This edition of Farming the Countryside is brought to you by Corteva AgriScience Range and Pasture. Your land, your herd, our commitment. Learn more at rangeandpasture.com/countryside. Here's a look at some of the work we've been doing with Corteva Pasture and Range on our farm.
Well, spring of 2026 here, I think our plan is to look at the Alticid graze in a couple of places where we need to do that just because we need the fertility, but we also need the weed control in some hard-to-get-to places. But then we'll prioritize pastures that didn't get treated with Novagrass or Grazon XT last year, just knowing those are probably the problem spots. Evaluate what we did use Novagrass with last year and see if we have enough annual lespedeza to help with weed control, or if we need to go in and spray there again to help continue to promote that lespedeza and hopefully even some white clover.
White clover is really nice to introduce into these cool-season grass pastures. It is very tolerant to lower soil pHs, to poor fertility, and so they're a little more forgiving than a lot of other legumes. But having white clover in there also is going to help you out with your nutritional needs for your cattle.
To see more from our farm and others, just go to rangeandpasture.com/countryside.
Hi, I'm Andrew McCrea. Welcome to our farm and ranch in Northwest Missouri. My great-great-grandfather settled here in 1910, and I'm the fifth generation to grow crops and livestock here. As a farmer myself, I know the highs and lows of this life, the issues we confront every day—some new, some as old as farming itself. This show is a place to talk with farmers and others in the ag industry about topics that mean something to us, topics that can improve the present and future of our operations. This is Farming the Countryside.
Casey Seymour joins me on Farming the Countryside, host of the Moving Iron Podcast and everything dealing with machinery. Casey, good to visit with you here.
Yeah, thanks for having me back, Andrew.
Yeah. So, are you at home today? I know you're on the road a bunch.
Yeah, I'm back home. I got back home actually early this morning. So I'm back in my office here to finish out the week, but yeah, we had some traveling around to do and you know, we have a—you know what it's like, you know, we got to go places and people to see and we're out going after it. And we had some stuff in Kansas City at the office there, the new Farm Journal office down in downtown Kansas City. So had a meeting there, but made my way back and we've got to go to Des Moines next week for something else. So we're all over the place this week.
Yeah. Well, you know, you're out there for a variety of reasons, of course, and different things, but are you getting to a lot of auctions and those types of things right now? What are you seeing in the machinery marketplace?
Yeah, we have to pay attention to a lot of stuff going on in the auction space. You know, since COVID, a lot of those—I used to love going to auctions, one of my favorite things to do, and since COVID, a lot of those have switched to online. So we have to watch them virtually now and then not so much in person. But you know, what we're seeing in the auction space right now is, you know, go back, rewind the clock about a couple years, and dealerships are really going through disposal of a lot of inventory and they've kind of got themselves in a better spot than where they were. So they've kind of laid that off a little bit. Not to say there's still not some real huge stuff going on out there, but the big massive, you know, we're going to go out and sell, you know, 30 combines and 40 tractors in one day type thing, like we're not seeing that stuff take place. But what we are seeing is a lot of farm retirement sales, some farm liquid—unfortunately, a lot of farm liquidation stuff, forced retirements, and those kind of things popping up, and we see those things get moved into the auction space. You're seeing some really good equipment get pushed through there, and the prices are reflecting that. So if you go back and look at where pricing at auctions were this time last year, we're up a little bit from year over year. I want to say we're up like 12% on certain stuff.
Well, we are seeing a lot of stuff sell right now. The age range that we're seeing stuff sell is basically that 5- to 10-year-old stuff is really what you're starting to see surface mostly. And the 1- to 2-year-old stuff isn't really making its way through the auctions as much, but we are seeing some of that pop in there. And all things considered for auction value, a lot better pricing, a lot better supply—like not a lot of supply right now going through the auction space. So you're seeing some of that come up. To me, that's always a big indicator of what the marketplace looks like from a stability standpoint. When the auction prices are worse week over week, we're not seeing that. We're seeing a very stable marketplace. We're starting to see it kind of gradually creep up a little bit, which is drawing some folks into the market.
I will say this. If you go look at dealer markets right now, and a lot of my friends from the dealer space I talk to tell me a lot about, you know, we've got a lot of 1- to 2-year-old stuff. And then we got a lot of, you know, the next jump is into that 12-year-old stuff. And that stuff in the middle is really getting bought and moved very quickly when they bring it in. So still some obstacles out in the marketplace right now, but significantly more stable than it was 18 months ago.
Yeah, let's unpack some of what you talked about there because we had several different things. And let's go to the dealers first because you were talking about them. You know, when we had the last big downturn, maybe '13, '14, and so forth, my perception was a lot of dealers had a lot of used equipment on their lots. And as you mentioned, they said we're not going to do that anymore. So have they done a pretty good job this time as we go into a time of tighter margins that they aren't stuck—I'll say stuck—with a lot of equipment on their lots? What have they done differently this time than they did, you know, a decade ago or so?
Yeah, so coming out of that specific time frame, you had a—when the rest of the world was kind of getting crunched by the Great Recession, ag was on fire, right? It was really doing well. 2010, '11, and '12 were some of the best years in ag probably historically, you know, when you start looking at pricing and on-farm income and those kind of things. Obviously that contracted in '13, '14, '15. Dealerships took a lot of stuff—they had most, 80% of what they had in most places—to auction and got rid of it that way. Got themselves into a good spot and kind of got everything squared away. That leveling out of the marketplace in about 2017 was where you really felt things kind of get back to normal. Dealerships could kind of go back to an even-keeled conversation with the customers that they were working with because again those customers were feeling the same pinch that the dealerships were when it came to on-farm income and all the different stuff that was out there. So that kind of fixed itself. Fast forward to 2020, COVID comes and shuts the world down and it incredibly delays what's going on in the marketplace as far as getting tractors where they need to go and combines and those kind of things.
Fast forward to 2023, the end of 2022, 2023, and everything that got canceled seemed like it all showed up at one time. So you had like 2 and a half years' worth of stuff hit the marketplace all in one swath, which also brought in 2 and a half years' worth of trade-ins at the same time. Flooded the market from zero to a billion pieces of equipment in about 6 months. And so those dealerships, between 2022 and 2023, 2024 time frame, really had to go through a big liquidation because it wasn't necessarily the number of machines, but just the dollars associated with those machines and the interest rates on top of that, which were driving, you know, $3,500 a month worth of interest costs per machine. When you do that times 50 or 100, that adds up pretty quick, right? So it's a pretty big number. So you're starting to see that work its way through. Dealerships are still figuring their way through that right now. You look at how they're handling all the interest associated with those machines and being a lot more conscious about what they're doing.
A lot of the conversations I'm having with folks is they're limiting the number of machines they're selling—new machines anyway, the number that they're selling—because of the associated trade-ins that are coming behind them. And I think that's something that's going to continue to happen.
If you look at where order writing periods were for 2025 for 2026 delivery, it was way off. If you go back to 2022, it was something like 65% less new machines got sold in 2025 for '26 delivery than were sold in '22 when things kind of got us going. So huge drop-off in the number of machines. You know, '26 orders for '27 delivery are probably going to look similar to each other in how that looks. Don't really anticipate seeing anything there. Wouldn't surprise me if it rolled back a little bit, that we're maybe 5% or 6% back from where it was to start with. So again, it's going to have a big effect on the used equipment space if you start looking at the number of machines that are actually out there available for sale and what those machines are, because the way that works is, you know, you got to sell the 1- and 2-year-old machine to a guy that's got a 3- to 5-year-old machine so you can have a 3- to 5-year-old machine on your lot and so on and so forth down the line. And so you got to keep that rolling and keep that turning, and that's something right now dealers are just—it's not, I want to say it's not happening because obviously guys are buying equipment. It's just not nearly in the numbers of people coming banging on the door saying, 'Hey, I want a new combine, a new-to-me combine, or a new-to-me real crop tractor or something like that with that $500,000-plus price tag.' There's not a lot of people doing that.
If not as many people are buying new equipment, which doesn't surprise me, then are they still buying equipment? Are they buying the newer used equipment and is that keeping that price up? And maybe at what point, if that price is going up, do they go back and say, 'I might as well just buy the new equipment'? Where are we at in that equilibrium right now?
Yeah. No, that's a good question. You know, I look at it from the perspective like you have a lot of 1-year-old stuff and 1- and 2-year-old stuff on the marketplace now. Significantly less than any other time in history, by the way. This is probably the lowest amount of machines that's been on the marketplace for even my career, my 20-year career period. This has been way less than that.
When I look at what's driving folks to come in and play in the equipment game, a lot of conversations I've had with producers have been like, 'I typically trade every 3 years or 2 years or 5 years or whatever that might be, and just with the way the market is right now, I'm going to extend that out maybe a year, maybe 2 more years.' So the parts and service business at dealerships is obviously—there's not all that going on. But there are folks coming in buying equipment. It's just it takes a lot. And one thing we are seeing tracking and really seeing this come through in the data is people are planning on buying a piece of equipment. It's so late in the cycle when they come and buy it, right? So like a good friend of mine, they were delivering planters that guys bought into Texas or Texas and Oklahoma 2 weeks into when other people were already planting their crops down there, right? So these planters were showing up and they had to get them ready and everything that's associated with that.
And he said that wasn't a one-off situation. He said I've probably done that 10 or 15 times so far this year in different places. And same with, you know, last fall coming combine season and here's the combine getting delivered to the customer. Now, any number of circumstances there could be any number of things, but the 'I need it, I need it, I need it, I'm ready to buy it. Okay, I'm going to go ahead and buy it now. I'm going to wait a little bit. Okay, I'm going to buy it now.' And it's just this contracting down the speed and velocity of which the machine comes through. Towards the end of the year last year, I was surprised at how many pieces of equipment were moved in that September to end-of-the-year time frame. There's always a pretty good chunk of machines that get pushed through that time frame, but it was a bigger number than I had anticipated seeing it push its way through. So plenty of folks looking at stuff, plenty of folks out kicking tires and really getting their mind around what it is they want to do. It's just getting them to pull the trigger takes a little more work than it used to.
What are the strategies right now that farmers can and should consider if they're looking for new or used? Because you said things have gotten shortened down. What should they be looking at as far as if they're going to make a trade? Is there any strategy behind how I do it?
