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Wyoming | Well thanks to the guys that offered good suggestions, I appreciate your input. To the guys that are focusing on my tractor and talking so condescendingly I assume you have "jealous of your neighbor's decent paint disease" if you think I have "new paint disease." I agree with ahay, I get kinda upset that so many assume because I have a decent tractor without farming 5000 acres I am an idiot. I mentioned it and the custom stuff just to say that the ground isn't required to pay for the equipment. The custom work pays for the tractor with minimal extra hours and wear on it, so why would I not do it? Some years tillage and planting and combining has made more than my farm ground when we had bad hails or freezes. It allowed me to get a decent used tractor and combine and use them on more acres with not much more cost, thereby making my cost per acre lower. Cost per acre and acres per hour are more important factors than how new something is.
Hell let me tell you how we got here. Back 12 years ago we were running a bunch of 30 40 and 50 series tractors with 10-12000 hours on them. We were all 6 row equipment like almost everyone else here. Like everyone else we were plowing and running a rollerharrow 3x over every acre. Cost per acre just seemed way too high. Dad and I got to talking and looking at costs and that next year he traded 2 of his 12000 hour tractors on a nice used 8100 and I bought a well used 12 row planter. After a few years did some more, I think the 50s had nearly 15000 when we got rid of them. Now we run a couple less tractors and put way fewer hours per year and way less repairs per year into them. Kept the 4250 too long, put way more money in it than what the payment is on my 7 year old 8320. Wish we had just traded as is rather than trying to fix it up first. Also in that time went away from plowing and now strip till most of the ground. Changing these things to be more efficient has lowered our costs per acre a lot, figuring repairs and fuel and wear parts and everything else, even figured with some equipment payments. So no, I sure don't want to go back to working on old tractors all the time. You also need to figure the downtime cost too if you are busy working on old junk rather than planting/spraying/ditching/haying/harvesting. Out here we run tractors hard all summer with irrigation and haying and such, we puts hours on them almost as bad as the guys down south where they can run almost all year. So if we can run nice used machines with way less cost per acre then I will take that any day over spending all my time wrenching. If I wanted to do that all day I would work for a dealer. Hell that first 8100 dad got has had a total of under $2000 in repairs on it in the 6500 hours he has put on it so far, so the 8000 series so far is way more reliable than the older tractors we were running to death before.
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How to buy ground?
