There's plenty of people farming thousands of acres, but it's different here.

For a start, the roads our much narrower. Secondly, workload. Nearly every farm here has crops in some form or rotation, so the work load is spread out and you don;t need to get the whole farm planted in 3 weeks. The veg boys in the east of the country have already started planting and they will be running until Christmas. Last year I saw a Massey 8S, which would have been about 3 years old at auction with 8700 hours on it. How long do you run that for?

It would be very difficult for us to switch to 30 year old tractors. The cultivation tractor is 370hp and needs all of that on a mounted 6m powerharrow. Show me a 30 year old tractor that can power that, and pull an in furrow mounted plough and the other mounted equipment, never mind the reliablity. It has to run from when the combine starts rolling at the end of July until mid december. It had an expensive break down this year, we can get around it by hiring a machine in, but you're looking at £2,500 a week. I'm old the repair with the hire charge was making a new one look attractive even at over £300,000, not that the repair cost anything like that, but it would have kicked a hole in the payments and there's no repairs on a new machine for up to 5 years, and there's better finance available on new equipment.

Historically, the UK had a really good export market going on for used tractors, so you would get a good price for your used machine and because a lot of people would shop around, rather than bend over the Deere salesman's desk, would get a new machine for a good price. Couple that with better finiance on new machines and that businesses are able to offset depreciation against tax, fewer is any repair costs on new machines, it made sense to keep machine up to date. That befoe you factor in that new machine are built to the buyers specification and you may need a particular build for particular jobs. 

A neighbour who farms less than use has gone down the buy big, old, cheap, American machines in the past and it hasn't been plain sailing. The 903 Cummins in his FW puked its guts expensively and the Challenger, which might have been a very early Agco version also puked up some magnificent bills, so contry to what is said on here, old American machines don't run for free or cheap. 

There's still plenty of consolidation in agriculture here and machines are getting bigger all of the time. I expect that the 200hp class is where the bulk of sales are now, but your 4955's and 7250 Magnums which were once big tractors to too slow and numb for 250hp tractor work, never mind old and unreliable, and nothing like big enough for the front line cultivation work. Your 4955/7250 size tractors are on very big trailers now, and no one wants to craw along at 20mph with no suspension and crap brakes