Midwest Farmers, 40-Year-Old Tractors Now a Hot Commodity

More and more people now recognize that the right to repair is paramount for resilience.

For Tech-Weary Midwest Farmers, 40-Year-Old Tractors Now a Hot Commodity

from the growing-trends dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from StarTribune: 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.

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. […] 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.