots and stuff like that, there's not as much stuff as there was a year ago even.
And if you start looking around, that equipment you see selling at the auction that's really bringing the chips right now, that's inventories on farmers' lots for the most cases. So you know, you're seeing some opportunity now for kind of what we talked about here, where the auction space is becoming more of a normalized selling path for some of the stuff, especially when we start looking at, you know, older than five-year-old equipment. I mean, we're seeing more of that stuff coming up for sale than we've seen in quite a while.
Interesting comment on a Facebook post a couple days ago. Just curious to get your take on it, Casey. But you know, we do a lot of auction promotions of Machinery Pete on social media. We work with about 1,500 auction companies. So it's real fun to help them get the word out on upcoming sales. And somebody chimed in on one of these posts and was like, 'Is it just me or does it feel like every farmer is selling the exact same thing?' And it kind of made me smile because as I'm typing in these promo posts, I don't know how many times I've typed John Deere 8235R or, you know, '20 model 88R, 280, same on the red side. But yeah, it is interesting.
You know, with the number of auctions up like it is, again, historically that would tend to create downward pressure on hard cash auction pricing. But the overriding factors, like we keep talking about, like you said, the overall volume is down due to lack of new sales the past few years. Farmers are watching their dollars closely, and it just seems to me like the focus is really squarely on the used right now. Just find what you want, need. You know, there's probably three other guys that want it, and who's going to blink first? And that's why we're seeing some of these auction prices holding up.
Yeah. Yeah. No, I responded to that comment on that post. I mean, that's... we talk about, you know, you talk about the auctions that you've seen over time, and I can tell you that it's a lot of stuff. You talk about the same stuff, a lot of the same models kind of keep showing up in that conversation, which shows you, you know, during that time frame how much machinery actually got put out in the marketplace. You know what I mean? And there's just a lot of those machines showed up, and a lot of different things showed up. And you know, you start looking at row crop tractors across the board, I don't care if... I mean, obviously John Deere's got the biggest amount of machine population out there, but you start looking at Deere and Case and all of them, as you start working your way through that, there's a lot of row crop tractors that got sold over the last five years, you know, and it's just... it's really piled up.
Right. I had another phone call. It was a guy we filmed with him two, three years ago. We were doing a commercial for Drago Cornheads, and we went up to Stillwater, Minnesota, which is right on the Wisconsin border, edge of the Twin Cities. A farmer up there, Donnie Anderson. Great guy. But he called me up yesterday and he said, 'Pete, I got a couple items I'm looking to sell.' So we talked. He had an MX 245 with like 1,500 hours on it, one owner, and then he had a planter, a '12 model, I think Case IH 1250, that he retrofitted.
So I told him, 'Donnie, hey, you don't have to worry that the items you're selling are kind of what people want: pre-DEF tractor, the planter that's been redone.' But he did say, you know, he's going to continue farming. He's just kind of downsizing. But he made the comment, 'Boy, I purchased a lot of equipment for tax purposes.' Which again, go follow us around the country anywhere and talk to farmers, a lot of that was behind a big piece of the decision.
And you've talked about it a lot, Casey, how you know farmers are smart, and they maybe even on the front end, if they're buying new equipment, wanting to have something that's got maximal marketing capabilities on the back side. So you want to have that 8235R, Magnum 290, whatever, something that in your area is going to be like, 'Oh yeah, we like that.' So it's interesting as we cover auctions all over the US and Canada to see, you know, these values. And boy, right now again, if it's in good condition, because the focus is on used, that's why we're seeing these strong prices, whether it's from Arkansas or out in Colorado like you said last Thursday. You know, it's all about condition right now.
Yep. Yep. And you know what's driving that more than anything is what it costs to update your equipment, right? And just like you just talked about too. It's like there's... if you were in a... there's... I think there's a lot of guys out there that are looking at their fleet going like, you know what, if I just... I've got 5,000 hours on something now and I don't feel comfortable with 5,000 hours, they might go buy the exact same model tractor, year and everything, just got 3,000 hours on it now. You know what I mean? Or 1,500 hours on it or something like that that they can, you know, keep working along with, right?
So I think just some of that, and then also too, when you start looking at most of the conversations that we've had on here have all kind of evolved around downsizing the amount of equipment they have on the farm, right? Some of that might be forced, some of that might be we did it for a long time with four and we've got six tractors. I think we can probably get back to four, you know. I mean, there's some of that going on.
So I think right now it's just we're at a point in time where the idea of what I'm going to do with a piece of equipment when it comes to the farm is totally different than... just that kind of step back and take a big picture view of what do I really need on the farm right now? And you're seeing some folks say we don't need this much stuff, and they're downsizing that stuff when they can. So it's changing the way people are thinking about stuff for sure.
And I do know another form of anecdotal evidence. It was interesting, Casey, just a couple days ago, I was talking to a friend of mine who buys and sells equipment, and he was saying he was listening to an online auction from a number of states away and getting ready to bid on stuff. But as they were coming up to the tractor he was after, he heard the auctioneer referencing our conversation on Moving Iron here about inventory and how it's thinning out at the top side. And in a weird way, it was sort of like the auctioneer was trying to convince farmers on the ground like, 'Hey, you know, this inventory situation is changing.' And I thought, you know, one very smart auctioneer. I'm glad he's paying attention to what we're yacking about.
But no, and I think farmers are starting to realize it too. And you know, the proof's in the pudding when we start to see these, again, good condition used equipment, wherever it comes from. You know, these solid auction prices, they just are what they are. And again, I think it's structurally tied to what you've noted, that there just aren't as many one- and two-, three-year-old items at the top end of the used chain. And as farmers watch their dollars, they're, like you said, in many cases maybe want that whatever that, you know, that '15 model that they had. 'Oh, here's one with lower hours. Cool, I can get in on that.' And it's, yeah, it's a competitive market right now.
Yeah. So you guys will be able to hear this conversation here if you listen to the podcast with Aaron Finnel here coming up. He was talking about... he referenced today, we were talking about some combine stuff, where the amount of upgrade technology they were adding that they were selling for combines, which kind of points to... we talked about this for a while, but kind of starting to point to, you know, 'I all I need this, I want this gadget that's associated with this model, but I can get that gadget now and put it on the model that I have. I don't necessarily have to upgrade my entire box to get the one thing that I'm looking for,' right?
You know, I think that's going to change some of the buying habits at auctions too. Like, what if I get this machine, what will I be able to do to it down the road? And I think that thought process, I think, is starting to creep into the mindset of some folks when you start looking at, you know, I mean, hell, you've been able to do that with planters for a long time. I mean, especially with, you know, Deere having their upgrade kit, complete row unit upgrade kit like they've got, and then what Precision came out with with their Cornerstone system, that's a complete row unit. That kind of changes the game a little bit on, you know...
Really does. Aaron and I used to talk about them calling them Precision donors, you know, because they were, you know, some $50,000 planter somewhere that you're just buying because it's cheap. All you're really looking for is what components does it have and what can I do with it? And I think you're going to start seeing some of that stuff on some of these machines.
You know, when you start talking about the idea of autonomous, the autonomous farm, that used to be way off. You know, 2030 sounded like it was a long ways away. Well, it's only four years away. You know what I mean? So when you start thinking about that, you know, on like I think it's a 2020 and newer that you can... on John Deere you can make it autonomous. You know, Case is going to have a cutoff on theirs and AGCO will have a cutoff on theirs, those kind of things, which that opens the door up to, you know, entrepreneurial-minded people. They're going to come and say, 'Well, I'm going to build an autonomous kit that's universal,' you know, and we'll start putting it on some older machines out there and start making those things work.
So that idea of what can I do with a piece of equipment that I've got is, I think, going to start really creeping into the thing. Which if you start thinking about the amount of equipment that's on the marketplace right now, and I'm not saying this is going to switch overnight or anything like that, but when you start really weighing into that, do I need to go get a complete box or do I just need to get part of what I want and put on the box that I already have? Which is going to change the dynamics for used equipment as a whole in marketplaces. Then you really start opening up Pandora's box of, well, it might feel like there's not enough stuff out there, but it may be too much stuff because of how people are thinking about what they're doing.
And you know, is there some... what's that... obsolescence, right? So how the term obsolescence starts to creep into the conversation too, because you know, I got a box full of iPhones at home that I can't use because they're so... you know, I can't upgrade them, you know, I can't update them, can't do anything with them. And I think...
Yeah, I think you may have just hit the word of 2026, whether you say update or, you know, retrofit, but I think that's make what you have a little more powerful. That fits the mindset.
And you're right, we've seen with planters forever. And in fact, when I took my call from my friend Donnie up in Stillwater who was trying to sell his like 2012 Case 1250 retrofit planter, that does bring up the point when you have an item that you have updated and like what would you say you and Aaron call them? The...
Precision donors. Right. Well, I just keep score on what that stuff brings, right.
Right. And I see smart people will say, you know, 'I spent 375 at whatever Scott Implement or whatever on this thing,' and they'll say when they did it. But I think we need to get more as specific as you can be with that stuff.
And what my advice to Donnie was, and we've talked about it a lot here, but I said, 'Donnie, what you really got to do...' and he wanted to sell this thing privately, so I said, '50 bucks, you know, you can put it in machinerpete.com, click the button, it's in there.' But then I said, 'Take your cell phone and make sure the whole planter, you can see it, but just talk to me. But then just, I mean, tell me, walk me through everything you did on that planter.' To why and with who. Yeah.
And that's the three-dimensional part of hearing Donnie as a farmer talk that retrofit out to try and unlock, because like you or you and Aaron chuckling about it, but you're right. You know, all that money you spent, a lot of times I think on a resale situation, whether at auction or private, people think, 'Oh, I should recoup all of that.'
Now, you can think that, but it doesn't work that way. But that's why go the extra mile, or if it's, you know, whatever it is that you retrofit.
And I did have to smile, Casey, on this topic of retrofit or updating. I was doing an interview a couple weeks ago with a national sales manager with Remlinger out in, gosh, trying to remember the town in Ohio, but they go back like 60-plus years, and of course tillage, right? So, but they would sell... they were doing these basically putting a three-bar or four-bar drag on the back of some tillage tool. And as we were interviewing, it just hit me. It's like, 'Oh, you guys were retrofitting before anyone was saying retrofit,' right?
And to me, that's just... there's a reason they're still around at 60-plus years, because you're listening to your customer, right? So, 'We sold you this tool, or someone else sold it to you. How can I make this better?' And whether that's putting a little roller on it or putting a three-bar spike or whatever.
But that's farmer mindset right now. So, you know, we've seen the manufacturers at the top level, they've been aware of this and they're getting much better at it, coming out with better tools for farmers to update. So, yeah, I think the rest of '26, that's going to be where it's at.
Yep. The one thing that's still up in the air with this whole upgrade or retrofit, you know, whatever you're calling it, if I go through and I do an upgrade kit on my 2015 bar, right, and I put 2025 row units on it, what do I have? Do I have a 2025 planter? Do I have a 2015-ish? You know, take them, average the years together and then whatever year you got, you know, it's hard. It's going to be interesting to watch how that plays out.
Right now I think it's still, you know, if you go look at, hey, this one's never been upgraded and it's a 2025 model, and this one has never been upgraded and it's a 2015 model, but then you got this one in the middle that's got 2025 parts and 2015 parts. Like, what do you have? Right. And that's going to be interesting to watch how that plays out.
And what we're seeing right now is, at least what I'm seeing right now, and then it's maybe starting to change a little bit, but you have kind of three different prices, right? You've got, you know, it's not a '15, it's not a '25, it's something in the middle. And what's that look like? I used to always value those things when they'd come in. When you start looking at stuff like that, I valued it as it was five years old. And that's how I looked at it because that kind of offset the bar and kind of did some other things.
And we'd have some pretty good debates over beers with other used equipment guys. You know, when we were talking about that, you know, you said, 'I don't think... I think it's one... I think it's three years old.' 'No, I think it's seven.' You know, we're trying to figure... So that's so up in the air right now that keeping track of what's going on with those prices is... I mean, that's going to ultimately determine what the market looks like.
Well, what you just said, that describes what I'm seeing on the auction market right now. And so when we talk, you know, maybe semi-authoritatively like, 'Wow, good used pre-DEF tractors, they're going up,' no doubt about it, or solidifying at the three- to five-year-old range. But planters is the one sector... Of course, we track auction prices on everything. That's the one that's hardest for me. When people say, 'Hey, Machinery Pete, what's happening with used planters?' It's like, well, we got to talk about what are we... you know, just like you said, what are we talking here? Is it a '25 loaded?
Is it an eight-year-old loaded, or is it an eight-year-old one that was like semi-retro? That's not what I want.
So, as the auction prices pour in, it's really hard for me to draw a general statement and go like, 'This is it with planters.' The closest I can get would be to say when it's that five- to ten-year-old rig that's been just decked for that area where most of the local farmers will go, 'Yep,' then when they show up at auction, they do the best. But it's really hard.
That's why that was my advice to Donnie is when you have a listing, whether it's an auction or a dealer listing or a private item, you can't just let it lay there and say, 'Well, they updated it three years ago.' No, you got to walk me through this, right? And you just... you gotta... and when you do that, then can you, in essence, what you described, can you make the potential buyer go from thinking, 'Well, this is the equivalent of a seven-year-old,' well, yeah, he said, 'Well, maybe it's a four-year-old.' Well, now you just raised it X amount of dollars, right? You can't blow smoke, but...
Right. This is the tricky part because farmers and even frankly dealers don't... they're just busy and they're not in the habit of saying, 'My thing I'm selling is awesome.' It's not who they are. But if you don't say it, then the assumption is going to be, 'Well, it's not quite what I want. Keep scrolling.'
So you got to make them stop and then say, you know, 'Here's what I did. Here's what I spent. Here's how I did it. Here's how it ran for me the last year or two,' to pull them in and go, 'Yeah, that is what I want, need, and I'll pay for it.'
Yeah, for sure. Yep. And that's when you go through that process of what you did to update stuff and bring it up to the latest technology or really close to it, right? It's... you spent a lot of money doing that, right? And there needs to be some return to that, and that return is as good as your definition of what you did and why, you know, right, what you were able to achieve by doing that. So yeah.
That's one thing. Another example I would give. So people have maybe seen I've been posting about this company out of Kansas called Quality Drills, and they go all over the US and Canada, and free of charge they just inspect your planter, your air drill, and they make... you know, they're kind of Switzerland, right? They carry all these components, and then they would say, 'Well, here's our professional opinion.'
Now, I'm going out to Kansas to film a special episode of our TV show with them this week because I'm so intrigued about their process, how and why they do it. But if you flip that now, let's say you're the farmer and you have, whether it's your local dealer or an outfit like Quality Drills come and expertly assess your planting rig annual basis or every other. What I'm interested in is the experience those farmers have when they trade that or sell that rig two, three years down the road because they've done this every year and kept up like that.
My point with these folks and what I tell Quality Drills is you got to tell your customers that when it comes to trade or selling, they need to pull that to the front of the listing and say, 'We've had Quality Drills come to our farm in the last four years.' And then people go, 'Oh, Quality Drills.' They go watch one of their videos and they go, 'Oh my god, quality. Wow, I like what they're doing.' So you've invested in that in your planting tool right along, and it should be, and it is worth more money if you find the way to tell the story on it.
And again, if you don't do that, you're just leaving dollars on the table.
For sure. For sure. You know, you said that for years, man. You got to tell a story and really, you know, make it as personal as possible. So, and it works when you do it like that. It makes a big difference. So, makes a big, big difference.
All right, Greg, good place to stop. If folks want to get you to come out to an auction or get you to come speak at an event or something like that, you go to machinerpete.com or check you out on your social pages.
Yep, you got it. Hey, I'll go to Texas. I'll go anywhere. Just give me a call. We'll be out on the road heading to Ohio next week. We're going to Kansas and then out in California the following week. So got some good miles coming up. So, but yeah, give me a call.
Right on. Well, Greg, I appreciate you being on the podcast. We'll catch you again next week.
All right. Have a good week, Casey.
All right, man. Stay tuned for more Moving Iron podcasts after these messages.
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All right, welcome back to Moving Iron Podcast. Got Alex Sneller with New Leader here to talk about what's going on with the new product they have coming out here, the NL7 dry box. So, Alex, good to have you on, man.
All right, perfect. Like you said, my name is Alex Sneller. I'm the regional sales manager for New Leader Manufacturing. I'm standing in front of the NL7. We released this just a couple years ago. The reason we brought this out is we wanted a high-precision, high-output, wide-width machine. So this machine can now do 120-foot wide through a lot of our core products, our nitrogens or salt, AMS, phosphorus, potash, that...
Okay. Now, when I was here yesterday, we were talking through this a little bit, and you have the opportunity to have multiple products in there at the same time. Correct.
Yep. So as this one sits, this is a single bin. We do have the 720s out, and that is a true twin bin. So you guys can variable rate two products at one time. The other thing that we can variable rate is from left to right because we've had these two conveyors now.
So one side can be doing a completely different rate from the other side.
Okay. So if you're like up against the fence or something like that, or you need to...
Yep. So if we're up against the fence row, we can turn on boundary control. And what happens is we shorten the one side of fertilizer up to keep more fertilizer inside that field and not throwing it in the ditch or into your neighbors. We'll move the machine over a little bit to cover that up, and then continue around the outside, and then we'll turn that off, and then we'll start doing our back and forth filling the rest of the area.
Okay. So walk me through the conveyor real quick. Let's get a little shot of the conveyor here real quick.
So what you see here is a single-piece conveyor belt. There is no splices anymore. This is a true one-piece belt. Now it is a straight belt. That way we can deliver the smoothest delivery of fertilizer possible. You can see the chevron pattern on there to positively engage the fertilizer so we don't have the fertilizer roll. You can see the lasagna pieces on the outside, and that keeps fertilizer on the conveyor so we don't have that carry back to the front of the machine like we used to.
That conveyor is also positively driven, so there's no slip on the belts like we used to with some of the older machines. Because it's also positively driven, we don't have to track that belt left and right anymore. Try to take out as much maintenance out of the machine as possible.
Okay. So if I have an old New Leader box now, and let's say I'm ready to look to upgrade what I'm doing, what are some of the benefits I'm going to gain by this machine versus what I currently have?
So the huge difference is the throughput on this machine. If we increased your width by 25 or 33%, we didn't want to necessarily slow you down by that same amount. So we increased this so you guys can carry the rates that you're used to at the speed you want to. Some of our competitors when they do that, they have to restrict the speeds a little bit. We want to make sure that you can stay at that field speed that you guys are running, that 15, 18, 20, 25 mph.
At that high width of 120 foot, at that high rates we want to carry.
All right. So talk a little bit about the construction, the material of the box. Like what's the longevity here? What are you looking at?
So the entire box is made out of stainless steel. We don't have anything painted on this. Every nut, bolt, everything on this is, including the bearings. The bearings are now stainless steel sealed bearings. So which then means we can remove all the grease. So there's no greasing of any bearings.
There's no belt over chain anymore. It's a straight belt, so we don't have to oil that belt over chain like we used to.
Well, Alex, appreciate you taking the time to talk with me here. We'll catch you again next time.
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All right. All right. Welcome back to Moving Iron Podcast. Got Rich Pos on to talk about what's happening in the world of economics. Rich, how you doing today?
Doing good, man. We took forever for us to figure out what we're going to talk about today. We racked our brains. Well, I tell you what, the price of oil sure shot up. We take a look at what's going on in the Middle East right now with the Iranian conflict that we're in right now. And the price of oil went from, man, you could get it to do anything, to now it's 120 bucks. And it did that in about three days, seemed like. So I guess... big, big scenario. Rich, a lot of things moving. Before we get into that though, talk a little bit about your podcast and what people can find there.
Yes. Go to criticalpoint.com. You'll find some free things. You have to scroll down quite a ways to find them. There's a blog section where I put out a free newsletter once a month, which I'll probably write later this week. But sign up because it's a 60-day free trial. Nobody really gives you that. You're normally two weeks, four weeks, and I used to be two, four weeks. I said, 'What the heck? I'll give them two months because I have a pretty good track record of people staying with it for a long time.' And I said, I want them to really get a good feel for it and then stay with me.
18 bucks a month on the stock market, the economy, gold, oil, Bitcoin. A lot of information there, a lot of different markets, but the focus is primarily economy and stock market. Then I think it's about 13 bucks or something like that for the three grains, and then you can get a combined service where you get all of it in one package. And email me at
[email protected] or
[email protected], and I'll answer your questions, give me some ideas, we'll toss them around.
But basically my service provides a morning brief that can be five minutes to sometimes 30 if we're having an emergency situation, alert situation. And I cover anything from very short-term to very long-term. So if people are interested in long-term, they may want to just look at the Thursday weekly update and take a look at that. I try to give a snapshot at the beginning. So if not a lot has changed, you don't have to spend your time listening through the whole thing.
Because when you get involved in this news these days, you can talk for hours on the news, you know. But most people, if they know their analyst knows that the analyst is looking at that news, then really all they want from the analyst is: do we buy this thing, do we sell this thing, what can go wrong, what can go right, and that's it. That's all they want to know. So I try to put that snapshot at the beginning. I'm getting good feedback on that. A lot of analysts talk too long, and they said they like that five-minute snapshot, get it over and done with, they can go back to work. Whereas, yeah, if it is a crazy time, then they'll sit and listen to the whole spiel.
And I do put out some separate free videos on just the news and information, but obviously I have to save my signals and alerts for paid members. So...
Right on. Okay. So did you put out a 30-minute one this morning about oil? Because it seemed like that'd be pretty much emergency to be...
Quite a bit of oil. Quite a bit of oil in the stock market stuff, even in the economy. Oil market days before Trump went in, I said, 'Gosh, I think he's coming in on this next weekend.' And I said, 'You know, we better prepare for 75 to 85 dollar oil.' And it was down to 60s then. And I said, 'We can come up with higher targets than that. Who knows how high it'll really go.' So he goes in, immediately went to my 78 dollar target. I was so pleased, just bam, right there, backed off, and then changed his mind, went on up towards the 85 dollar oil.
But this over the weekend, yeah, they slammed it to over 120. It's already backed off quite a bit today. I think what you're going to see in oil is when you get these straight-up gigantic moves in commodities, they spend a long time going down. And I think that's going to happen in oil. They might for the first one-third drop do it quickly, but I think over time they're just going to take their time dropping it, and it could just take quite a while.
And the problem with that, Casey, is that provides more time for the inflation to go higher, more time to impact the economy. So even if oil's going down, we've got months to come of more issues for the economy, the stock market, paying more at the store, at the gas pump. This is a shock wave, but there's far more coming that's going to impact us for months on end. This whole year is probably screwed now, frankly. Okay. We've got issues here.
Now, Bloomberg last week had an article that if oil goes to 108 dollars, they thought the US economy would go minus 0.5%. So that means the economy is falling backwards. It's contracting. That's also a risk level of better start thinking about recession. I think that same writer said England would probably take about the same hit. So we've been at 120 dollar oil this morning. So you know, we have to start thinking and go for a recession.
Well, last week I put out a couple of free podcasts and then some locked ones on what's going on with some of these economic indicators. And I said, you know, for months, a year now, I've been forecasting higher inflation late this year on into the next, higher interest rates. Now that looks more likely. Still question how high we're going to go, but it's on the table. Okay.
Now, the next thing though is some of the PMIs, which are used to predict where GDP, where the economy is going. We did some things recently, not so good, Casey. Last summer, I think I spoke of this probably in the July-August podcast with you. I went on a trip in late July for four states. It was a bit of a cave vacation, but I had goals of inspecting certain types of businesses.
And what I came up with is business was not looking good. The economy was looking... I got back in the office, I said, 'I think we got a problem.' Well, even today, we can look backwards and see the economy probably peaked for those PMIs in July, about the time I was waking up. Things aren't good.
What this means, Trump had the shortest economic expansion for only one type of business cycle. It's not the biggest, it's not the most important, but for that type, the shortest economic expansion of any president of the United States. The economy grew for three months over. Economy has been dwindling since then. Now, if you look at GDP though, it's been mostly stable, but we're now down to 2.3. It's starting to slip.
So lots of times this is a process of how we develop and create this stuff. So even when I saw that bad data last year, I wasn't convinced we were going to crash and burn, but it allowed me to do some digging. What I found is that the once-a-decade buy-sell signal, and as you're aware, for years we've talked about the economy peaking in 2028 to 2031, bear market, recession, bad times. But what I've learned is those patterns can top a year. They top out about eight years, maybe nine, when normally we want nine to 13 for the best economy.
I looked into that eight-year, and we're getting there. It's this year or next year, depending on how you calculate. In that eighth year, some of these smaller patterns simply just broke. The model broke. And it wasn't shocking news right away. You could miss it easily. So I've been warning under Trump, something can go wrong where we're going to get like what occurred under George W. Bush. That was the financial crisis that came in too soon.
And I found in the 1800s, three occurrences that it came in too soon. It was a broken thing. What if it breaks? Well, that bad period of 2028 to 2031 shows up in 26-27, minus 35 to minus 60% down in the stock market, a recession. It's only 20% probability when you look at...
At history. When I put in Trump and do the forecasting, it may be up to 40% probability now. And this morning, one of my favorite analysts out on Wall Street was quoted headline news in Bloomberg. He'd been gung-ho bull even with this war starting. He's flipped the other way saying we might want to consider as much as 35% down. I thought, h, that's one of my targets if it's going to happen. I don't think either one of us know. Will it really occur this time, you know? But let's face it, eventually the Fed may lower interest rates, continue to print the money. Wars, the new chairman coming in in May, he's against printing money. He'd like to cut back on money, but said he would help out by lowering interest rates more than what Chairman Powell did or the Fed has done.
Hold on, hold on, hold on. Hold on. How's that possible? How can you lower interest rates without printing money?
It's how they control their money related to the banks. They can buy and sell things and shift money around to different accounts. And they can also just establish saying this is going to be the rate for us and therefore for you. Now the free market can reject that right the moment. You can bet the Trump people and maybe even the Federal Reserve don't want necessarily higher interest rates. Free market's already put interest rates up on this war, right? So the free market can reject this. This can make it tough on Wars when he comes in. He may learn he might lower interest rates. Maybe the free market will drag its feet. It's only so far it can go, but it might actually make that more difficult. So what I'm concerned...
Robbing Peter to pay Paul is an actual economic...
That is definitely a part of all economic systems, right?
You're on the right track.
So, this is going to be hard on the Fed. Of course, they always have a tough job no matter who's in and war. He's been beating up on all the old former feds. He's going to find out. Oops. This isn't going to be an easy job that he would like. So, everything's on the table here. And I've been skeptical of a higher stock market this year, even though the stock market model wanted to do that. And now even a model saying, gee whiz, there may not be any real profits this year. I already told my members the last few days if we want to buy this big pullback here in the stock market, we better wait towards the end of March to early April and re-evaluate. And even if we buy it, we might want to be ready to sell it in summer. There's just a lot of things that go wrong. And some of that PMI indicators, this is what I just told you about Trump having the shortest economic expansion that modeling is forecasting those PMIs in GDP not to do well into next year. That's a pretty lengthy period of time. That opens the door for a recession, but by itself, it does not guarantee a recession. And if we can print enough money, lower the interest rate, calm people down. And if you look at these wars, normally Americans seem to have a short memory on wars. Look at Ukraine. Well, we were all upset the first year, second year less, third year less. Now hardly anybody talks about Ukraine, which is very, very sad because we were supposed to by law, by the rules we set with Ukraine, the deals we made, we were supposed to protect them. Never really did. We gave them stuff, but we should have had troops in there in my opinion. Didn't do it. Okay. But it's fascinating how the markets got over Ukraine the very first year, right? They're going to get over the Middle East, too. So, this war can last all year long going into next year. And believe it or not, stock market can go up, economy can do better, but in the next month or two, we better be nervous of a slippery market here. Things can go wrong. And we better be nervous long term. We're paying more at the store, at the pump. We're going to have higher inflation. Even if they pump the money and can prove the economy is actually getting better, with the higher inflation, I think you and I are going to say, "We're not better. What are you talking about?" You know, these government tell me they keep telling me that I'm better and I don't feel like you...
...we're not, Casey, we're not better. But they tell us that, but we're not better except for the rich. Rich are doing well, but even some of those are complaining and worried. By the way, I know this is very, very long term, but I've done more stuff, I can't let this go. I put out a free podcast last week, part one. I think it came out first part of the week. I might have to change something on my website. I might have already scrolled off, but you can find it at LinkedIn under my name, Richard Pawson. Part one on the civilization cycle, the destruction of the US, but the rebirth. I've had members and family members telling me, I got to keep talking, stop talking about the countries dying because people don't listen to that stuff anymore. And so I'm trying to my next podcast, in other words, part number two, it's going to be more optimistic. It's the rebirth of the US in the next 20 years. Okay? But right today, I don't care what anybody says. We're dying as a nation here. Slow death, fast death, who knows? But from the year 1800 to 1970s, the middle class grew from 6% of the population to 70% of the population. The best part of that growth was World War II till 70s. Why? Because we had labor unions. We took care of the middle class. We didn't take... So and the rich did fine. People say, you know, the rich tell you, oh, it was horrible time back then. It wasn't. The rich did fine. All right. 1980s, we switched gears to a trickle down economic system, all the financialization, all the bad stuff you read about, the inequality. The rich got richer. And guess what? From 1980s to now, the population of the middle class has declined. Now, some of those got richer, some of those got poor. Okay. Now, guess what? The portion of the economy that the middle class was able to extract earn was also about 6% in 1800, went up to about 60% in 1970s. It's dropped off. And last night or a few days ago I tested this on AI to see if I'm on the right track. AI came back saying that drop in earnings or portion of the income was more severe than the drop in the population. But we were taking a hit on both sides and it's declined from 1980s to now. So that gives us this K economy with the rich going up like that, middle class, the poor going down. So a lot of this stuff we read day after day of the inequality, I'm finding even more evidence they're right. Okay. Now I will admit in the 1980s, 90s, the middle class poor were actually optimistic and were on board with President Reagan and all those things and they were assuming, yeah, let the rich get richer, it's good for us and that opens the door for us to get rich. And it's amazing, you look at consumer sentiment just went up like this, okay, like that all the way to President Clinton who was nothing but another Republican. He bought into all that stuff, globalization, do it all. Okay. And he had one of the best stock markets. It worked great for him, but it also stopped him. Consumer sentiment has declined from 2020s down to 2000s to now. That's meaning we went from happy to unhappy and now unhappier. Now under Obama the second term, the sentiment blipped up a bit. Then it came down again. And when you look at Trump came in, the sentiment stopped going up. Immediately he walked into office, it was over and done with. Americans started turning pessimistic. Then Biden come in, we got a blip up, but not as good as Obama. And then it just come down again under Trump again. It's down at the bottom. I call it the gutter. Okay. We're not good. All right. Now, why did that take place? We were optimistic 80s, 90s. That's because we were developing this 1980s to now thing. We're developing this get-rich thing, printing money like crazy. But in the 2000s and now the middle class and poor woke up saying, "This is not working for me. It's not working for us." And they tried their best to go along with it. Don't bother the rich. But slowly they're getting to the point, you know, I don't care about the rich anymore. And we're even seeing right-wingers saying, you know, tax them. All right. The thing the country is changing. So we're ending the 1980s to now. We're ending the 1930s, 40s to now, which the story behind that was the US became the leader of the world. But now Trump wants us as a different kind of leader. And so we're destroying that. He's telling people we're not going to be the leader of the world when really he's trying to make sure the US somehow pulls that off and it's a different kind of leadership and we still lead the world anyways. I don't get it. They can't seem to explain it. They don't have a plan for the future. I'm scared it's not going to work. And I think after this Iran war, more and more people say, "Where are we going here? What the heck are we doing?" So all of this history, even back to 1790s, it's ending. But here's my optimistic side. Next 20 years, the Gen Zers and the millennials are going to turn this country around. Some Gen Xers, they're already starting to flip politically. Some baby boomers will help turn that around. There is a future for us yet. It's rebirth. The country won't destroy itself. Every 200, 250 years, almost every country, every civilization tends to go through this and try to destroy itself most of the time for no good reason. It's just something we have to do, okay? We can't stand peace or prosperity. We get bored. We don't like how things are running. So, we wreck it and then we rebuild as something new. So, I'm optimistic next 20 years, we've got a lot of work to do. It's really going to be the people about 40 or 60 years from now going to truly benefit from this big change. But we got to get to work. We need to put an end to this. And somebody pointed out the Gen Zers and millennials, they're 60% of the population. That should make them the powerhouse of driving economy, but they're not there quite yet because they really don't earn as much as the other 40%.
Well, that's a good point, Rich, because you think about looking from the economic standpoint where that Gen Zer, millennials, all those people are coming into play. They're just now getting into the workforce like they're either mid-career or coming out of college type thing.
So, they're working their way through it. The issue right now is this, and the guy one time put it to me like this. The reason that you have the farming population the way it is where you've still got the 85 or 90 year old patriarch matriarch of the family still running the thing is because we have hip replacements and knee replacements, right? Because you go get a new knee and you're back in the game, right? You go get a new hip, you're back in the game. You might slow down a little bit, but you're back in the game.
And that's why you have a 75 year old Prince Charles type of approach to life, right? You know, you got this...
...you got this generation in the middle is kind of lost, right?
Where the boomers are still controlling all the money and that's we're still seeing that where you've got this next generation that should be taking over is not going to take over because by the time they get ready to take over, they're going to be like, "I'm 80 years old. I don't want to do this. I'm 75 years. I'm going to retire. I'm done. I've been beat down my entire life by the previous generation. Let the grandkids come in and do it." Right. And that's where I think you make a really good point when you start looking at that the whole idea behind where we're at. We have such a divide in economic thought process. You know, you've got the boomer generation that's really doing things that they've always done forever, you know, and that's they're kind of this is how it's always been done, so we're going to do it that way. The generation after them doesn't really have a shot at really taking the reins. And then you got this grandkid generation that's coming in, the Gen Zers, millennials, whatever they are, you know, all people that are in there.
Well, they're going to come take it over and this is going to be 180 degree difference in how they view things compared to what the current status quo.
That's right. You're skipping a whole generation in the middle and it fills up. Generation one and two. Generation one was the 30s, 40s to about the 80s. Generation one and two, they're different from generation three and four. That was the 80s to now. Now, generation one and two is coming back in and they're different from generation three and four. So yeah, I'm glad you shared that what you're seeing on your end because that's good analogies, good assessments of how this generation works. So I'm actually very excited even though I have my days where I go outside and I think, "Oh my gosh, what is this country doing?"
I'm right there with you, dude.
Yeah. So, let's talk a little bit one thing real quick. Let's talk about this. I've been reading a lot that there's a lot of beyond before all of this Iran war and the oil price and recession, those kind of things. There is a big, you know, I watch Bloomberg every morning when I'm working out in my gym. There's a lot of concern around an AI bubble that could be very hearkening back to like, you know, the dot-com bubble or maybe even the housing bubble a little bit that it's so inflated and so big and there's everyone's got an AI this that the other thing that they're worried about that popping what it could do to the overall economy and really drag things down pretty quickly. What's your assessment on the AI system? We should be worried over that.
I realize if you look at the history of this country or any country, you get these moments of you have a big technological thing, you wipe out a bunch of jobs, but it's fascinating if you have the capital and can make it work. You invent a new industry, the new technology, you hire those people. This one's coming at us too fast. And we did, what's the guy that he started Twitter and then he created the block company. He just announced last week laying off 4,000. He's laying off half employees. And he says it's all because of AI. You know, this is, there's more and more of this coming. I can't tell you if it's really is the bubble truly bursting now or are we deflating it and we get another boom in a few years. But the point is you need to layer that on top of the private credit that's now starting to blow up. I have people that called me over the weekend. They're invested in the block company and their funds. Well, the block company stock is tanking because one of their funds or two of their funds, people said, "We want our money." They were told, "You can't have your money. You got to wait in line." People don't like to hear that. That creates the old-fashioned bank run, right? And so, this private credit is not a good thing. And if you don't know what private credit is, even I'm still learning about it. It's just rich people loaning money to other people. They're not real banks. They're not regulated, but they act like banks and they're not regulated. And they are tied in to borrowing money and doing deals with regular banks. I think even the Federal Reserve is concerned right now. Will it drag down the other banking system? So keep an eye on that because fires are popping up around the world. US and England are the worst right now. That can be another blowout move along with this AI. Now in AI, if you look at Nvidia stock, they're making the mechanics for this AI. They're the machine builder. They have the chips. Their stock's not doing too bad. It's almost like the old IBM stock I grew up when I was a kid of if you were scared of the stock market, put your money in IBM and the bank and that's it. Nvidia is holding up quite well. I'm shocked really. But the rest of the AI group is shaky ground. Some of the software stocks down 30, 40% taking a beating. Some of those also were borrowing money for private credit which tells me they couldn't get the credit at the bank very well. So, it makes me nervous. Those companies never were really that good to begin with. This sounds some similar, but nowhere near the same as the dot blowout in the 1990s. And I remember that my wife was into merger and acquisitions in the stock market and I can remember her come home one night and she just says, "I'll be surprised if everything just doesn't go right into the plot. You know, we're going out." She says, "These companies are buying companies just to make themselves look good, and there's no profits. They're just burning through money." And then lo and behold, I started looking at my stock chart. I said, "Yeah, I think we better protect ourselves a little bit here." And then we had the 2000 to 2002 recession and the dot blowout and it was massive on the NASDAQ stock index down 85%. Now, the rest of the economy and stock market was only down 35%. So that wasn't that was normal, but that's because we printed money to make sure it didn't get worse, right? So...
Real quick on the video. I got a question on the video real quick. Wasn't about two months ago, three months, month and a half ago, something like that. They had a pretty good, they took a pretty good hit, didn't they? And their stock price.
They actually have taken good hits along the way. You could have bought that stock in 1990s like two bucks or something like that into today after all the stock. But yeah, you would have had to ride out some tumbles and they've had recently had some tumbles and really the investor is getting nervous that this whole AI thing is moving too fast because Nvidia is charging high dollars and they're raking it in. So that's holding them up. But the company's buying that stuff, the investor's saying, "Do you people know what it's like to shop? You just seem to buy the highest price thing." And they're doing it with more and more debt, which is scaring investors, saying someday those profits got to service that debt. And so they're saying maybe we shouldn't be investing here even if the industry is going to grow and do well. Everything's just too high price in this stock. And so a lot of these AI stocks are coming down. You're right in mentioning that got to watch AI. We got to watch that private credit. Now we have to watch the Iran war, crude oil, interest rates, which we always have to watch interest rates anyways. We still have to watch corporate profits. It is strange to me how we can have bad times in the economy and the people yet if the corporations are making money, the stock market would actually do fairly well anyways. Don't know how much I want to trust that now because I'm sure this morning everybody on Wall Street is calculating where are corporate profits 12 months from now. Okay. So those have been pretty optimistic. Might be turning the other way now, which can also make the stock market come down a bit more. So, wild and crazy times here. Now, Trump called it interesting times and...
It's interesting times, but I like the wild and crazy better.
Yeah.
Okay. So you look at grain prices though. I mean, the price of corn's gone up, I don't know, almost 50 cents here, it feels like over the last week and a half or so.
Yeah, the situation as you...
...that's primarily driven by sympathetic trade with soybean soil and of course now this morning the oil market, oil corn really didn't want to do that, doesn't really deserve to be up there in my opinion. But what happened is the soil's been strong all this year, just kept marching higher and higher and higher and eventually soybeans said, well, why am I selling at this price if you're getting that highest price soil, the crush beds must be good, I need a better price for my soybeans. So, finally the soybeans woke up. We actually thought we had a pretty good sell signal about 3 weeks ago and I said, "You know something? You can see them. They come in in the morning, buy this, the rest of the day, they just sell, sell, sell." But the next day they put it up again and then they sell, sell. I said, "This should be a top. That's a topping thing, but something isn't quite right." Then as we got going into this war, I said, "Uh-oh, if you're going to put crude oil up a lot, you're going to put the biodiesel up a lot. You're going to put soil up still more. Why wouldn't soybeans fly?" And here we are. They're higher still. Now, what it's done is trickled over. First trickled over into wheat, interesting enough, which doesn't make a lot of sense fuel-wise, but it woke up wheat. Corn, you could just see it didn't really want to do it. Now, it is. It's looking very well. How do you handle this? I don't know because boy, straight up moves. If you're a producer, you generally want to say, do I need to sell something here? On the other hand, for months now, I've been bullish into summer of these grains, even though I'm trying to forecast normal setbacks, and we can still get in the next 30 days a big setback in the grains only to see a higher in summer. So, I may still be right on that, but I'm getting nervous. I better be careful of being too bearish too at times because I do think we can be higher in summer, a crop problem, weather issue. But now you've got this underlying tone of oil which for decades really has not meant much for grains and other commodities used to but it kind of split away right today. Yeah, the grains are on board with the oil. And so at least short term you got to consider that. How long would that last? I don't know as of this morning, you know. It really shouldn't because you know, if higher oil prices raise the price of everything, then how much can you charge for grains if you have a lot of grains? If you don't have a lot of grains, then yeah, you can charge more and make it work still. So, I don't know how much really trust this up on the grains, even though I have been bullish for a while into summer and now we got additional bullish news that we would not normally expect here. And that's what surprised the grain markets.
Right on. Okay, Rich, good stuff as usual. Folks want to reach out to you, get more information, tell them about the podcast and how to get a hold of you one more time.
