Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire For tech-weary Midwest farmers, 40-year-old tractors now a hot commodity

http://www.startribune.com/for-tech...-tractors-now-a-hot-commodity/566737082/

Tractors built in 1980 or earlier cause bidding wars at auctions.
By Adam Belz Star Tribune January 5, 2020 — 8:27pm



Track Folland, son of Kris Folland, feeds cattle at the family’s farm near Halma using a 1979 John Deere 4440.

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.
“This is still a really good tractor,” said Folland, who owns two other tractors built before 1982.


“They cost a fraction of the price, and then the operating costs are much less because they’re so much easier to fix,” he said.
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 with a website and TV show.

“There’s an affinity factor if you grew up around these tractors, but it goes way beyond that,” Peterson said. “These things, they’re basically bulletproof. You can put 15,000 hours on it and if something breaks you can just replace it.”
BigIron Auctions, a Nebraska-based dealer that auctioned 3,300 pieces of farm equipment online in two days last month, sold 27 John Deere 4440 tractors through 2019.
The model, which Deere built between 1977 and 1982 at a factory in Waterloo, Iowa, was the most popular of the company’s “Iron Horse” series of tractors, which used stronger and heavier internal components to support engines with greater horsepower. The tractors featured big, safe cabins, advancing a design first seen in the 1960s that is now standard.
A sale of one of those
tractors in good condition with low hours of use — the tractors typically last for 12,000 to 15,000 hours — will start a bidding war today. A 1980 John Deere 4440 with 2,147 hours on it sold for $43,500 at a farm estate auction in Lake City in April. A 1979 John Deere 4640 with only 826 hours on it sold for $61,000 at an auction in Bingham Lake in August.
“Those older tractors that had good care and good maintenance, that’s good property,” said Mark Stock, co-founder of BigIron.

The tractors have enough horsepower to do anything most farmers need, and even at a record price like the $61,000 the tractor in Bingham Lake fetched, they’re a bargain compared to what a farmer would pay for a newer tractor with similar horsepower.
The other big draw of the older tractors is their lack of complex technology. Farmers prefer to fix what they can on the spot, or take it to their mechanic and not have to spend tens of thousands of dollars.
“The newer machines, any time something breaks, you’ve got to have a computer to fix it,” Stock said.
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.
“That goes against the pride of ownership, plus your lifetime of skills you’ve built up being able to fix things,” Peterson said.

The cheaper repairs for an older tractor mean their life cycle can be extended. A new motor or transmission may cost $10,000 to $15,000, and then a tractor could be good for another 10 or 15 years.
Folland has two Versatile 875s manufactured in the early 1980s in Winnipeg and bought a John Deere 4440 last year with 9,000 hours on it, expecting to get another 5,000 hours out of it before he has to make a major repair.
“An expensive repair would be $15,000 to $20,000, but you’re still well below the cost of buying a new tractor that’s $150,000 to $250,000. It’s still a fraction of the cost,” Folland said. “That’s why these models are so popular. They’ve stood the test of time, well built, easy to fix, and it’s easy to get parts.”
He also said the modifications to newer diesel engines on tractors can cause mechanical problems, and the carbon footprint of an older tractor can be mitigated by using biodiesel, which is produced from soybeans grown in Minnesota and extends the life of an engine because it includes better lubricants than conventional diesel fuel.
Combine all that with nostalgia for the tractors of a farmer’s youth, and 30- or 40-year-old tractors are in high demand. That’s a shift from 30 years ago, Peterson said.
n 1989, 30-year-old tractors really were antiques. A 1959 tractor at that point would have sold for $2,000 or $3,000 and looked like a different species from the tractors in operation in the 1980s.
But tractors from the 1970s and 1980s aren’t so dramatically different from tractors produced in the 2000s, other than the irksome software, and at a time when farmers are struggling financially, older tractors can make a lot of business sense.
Folland said his corn crop was better than the Minnesota average in 2019, despite the fact that he farms on the Canadian border and uses 40-year-old equipment.
“The main reason we do this is to make money,” Folland said. “Older equipment is a way to reduce your cost per bushel to become more profitable.”

Diagnostics are nothing to be afraid of. They will help you get to the source of complex problems. All of the same mechanical skills will still be needed to fix a problem.

A lot of the new stuff can only be worked on by an authorized dealer, it takes proprietary software and equipment only available to the dealer to diagnose it. This leaves you hostage to anything the dealer wants to charge to get your equipment running, a lot of people aren't OK with that.

I've only got one tractor which I bought in 2007. I was looking for about a 70 hp tractor and chose a Massey Ferguson 471 over several other makes specifically because it was an old school design without any electronics, it's all cast iron and round gauges. Electronic stuff is nice but it'll eventually break and 30 years from now I want to still be able to fix it with a hammer and crescent wrench. So far so good.

Cars and other things with a relatively short useful lifespan I'm okay with having a lot of electronics and gadgets, they'll eventually break but you're not going to keep them forever anyway. Something I intend to keep forever I want to be able to work on myself.

The diagnostic protocol is open to all tool manufactures. Any company can develop a scan tool to read the common data stream. A scan tool will be one of the lowest cost tools in a shop. Many of the companies support an internal flash code system that can be initiated to blink out a fault code. I use an adapter on a laptop.

While the John Deere 40,50,55 series tractors still bring good money.

Try buying a low hour John Deere 7810. Those tractors seem to bring a real premium. As do models like the 4960 and the 8410.

In some cases more than they sold for new.

Go figure. Phoucking computers...if you ever crawled into a new one...

If you screw with the electronics on any new vehicle without knowing what you're doing, you can cost yourself a pile of money.

Not true in most ag equipment. The tools and software are controlled by the manufacturers. Talk to growers if you want more specifics.

Been awhile since I saw an update but i know theres was or is a giant lawsuit against John Deere because they refuse to release the software for their latest tractors.

Same story with older 2cycle motorcycles - easy and cheap to rebuild .
Rebuild a new high tech 4stroke - cost more than buying an older complete bike .

I prefer the older stuff as far as being able to work on it. My New Holland TL80 and TC45A are both pretty easy to work on myself, not much electronic stuff to worry with. But, the newest one, a TS115A has all that crap on it, and I've got my fingers crossed that nothing bad happens, because if it does, I know what a dealer will charge to work on it.

However, here is the thing about running older equipment..........the 4WD and front wheel assist tractors have about taken over the market, and there is a good reason for that. I have to feed cattle in the winter, and we have a lot of mud to deal with here, and I know how hard it is to get around with a 2 wheel drive tractor. So, if you want a 4WD tractor, the pickings are very slim in the older tractors because not many were made in that configuration. They made them, but they were not popular in my part of the country and are hard to find. You're pretty much restricted to buying the newer tractors, the ones that usually have at least a few electronics on them.

Attached is a link to the ISO standard.
https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#iso:std:iso:11783:-12:ed-3:v1:en

I have found that to be a voluntary standard which most ag equipment manufacturers have not opted to abide by. Do a Google search on how companies like Deere are not providing a way for growers to access or jail break their equipment. Currently their software is in a locked down state. Accessing the questionable black market is the only option growers have.

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/246314-farmers-pirating-john-deere-tractor-software-stick-man

https://www.wired.com/story/john-deere-farmers-right-to-repair/

Friend of mine got a text on his phone informing him that his new JD combine, which was sitting in a field a few miles away, had lost 10% charge on the battery. He called the dealership and asked what was going on, and they said it was just business as normal with the new stuff. I don't know that I want JD or anyone else having that much access to what I own.

Did his tractor text or did JD? I am almost to the point of blocking my pickup, it thinks a little frost of the front is a near death experience.

I used my 1952 Ford 8N for years.For every hour I used it,I worked on it for 4.Finally one morning when it was about 10 below and I had to put a starter on it to move snow. I said screw it and went out and bought a new Kubota

Not a farmer, but I needed a piddlin' tractor to do odds and ends around my place. I couldn't afford to drop $20K on a little JD or Kubota,...but I had enough scratch to buy a nice old restored 8N. It's low tech as it gets and easy to work on.

When I was in school our program started getting some new engines.

Cummins and Cat.....Detroit was later.

Cat refused to give us any of their proprietary diagnostic equipment.

Cummins gladly agreed to give us their equipment.

We informed Cat that we would not be teaching much Cat after that.......


They sent us everything.

It was proprietary.

Tractors and trucks are apples and oranges, I get it. But signatories to the ISO mean nothing in the real world. A Kenworth customer, 40 trucks in 10 years, could not get chassis circuit diagram software. Dealer told him, "well just call us with your problem, we'll break out that circuit from the master and fax it to you". Oh boy, this really works well out in the sticks. Roseburg lumber got a new 966 Cat wheel loader last year, for a hell of deal. Well, they found out why, a veritable nightmare of onboard computer problems, lots of downtime, and Cat's own servicemen tearing out their hair. Peoria telling their field mechanics, be paptient we're working on it. Sound like Boeing max 8?