Equip Blog

One of the great things about my job as machinery editor is I sometimes get a chance to go behind the usually-closed doors of research and development shops at the manufacturers. Those workshops are where all the great new features that appear on farm equipment every year are born and evolve from concept to market-ready […] Read more

The last two weeks have been a bit of a blur for those of us involved with the Grainews UTV Challenge. Not only did we organize the event and test nine different machines from seven manufacturers, we put them on display at the Ag in Motion farm show near Saskatoon after the judging was completed. […] Read more

At Grainews we pride ourselves on providing practical production information to our readers, and I think we do a pretty good job of it. This year we had the opportunity provide even more of that practical information on the machinery side of things. With access to the facilities at the new Ag in Motion farm […] Read more

For those of us who’ve ever bought a new tractor, taking delivery of it usually means waiting for the dealership truck to come down the driveway and unload it. The driver rolls it off the deck, leaves it running and says, “There you go,” before high tailing it off to some other job. It may […] Read more

On the eve of the Brexit vote I was sitting in a restaurant in Hungary having dinner with a group that included a British freelance journalist who also farms in the UK. She correctly predicted the then-pending referendum would fall in favour of an “out” vote, which would remove the UK from the European Union. […] Read more

Every farmer needs to have a decent relationship with at least one local machinery dealership. Those businesses play a pretty big role in keeping farm operations ticking along, and getting to know the staff in the parts and service department can definitely help with machine maintenance and repairs. A good service manager will almost certainly […] Read more

Now that we’re well into June, the farm show season is about to kick into high gear. Every year the major shows highlight the cutting edge innovations about to hit the ag equipment market. And in past years, there has been an avalanche of them. Although with the slowdown in machinery sales that started last […] Read more

Just two years ago, ag equipment manufacturers were struggling to keep up to customer orders. Assembly plants were working beyond their capacities pumping out virtually every type of machine at breakneck speed. That unprecedented demand was spurred on by seemingly unbounded optimism across all sectors of agriculture. But there were a few muffled voices saying, […] Read more

A few weeks ago, Arie Prilik of MTZ Equipment Ltd., Canadian distributors of the Belarus-built MTZ line of tractors emailed me—as well as a few others—with a chart his company had prepared. It was a sampling of current list prices for new tractors in the 80 to 450-Plus horsepower range. “It’s not meant to be […] Read more

This past Saturday I took in my first auction sale of the season, a Mack Auction Company event near Langbank, Saskatchewan. This sale had an interesting lineup. It wasn’t primarily late-model, very-high capacity equipment like so many sales include these days. This one was mainly older machinery. There were a lot of tractors under the […] Read more