Equip Blog

The number of ways we’ve seen farm machines get into the Guinness World Records Book in past couple of years is imaginative to say the least. Some of those record setting efforts have come directly from brand marketing people, like my last blog entry which looked at setting a land speed record for a tractor […] Read more

It’s hard to know what to make of the ag machinery market so far this year. 2015 started off pretty shaky. By the end of February AEM (the Agricultural Equipment Manufacturers Association) reported that farmers were clearly keeping their chequebooks in their pockets. Monthly sales reports showed Canadian farmers bought over 60 percent fewer combines […] Read more

Ag tires have undergone some major technological advancements in recent years. And they really had to. Farm machines are now bigger, heavier and faster than they used to be, and that calls for more capable tire performance. Introduction of the high flexion and very high flexion radials have significantly improved traction while enlarging the tire […] Read more

There was a time when if a salesman had to spend more than five minutes with you explaining how to operate a piece of farm equipment, you probably didn’t need it. If you really did, chances were high you already knew how to use it, because it worked like virtually all the others. On top […] Read more

In about two weeks the spring auction sale season on the prairie will kick into high gear. Farm sales really take off as soon as April hits. And I can recall an auction company manager telling me it’s those early sales in late March and the beginning of April that really seem to set the […] Read more

I’ve always considered engineers to be the rock stars of the machinery world. They’re the ones who take the concepts discovered by Newton, Tesla and others and actually turn them into useable technology. Some, or maybe most, of that technology today is beyond impressive. Over the years I’ve had the privilege of meeting and talking […] Read more

As I and a handful of other journalists had a casual conversation with some senior executives from one of the international machinery brands recently, it was interesting to hear about the intricacies of managing production facilities in a variety of countries around the world. Their firm has plants in the UK, the U.S., India, China […] Read more

The news coming from the major equipment brands in February strongly suggests the equipment market in 2015 is shaping up to be very different than the one we’ve experienced in the past five years. The sales outlook for new equipment this year isn’t all that rosy. In a speech to investors at a February shareholders […] Read more

It happened to me again last week. I was in the Midwestern U.S. and a complete stranger offered me the kind of hospitality usually reserved for a friend. After a day full of flight delays caused by everything from weather to the lack of an available gate for my plane to pull up to and […] Read more

A couple of weeks ago I decided that some of the machines kicking around the farmyard had been here far too long. If left as they were long enough, they’d eventually degrade into big brown piles of rust. There’s no profit in that. So I sat down at the computer and posted some online ads […] Read more