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| Thanks justbad7.
For me, all equipment purchases are based on 3 things (and not necessarily in the following order):
1. My perception (which is frequently wrong) of how much I can get done with said equipment
2. How it affects my risk exposure profile. I have grown with debt. As I get older I am less comfortable with debt ratios that I was comfortable with in the past.
3. The expected depreciation profile of the machine.
It wasn’t so long ago that I was hoping we could switch from 16 row planting equipment to 24 row. To do it with the way we handled starter fertilizer we needed relatively high HP and hydraulic flow. Used 24 row equipment that could pull an aircart behind it reliably was not very old and was almost as expensive as new. Same with the tractors that could handle the hydraulic requirements. At that time I wasn’t buying the equipment, I was renting it from my Dad and he has more years of success behind him so the risk exposure profile was different so we went with new.
But now everything is different. You can buy 5 to 15 year old equipment that can do pretty much everything that new equipment can. For planters you can get strong frames, good row units and good meters in fairly old equipment. For tractors you can get high flow hydraulics in fairly old equipment. For combines you can get high capacity machines that are 12 row and even 16 row ready and that have great hydraulics for performance over terraces in 5 to 8 year old machines.
So at this point performance is more about whether you can keep ahead of repairs for a reasonable cost whereas before it also had to do with how old stuff was. It wasn’t so long ago that a 12 row machine that was really good for terrace performance really didn’t even exist. It could be done but none of them truly excelled at it like they do now.
I just feel like used choices are abundant now.
So next you get into, how is the depreciation profile and what is my risk exposure? Well, the 7230 to 8240 area is an area that I feel is a really good forecasted depreciation profile. Somewhere between 600 sep hours and 1500 sep hours should do fine.
Then you go to the risk exposure. In the interest in getting my ratios closer to an area that makes me comfortable, I want the lowest priced machine I can find that does what I want. So that may push me past the ideal sep hours range of 600 to 1,500 and into the 1,500 to 2,000 hour range just so I can get my risk exposure profile down further.
That was the long answer. The short answer is that for my stage in life, a 7230 to an 8240 is probably just about right for adding a second machine.
All of the above reasons are why it’s going to be very hard for me to actually sell the Gleaner. I have finally worked past quite a few of the bugs and it really is likely to be an economical machine going forward despite all of it’s quirks so I think it’s more likely that I add a Case rather than sell the Gleaner and buy two Case machines especially if I can figure out a way to make the lower lateral tilt wear pads last longer than a day or so. | |
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Various cornheads performance review in down corn
