|
Fruita CO | Here's another take on used vs. new. The story of our little valley...in 1972, I went to work for the JD dealer. At that time, there were dealers for JD, IH, AC, MF, Ford, Case, Hesston, Farmhand, New Holland & Oliver here in the valley. The big crops were sugar beets & beer barley, (Coors). there were probably 10-12 dairies, 5 or 6 feedlots, hogs all over the place, lots of sheep & cow outfits that wintered here. Orchards in one end of the valley. Beet guys never put more than 2-3000 hr. on a tractor....
Fast forward to 2006-no beets, Holly pulled out in the 70's, no beer barley, Coors left the West slope about the same time. Those were the big blows that started things downhill. The JD dealer is a branch store from Delta, 90% of their business is lawn & garden. Same Ford dealer is here, now New Holland, Hesston, Kubota, & a few other short lines, the hardware/western clothes/horse tack store is the main reason they are still open. All other colors' dealers are 2-300 mi. away. There is one operating dairy, 2 feedlots, the big one is a sideline to a trucking business. Horses out the *ss, 90% of which never get ridden, they're just big dogs...rest of the farming is hay & corn, the corn is mostly trucked out of the valley. Lots of farmers run trucks on the side. Enough hogs to furnish 4H pigs, a few sheep & cows, mostly hobby type operations. The sale barn shut down a few years back. Couple guys doing alfalfa seed, there was a few onions for several years, they slowly fizzled out. The only thing that has been fairly stable is the fruit in the east end. The point of all this? I can just about count on one hand the new tractors JD has sold here in the last 10 years, & I don't remember the last new NH I saw, excluding weekender stuff. One egg farm that mostly hauls its feed in on the railroad. The only guy buying new big tractors on a regular basis is a dude who sold his oil field business for $5 mil & just wants to farm 'til it's all gone...but has already started back up building compressors for the oil patch...
Where I fit into all this is mostly working on the same 20-30-40-50 series I predelivered back in the 70's & 80's, plus the used stuff jockeyed into the valley from eastern CO & Nebraska. I expect to be able to do this until I retire, when most of the valley will be subdivisions, if the energy business doesn't bust...we're losing prob. about 1000 ac./yr. to houses. When I retire, I'll prob. restore the tractors I worked on all those years...;o)
The point of all this ranting & rambling is that used equipment is a fact of life here, not a choice...
Ron in (formerly agricultural) CO... | |
|
new versus old tractors?
