Construction Equipment Crosses Over to the Farm

Construction equipment is earning its place on the farm. Tools like skid steers, telehandlers, and excavators have multiple uses that can make jobs faster and easier. Due to the seasonality of construction work, at certain times of the year these machines are widely available at a range of price points.

However, buyers should do their due diligence when purchasing a used piece of construction equipment. Construction use is different than farm use, and certain components may wear differently based on how a machine was run.

Andy Campbell and Dave Mowitz discuss what to watch for, where to find deals, and what months typically see the best buys in this podcast episode.

Meet Andy Campbell

Andy Campbell is director of insights at Tractor Zoom. As a past engineer, professor, and entrepreneur, Campbell is passionate about bridging the gap between data and action for farmers, dealers, auctioneers, and ag lenders. He continues to help operate his family farm in Iowa.

Tractor Zoom was started in 2017 to help farmers and other decision makers have access to current equipment values and make data-driven decisions about heavy equipment.

Meet Dave Mowitz

Dave Mowitz worked at Successful Farming from 1982 to 2022, covering equipment trends for Successful Farming magazine, the Successful Farming TV show, and the Ageless Iron Almanac. Although recently retired, he continues to serve as a contributing editor and now podcast host.

Mowitz was raised on a family farm in Nebraksa, of which he is now a part-owner.

Listen to the Podcast

Subscribe to the Successful Farming podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Please rate and review us!

Episode Highlights

• Construction equipment like skid steers, telehandlers, and backhoes have many uses on the farm and are readily available.
• Farmer-owned machines bring a premium at auction over construction-owned machines because of the way they are typically used.
• Owning construction equipment can help you diversify your operation into custom work or help justify the cost of hired hands.
• Pre-harvest is a good time to find deals on this type of equipment, because construction-used machines are hitting the market after summer building projects. Deals can also be found in January and February, before the construction season begins in most parts of the country.

Transcript

Please note, this transcript has not been edited.

Dave Mowitz: Hello, I’m Dave Mowitz with Successful Farming Magazine and Andy Campbell with Tractor Zoom. And Andy, today we’re going to be talking about an area where farmers are buying increasing amounts of used equipment and that’s construction equipment. That’s skid steers, which has of course been on farms since the very beginning when two farmers in North Dakota built the Bobcat for their chicken farm needs and then it took off from there. But also I’ve seen an increasing number of excavators, backhoes, certainly backhoes, excavators, payloaders, especially on larger farms, larger livestock operations moving out. It’s a different market with different influences outside of agriculture.

Andy Campbell: It is. Yeah. And I mean, just to highlight a few of these things. So, uh, growing up, we had a case 1845 C, uh, and essentially it was used so I could scoop hog poop and then I could take it over to the chicken coop and I could, you know, clear things out there. So I’ve had experience way back from well before I could legally drive on those. But even just most recently I had, uh, I was back up at spring break up at the farm.

And I was in a backhoe because we had a blitz snowstorm just last Wednesday. And about the same time, my phone reminded me, Hey, you took this picture a year ago today. And that year ago picture was when I was in the exact same backhoe and I was ripping out mulberry trees with it. And I happened to drive over a mulberry tree stump, jammed that sucker way up inside of the, the gizzards of the backhoe busted out the oil line.

Dave Mowitz: Ha ha!

Andy Campbell: And essentially then I was sitting dead in the middle of the field because I couldn’t move. And so, yes, all the way from the early skid steers to the backhoe. And then this whole past month I’ve been on the road knowing that we’re going to chat about this. I’ve been asking every dealer I’ve talked to about like, what’s your skid steer market? What’s your compact track loader market or your backhoe market doing? And it’s been exciting to kind of hear all the compact construction uses on the farm and the nuances on how they sell it. It’s fascinating.

Dave Mowitz: What are some of the insights in that regard? it’s, again, farmers deal with their local dealer. I mean, skid steers, of course, go through the local dealership and it’s more of an, like I mentioned, foreign ag item. But the other items, it’s a different, it’s a brave new world there. So what were some of the insights on how this stuff trades and what the trends are as far as seasonality?

Andy Campbell: Yeah. So my first insight into this, because like I said, when I grew up that the case we had, you know, wheeled skid steer, no real cab on it. and so I asked an equipment jockey, there’s a really good one down here, near where I live, DB equipment. And what he’ll do is kind of look for that arbitrage like that, you know, is there a deal down South? Can I ship it up North vice versa and deals a lot with telehandlers, but also skid steers. And he was saying, and he didn’t know the reason, but he’s like, wheeled skid steers.

up north. He’s like, I ship them up to Minnesota and Wisconsin. He’s like, but tracks the exact opposite. go, they go south of that kind of mid Iowa border. And he’s like, then it’s all tracks going down south.

Dave Mowitz: Really? I would have guessed just the opposite considering snow and mud, but okay.

Andy Campbell: Right. Well, and that’s exactly, I didn’t know the reason. I’m just like, and I actually looked it up in our data on tractor zoom pro and I looked in our dealer data and I could see our heat maps of, yeah, skid steers better up North, you know, the track loaders, better down South. And then, so I followed this up, talking to another dealer, Mark up at Mark’s equipment in Osage Iowa. So he’s near that Minnesota Iowa border and, Gehl, skid steers is what he sells in track loaders. And so I was up at his dealership and I spoke with him and I’m like,

You know, what are you selling? Why one versus the other? And he’s like, it’s all about freezing and essentially cow crap. and, and he’s like, if you run a track loader up North and you don’t have a heated shed, then it gets up in the tracks and the next morning you’re not going to run. and that’s not the case with the wheeled, skid steer. And also he said, they’ll sell really well with your moderate to smaller sized, farmers, livestock farmers. And it’s like,

You can’t run those track loaders up north if that stuff gets stuck in the tracks. But you go on down south, you don’t have that issue. But then I went down to Texas down near Waco talking with a guy at Tipton International, Ben down there. he’s like, the rocks down here don’t work well with the wheels. It’s like you’re up and you’re down. It just shakes the heck out of your machine. He’s like, you need that track loader to be able to handle the terrain down here. so, you know, there’s a place for everybody.

Dave Mowitz: Right. Well, I remember the conversation I had with one of the salespeople at RB auction, Ritchie Brothers, which sells a lot of construction equipment was that the trend was if you’re getting a skid steer out of a major metropolitan area, it’s going to be predominantly now tracks because they don’t like the way that wheels tear up a construction site or they have to run in mud.

If it’s spring, they got to get a building up. But the problem there, the challenge there is, and this is the other aspect to skid steers is how they’re used or abused, right? And that can be a big impact upon its value.

Andy Campbell: Right. Yeah. We honestly, you see that not just with skid steers. I see that with tractors and everything else. When I, when I see on our auction data, a retirement sale, then I’ll go in and I’ve done this statistical analysis and the T tests and regressions on retirement sales versus every other single kind of auction retirement always comes out on top on bringing the premium, but it’s, it’s that, you know, that the person took care of their equipment, all the way up until the end.

And it just, it’s a much more likelihood of being a quality piece of equipment versus first of all, you don’t know. and then, you know, if it’s any other kind of auction, but especially on the construction side, because the way that they utilize equipment and own equipment is usually per project. And they, the, the person that’s buying the equipment is not the one that’s running it. And so they bid it into a project, say, Hey, the whole cost of skid steers within this building project, use it, abuse it. It’s for that project. Whatever’s less than left in that value on that.

So when they resell it at auction, that’s just something that they get to retain in earnings because the price of that skid loader has already been baked in to the cost of that project. So yeah, there’s really no incentive for them to make those suckers last.

Dave Mowitz: So we know that farmer-owned always brings a premium when it comes to farm equipment. I mean, that goes without saying because it’s all farmer-owned. But when it comes to construction equipment and semi-trucks, this would be a nice crossover too. I suppose there is, is it a 10%, a 20 % increase in value if it’s farmer-owned?

Andy Campbell: Well, I don’t know on the farmer owned side. can tell you on the retirement side and the retirement side, I just did a study on the row crop tractor piece that it was being bringing a premium of $26,000 for a, for a low hour, uh, high horsepower tractor. And so, but again, we’re talking low hours. something less than a thousand hours, I suppose you’re probably talking then almost an 8%. Uh, yeah, probably roughly 8%.

Dave Mowitz: Really. Wow. Right. But in tractors, the vast majority of tractors would be farmer owned.

Andy Campbell: They’d be farmer owned. Yeah. So if you’re trying to differentiate construction versus farmer, that’s an interesting one. you know, I’d have to look into the data cause it gets back to, know, if you want to nerd out on data governance, but how you catalog that, did you actually know that it came from a construction when it was sold? But I suppose if you’re looking into, you know, trying to figure this out, Ritchie brothers, like you said, sells primarily, construction owned equipment. So if you took Ritchie brothers versus like a Sullivan, or a Big Iron, then you could safely assume, you know, the Big Iron often coming from a farm, Ritchie’s coming from construction. That would be an interesting study. Haven’t done it yet. So we have a new data analyst on staff. Maybe I’ll say I got a project for him.

Dave Mowitz: Well, this brings up the whole thing about if you are in the market for used construction equipment, you absolutely have to inspect it, right? You should probably do it yourself unless it looks like a good deal. It was farmer owned and you know the auctioneer and they can do the inspection for you. But I remember writing story after story for Successful Farming Magazine on buying construction equipment and giving specific tips as to what to look for. forklifts, the mast and the rollers on the mast, skid steers. It was always the drive train and wheels. remember I’d always go to the Clinton, Cook auctions and Scott Cook down there gave a lot of great advice when it came to how do you go look at a skid steer tracks and wheels and

He said, here are giveaways, chipped rubber off of tires or look at the lugs on a track. Look at not only the lugs on the rubber track, but also then the drivers for a good indication of use. And then came the big one when he said, if you are going to buy a track skid steer, you got to look at the hours, of course, you are anyway.

But figure out that you may be spending anywhere from $4,000 to $8,000 if you have to replace those tracks, if they’re really worn. And that’s on the cheap side. It got bigger machines, a lot more money. So inspection is crucial, right? You better get in look at the machine if you are looking that way.

Andy Campbell: Yeah. And actually I’m glad you brought that up and I was well prepared on this time because I know you always ask me like, what’s your best buy? And I’m probably the jump in the gun, but this fits. Okay. So good. It fits in our conversation right now. I’m not, not screwing you up for later, but with this, uh, I looked at that track, you the compact track loaders, the tracks skid steers and for a best buy. I scoured through all of our popular models and I found one it’s super low hour. It’s a Bobcat T 76, uh, only has 61 hours on and it sold for $53,000. And I went and I plotted every other T 76 that we had. There was a whole slew of those that sold for roughly 53,000, 50 to $55,000. And they all had 2400 hours on them, not 61. And, and that was just a year ago when those sold. And so yeah, the market has come down a little bit and we can chat about that, but not that much. And the one thing that I really noticed

Is when I looked through all the pictures, cause on tracks and pro you’ve got these big pictures in the cards. You can look at them. This was the only one that where the picture was taken in a, a residential. Background. So they’ve got their garage in the background. I’m looking at right now. They’ve got evergreen trees and their yard and stuff. and I can see the tracks. look nice, but every other picture then is kind of your Richie brother’s style with like, you got a yard and you can see all the other ones behind it. It was sold because it was like a mass construction of all these lined up and somehow this one sold in Virginia but it slipped through the cracks or somebody got a great deal because they bought probably a residential owner used it for 61 hours for whatever reason decided to sell it and this thing looks like it’s barely been touched and whoever bought it kind of bought it you know they got a good pick

Dave Mowitz: Cherry, at cherry buy. So, um, when it comes to brand, that make a difference? I always saw cat would bring a price. Uh, Bobcat, uh, always brought attracted at a good price. Deere came back in the skid steers and that seems to always bring with it a price rise. Or does it make any difference? I suppose in construction it doesn’t cause they just want to run the machine. But in farming, yeah. Well, it does have an impact.

Andy Campbell: So, there certainly is, there’s certainly a bit of a difference in the kind of the value of things. If you’re talking, let’s just kind of talk to some of the bigger brands that are out there right now. And I’m going off of what we see at auction in terms of, just proportion of one sold them. looking at my power BI thing here. Cat does hold most of the market on this one. you know, roughly I would say it’s maybe a third of what we see that out there.

Dave Mowitz: Wow.

Andy Campbell: JCB though, and John Deere, New Holland are following those up. you know, you got a few other brands after that. You have some case, which are certainly older, Gehls, Manitou’s and all those. So that’s kind of the split, but Caterpillar JCB and John Deere, bet are sitting at like 60, about two thirds of that market. and, yeah, I don’t know, maybe even larger cause, cause cat just is fairly dominant there.

Dave Mowitz: Well, certainly in the Midwest, I would say that holds true. I think it may be different on the coast when it comes to this thing, but yeah, they dominate when you look at the lots and the availability of these machines.

Andy Campbell: Yeah. And if you’re looking at price, and again, I’m talking about an average auction price that we see here. So there’s some nuances with that. But you’ve got of the major brands that we typically hear a lot of, mean, Lamtrac is up there. Not a major brand that we hear of, but that’s the most premium one that we see out there. But really, if you’re talking the ones, probably the 10 most popular ones, Kubota, JCB are high up there. Those on average, uh, 38,000, 39,000 for those guys. Deere, uh, followed them up at 37,000 on average. Cat is a little bit lower. Uh, 33 case at 32 Bobcat 29. Um, now I will say there’s a pretty decent caveat with this, that these are average auction prices. So if they’re not run for very long and maybe Kubota is a great example of this. Um, Kubota is re you know, especially compared to like case or cat, newer to this market in North America, especially the farm market. And so those are just not going to be as old. And so on average, if they’re not as old, they’re going to go for a higher price. But yeah, just strictly speaking, that’s what I’m seeing for our basic averages on price in the market.

Dave Mowitz: Yeah, it’s a, and of course we’re just talking skid steers. We haven’t gotten into the fun areas of, used to be the hot thing was backhoe loaders. Not as much anymore in agriculture, although I think everybody at a certain size farm would like to have one or does have it and then park it in the shop for the three or four times a year that they bring it out. excavators have been red hot in the last decade with farmers.

Andy Campbell: And so I, know, 10 years ago, I would have said no, this, but this past year I’ve, we’ve actually used an excavator three times on our farm, footings. And then we had to take care of just a mass of trees that were, the root systems is going out in the field and, getting up the tile. we had to cut it down, had to bury the stump and, use a massive excavator to do that. Now we don’t own an excavator ourselves. our neighbor down the road, who we share that field fence line with does. So we used his. But actually I talked to Mark up at Mark’s tractor up in Osage about this because he had many many excavators out there. And so I said, how do those things sell compared with what else you have? And he said he’ll sell a few to your larger farmers. And he says they see it as a luxury good that if it’s a big enough farm and they can have it, then they’ll bring it in because they’ll use it for some things. They can certainly expense it and he said, but they don’t use it constantly. It’s if they can afford it. said, what he sees more of is farmers coming into rent them because it’s predetermined. Like I know I have a period where I can do some tile fixing or, I need to buy, or I need to put in a footer for a bin that I’m going to put up and I’m going to do that myself. And so he said, if they can plan that workout, they’re going to rent it. and so he moves a lot more, uses a lot more through his rental fleet than he does actually selling.

Dave Mowitz: Yeah, I could see where you would have the rental if you have somebody that’s local enough to be able to do that. you, you go out to where I grew up in Nebraska, central Nebraska, you don’t have the rental. I mean, you’re paying such a big delivery fee to get the darn thing dropped. I’ve got a farmer friend in Hampton, Nebraska, where I grew up, Gerald Joseph bought one because he said he hated paying that rental drop, the transport fee. He became immediately popular in the neighborhood, which he is anyway, because he has other things that he likes to buy. Because with an excavator, everybody discovered they had these things that they had to get done with. But he said it’s one of those things, it paid for itself and the job that he had to do, and then you just park it. And a couple times a year he gets it out to utilize it, but he felt it was justified because he bought a used machine. it’s, anyway, the point is that it’s kind of a mixed market, isn’t it? Are people, farmers looking to buy them at auction, at a dealership, or do they pick them up at the rental places when they sell off?

Andy Campbell: Yeah, I think it probably depends on what type of farmer you are. And so I think if you’re a large scale farmer, I think you probably have one of these in your shed. Just again, depends on where you’re at. But if you have tile, then I imagine that you’ve got some scheduled tile maintenance work. And if you have hired hands, then you’re like, okay, how do I space out the labor that they do? And fixing tile is a great way to leverage the labor that you’re already paying for and make that work for you. Now, if you don’t though, it can be a pretty expensive piece just to have in the shed. Again, I’m talking about places that are maybe a little more populated than rural Nebraska, uh, where you can get one delivered, but that then they probably are more pulling from a rental fleet on, on those mini excavators. Now a backhoe though, I’ve seen this grow. And again, I’m, mean, I don’t know if impartial is the right word. That’s definitely not the right word. I’m biased because we have one, uh, and we use it way more than, man.

Dave Mowitz: Well, yes. All the time.

Andy Campbell: I would say it’s, you know, if we’re not in the field, we’re using the backhoe to keep up the property. you know, we still have hogs, got to move equipment around. used it the other day, putting on a little, ball hitch in the beginning or in the front of it on the bucket, just so that I can move a gooseneck trailer. Cause did not want to go, you know, get the truck back it up and just to move it a little bit. So it’s versatile, pain in the butt to fix. It’s not easy to get hands in there or access things, but I think they’re built to work, not built to be worked on.

Dave Mowitz: Now they are, and that’s the situation. Again, with back hoes, how crucial it is, kind of like a skid, even more so than excavators. Back hoes and skid steers, when you’re buying used, the inspection aspect of that machine, looking at the joints, especially that main joint in the back, the boom swing, and be outside of the engine and transmission, but to be able to get on that machine and operate it, is so crucial to figure out if you are buying used unless it’s at a dealership and it’s been gone through and verified some way. But being the indispensable machine has always made it popular. But I was looking at the trends of backhoes, inventories are just about zero. know, there’s no big, in agriculture we saw a lot of numbers, a lot of inventory, but that’s not the case with construction equipment. In fact, across the board, even in skid steers, looks like there’s not a lot of these machines sitting in the countryside.

Andy Campbell: Right. And I think that’s one of the things that even here at TractorZoom, you know, we, play heavy into the farm equipment space, the farm equipment dealers, and, but we’re, as we’ve grown, we’ve adopted more and more construction dealers and we’re helping out more construction dealers. And that was one of the biggest learning curves for us is that not everybody treats equipment like farmers treat equipment. And in fact, again, you don’t notice the water you swim in, farmers are unique in how they handle equipment. Like everybody else, I think construction people are like, what are you, you want to spend or pay half a million dollars for a piece of equipment that you only use like a week, two weeks out of the year. and on the construction side, they manage their inventory so much differently, just because I think it’s, it’s much more seen as just a quick means to the end. It’s a tool to get the job done. And so they will buy equipment for a particular job, kind of like what we talked about earlier. And then they are, as soon as that job’s done, it’s out. Like they’re liquidating it. It’s done until whatever job they have next.

Dave Mowitz: Yeah.

Andy Campbell: They’ll bid and then in that bid will be that piece of equipment. And so they’re constantly just getting rid of the equipment, pulling it back. And, and there’s not this idea of kind of building a fleet, worth of equipment for most of these construction contractors.

Dave Mowitz: Well, I still remember sitting in an auction, one of the Steffes’s auctions up in Fargo and talking to a farmer and we were looking at an excavator and he was stunned when he just crawled out of the cab. He was looking, I was going to go in there and take a look at it too, doing the inspection and had gotten the hours off of it. And he says, my God, he said, this is only two years old. How can it have 5,000 hours on it? And Scott later told me, said, well, this is when I was learning about construction equipment too. He says, yeah, that hits the construction firm and it’s running five, six, seven days a week, at least eight hours, sometimes 10, and the summer could be as much as 12, 365. And you can have a machine that’s two years old that has typically three to four times the hours that a tractor would off of a farm.

And so, yeah, it’s that, and that’s true of skid steers too when they come off of all construction equipment. When it’s run, it’s run hard. And this was the thing that I remember Scott Cook at Cook Auction had pointed out about where the source is. Farmer-owned always brings the premium. But he said the mid-sized small diverse contractor, that equipment will also bring a premium too because they take better care of their equipment and they put fewer hours on it than the big operators that are running multiple house constructions, structural construction, or maybe they’re doing highway work where that’s running all the time with people that don’t own the machine running the machine.

Andy Campbell: That’s a good differentiator right there that you said like if you don’t own the machine but you’re running it, you’re not going to take as good a care of it. It’s like you rented a car from enterprise, yeah, hit a pothole. But if you do own it, you’re avoiding that pothole.

Dave Mowitz: Yeah. So let’s ask about numbers. We have skid steers, backhoes and excavators. We’re going to kind of focus on them. The trends that I saw was that inventories are just about nil. They’re about where they have been in the last year. Is this what you found at TractorZoom?

Andy Campbell: Yes. Yeah. So I actually pulled up our backhoe. We have a supply and demand chart that our dealers will use to try to kind of anticipate, the what’s out there and price trends and everything. And I had to double check on the backhoe side because it, the sale, what was sold versus the overall inventory was almost at the peak. it would be pretty jagged because it’s a little bit more seasonal and, and not as much as, you know, what we have for row crop tractors, but it, you know, of what’s on inventory each month, 50 to 75 % of it was sold. And that’s just not something you see with farm equipment, especially not now with supplies higher.

Dave Mowitz: No. no, no, no, not at all. Boy, it’s a whole different world, isn’t it? Because construction has been so brisk and demanding. So that’s going to have an impact on prices. Although the research that I show said asking prices were just about flat. I mean, they hadn’t necessarily gone up from a year ago. So it must be supply is meeting demand here.

Andy Campbell: Mm-hmm. On all the compact construction or on the which ones you see.

Dave Mowitz: Well, that was primarily unused loader backhoes that I saw. Again, excavators would be different, skid steers would be different. That was what I was going to ask you about. What have you been seeing?

Andy Campbell: So I’ve been seeing back hoes, let’s put those to the side for a second. Let’s talk skid steers and compact track loaders. So one of the bigger trends that I’m seeing skid steers and compact track loaders is the proliferation of the compact track loader. So the skid steers with your tracks ever since 2000, you know, I think I don’t know exactly when it was released, but, or when they’re, you know, introduced to the market, but they were only seeing like 5% of the auction market back then. It has grown to almost greater than 80% right now.

And it’s just been a steady increase. Yeah. But I think you’re also talking more construction now. And, and so anyways, so you’ve got a lot more of the compact track loaders. So skid steers, probably a little less popular. I don’t know from a manufacturing standpoint, if they’re selling just as much or even probably less from the manufacturer level, what they were on the value side though, sticking with, you know, the more prolific compact track loaders.

Dave Mowitz: Seriously? Right.

Andy Campbell: And a more recent here, we’d take a quarterly average value. And I trended this thing in 23. Again, you’re post COVID. You’re still a little bit of supply chain issues because you’re at the end of 22 into early part of 23 for, you know, zero to 500 hour compact track loader. They were bringing about $55,000 on average across all of them at auction. as soon as mid 23 started to hit though, this is a steady decline all the way down to Q4, so just at the end of last year of 2024, on average they’re bringing about 38,000. So it has been a steady drop. Again, if exactly.

Dave Mowitz: correctional for the marketplace, I suppose, based on the huge demand during COVID.

Andy Campbell: Exactly. Yes. It’s the, the, there’s a shortage of supply during post COVID. Everybody wanted these. It’s kind of like compact track loaders. You could use them and they’ve got great versatility for any kind of acreage. Well, that’s drawn back. Supply is returned a little bit. And also we’re looking a lot at the farm auctions here. You just have equipment goes where cash flows. And in the past year, year and a half cash has not flown nearly as well. And so that’s drawing down the price.

Now we did see a bump in Q1 of 2025 all the way up until here mid-March. But that, and that’s two things. I mean, the core markets, I don’t know. It hasn’t been fantastic, especially this week, but it is compact track loader buying season. And so we always see a little bit of a bump in the springtime as people gear up for those kinds of projects. And there was, at least if you look in January, there was a little bit of optimism about what’s going to happen with the ag market.

Dave Mowitz:Right.

Andy Campbell: And there was a little bit of a rebound in some commodity markets before the corn market hit the toilet here recently. So that could have accounted for a little bit of a blip here in Q1, but we’ve seen a pretty steep drop off since January of 23.

Dave Mowitz: I was going to ask you after the, because what I saw too was that there was prices had softened and mine were a little more delayed than yours because TractorZoom is constantly on the bubble when it comes to information gathering. You got what, a thousand auctioneers across the United States and then you’re looking at dealer asking prices as well. So daily.

Andy Campbell: Yep, and usually updated daily, usually at 2 a.m. we get it updated so we can see trends happen pretty quick.

Dave Mowitz: By the way, if a farmer wants to access this information and your analysis, they can do that. Go to TractorZoom.com.

Andy Campbell: Yeah. Yeah. They go to tractorzoom.com. We’ll have a blog on there. tractors and pro is another section of our business. It’s more, yeah. Tractors and pro.com is geared more towards dealers, but I’ll do a lot of my heavy analysis, on trackers and pros blog and really talk the nitty gritty of what our self-propelled sprayers doing right now. Wider boom versus shorter boom. Like I’ll get into the, the super detailed there stuff there that dealers may care more about, but Hey, I know some farmers that just love this type of stuff too.

Dave Mowitz: that’s right, yeah.

Andy Campbell: So yeah, TractorZoomPro.com is really where we’re helping out a lot of the dealers and, then lenders at Chattel Appraisals too.

Dave Mowitz: Yeah, pretty amazing what Kyle has done with the company that he started basically coming out of Iowa state and the way that it has grown so enormously and the fund analysis that comes anyway back to where we’re at. So prices have slid. If you were looking for a compact track loader, will the spring be the best time? Should we wait until after this spring a rush hits?

Andy Campbell: Yes, I would. Unless you need it right now for your farming operation, I would avoid competing with people that are gearing up for contracted construction projects. So even if there’s only a couple of those on the other line of the bid, you only need one to bid you up. So if you look at auction, I’d wait if you can. And then so you can then start to focus a little bit more on summertime once some of those come back out. finish jobs and come back out on auction.

Dave Mowitz: Well, here shortly you’re going to be in a tractor cab anyway, tilling or planting. So number two, is the best time of the year to look for this, all construction equipment in the fall after the blush of summer work has taken place? Because construction does, work does peak from running about May all the way to September. Is it?

Andy Campbell: Right, right, you’re gonna be busy.

Dave Mowitz: Again, one of those things you ought to wait towards the end of the year to look at buying.

Andy Campbell: Yes and no. So the one thing if you’re going to any kind of farm auction, if you wait to the end of the year, there is the benefit of like, right, exactly. You’ve got your tax buy purposes, which certainly have some benefit. But then you have everybody else doing it too. And what we see is if, you know, December is the month when prices get elevated across the board. And so we see that too. I’m looking at our supply and demand charts here for comp or for all construction and it peaks every single year.

Dave Mowitz: Yeah, tax buy.

Andy Campbell: December. And so if you can avoid that, that would help. Now you might not know your tax benefits that you need in January and February, but those are the lulls. Again, it’s cold, but if you can find some deals there, you’re going to have less competition.

Dave Mowitz: Probably then pre-harvest sounds like the sweet spot to be looking for this stuff then

Andy Campbell: Right. You know, July’s not bad when I look across the board. so it’s not as good as January and February in terms of if you’re looking for less competition for bidding on less eyeballs, bidding on your stuff. if you can find some stuff then, then it’s not bad. cause the construction stuff is in full swing. They’re not buying stuff. They’re using it. but, but again, you’re going to have less supply out there to, to pick from.

Dave Mowitz: The other question I have, and I know this was the case with RB Auctions, RB actually offers a rebuild package a guy selling off equipment can utilize where they’ll rebuild and repaint construction equipment. I’ve been at some of their sales and you look at three, four year old machines that look like they’re brand new. Is that something to look at or would wanting a farmer built, owned machine, a retirement auction machine be the best to go with. I may have perplexed you with that one, right?

Andy Campbell: Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. You’re, I don’t know. I’m just supposing at this particular point in time. Cause, you know, I’ll speak from our experiences, at least that, if you know the guy and, and trust them, then it’s a great relationship to have because my experience with compact construction equipment is I always break it there. You know, there’s not a piece of it that has not been broken by me and it’ll be, go back to the farm for one day and then I’ll have to walk into the house and tell my dad like, I’m sorry, there’s oil everywhere.

Dave Mowitz: I was going to, bet, yeah, I bet your dad just loves seeing you cut, pull into the yard. What you gonna break now? Yeah.

Andy Campbell: It, it, sometimes it only takes hours. but I break it. And so if you’ve got that guy and you can call them up and kind of have them assist you on future, you know, mishaps that aren’t certainly aren’t your fault. then, then it’s great person to have the back pocket because they are not easy to work on, but yeah.

Dave Mowitz: Well, but you know, the way you break them couldn’t be as bad as sometimes the way they’re being broke on construction sites. So it’s a hose or two or you’re jamming a stump back in and tearing stuff off, know, stuff happens.

Andy Campbell: You would think. Yeah, Stuff does happen a lot.

Dave Mowitz: Yeah. construction equipment, any other, and we’ve talked about skid steers, track skid steers being the hot item there. Backhoes are always popular. Guys have grown up to excavators, both renting and buying used. Are there other pieces of construction equipment that show up in farms? I know wheel loaders are great for feed lots or oftentimes sought out for feed lots, but

Andy Campbell: Yeah, so I think wheel loaders probably synonymous with telehandlers.

Dave Mowitz: my gosh, I’ve left telehand early south, but almost in a way they started out in agriculture, crossed over to construction. Right.

Andy Campbell: Yeah.Right. Yeah. And so I was talking to a dealer just yesterday about those and, and he’s like, there’s a strong distinction between the two, between a telehandler that’s meant for construction versus one that’s meant for farms. And he’s like the farm, can’t just buy one and assume that it’s going to work for your farm. He’s like, you have to make sure that it is agriculturally built because if you’ve got a telehandler on the farm, he’s like, you are ramming it into a manure pile. You’re ramming it into a bale. You’ve got much more force. It’s directed forward.

And then on the construction side, it’s all about the lift and moving something around. And so he said, if you buy a construction and try to use it for the farm, it could work, but it also could break, you know, premature. And so he said, that’s a very big distinction you need to be aware of. It’s make sure you’re buying the right kind of telehandler.

Dave Mowitz: Okay, so I have to ask about that. How do you differentiate with a telehandler? Is it the make? The model? Do you just need to do some, I’m guessing at this point in time, you just need to some research as to what was intended for what.

Andy Campbell: Right. Yeah. Do the research because I’m just looking at all of our telehandlers that we have here and going down the list, Skytrax, JLG’s, Caterpillars, Gales, Genies. Like I’m looking at the five most popular ones and six most popular ones. They’re all different brands. And so there are so many variations out there. I would not be able to tell you one over another. then of those, they all have different models too. so.

Dave Mowitz: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Andy Campbell: There’s a lot.

Dave Mowitz: spend some time researching, which is what you and I do when we get into it. And sometime I’m going to spend a little time looking at, because they will, I remember discovering this when I was first doing work on excavators. And it wasn’t just boom length and it wasn’t breakout capacity and lift capacity. There were also those that had heavy duty booms on them, for example. So I asked,

And I can’t remember who I interviewed about that, but they said, well, you have some excavators that are a little lighter boom because they’re doing light earthwork. And then you have those that are doing breakout work with concrete. And so the boom is built accordingly. I assume with telehandlers that must be the deal as well. So go look at that before you get into the marketplace, I take it.

Andy Campbell: Yes. Yeah, I would certainly do your research. You know, you’re not going to see a plethora of those out there on a lot of farm equipment dealership sites. I think you’re going to see a lot more of those on, you know, maybe a construction dealer site or as a jockey because they have different uses in the north and south and they have seasonal uses too. And so I think I see a lot more of these being shipped back and forth across the States to take advantage of timing of the year or seasonality and usage popularity.

Dave Mowitz: But I suppose the popularity would be higher, true also among livestock operations that are handling a lot of hay and baled hay.

Andy Campbell: Right. Yes. Yeah. You’ve got your cattle operations that are the primary users. Yeah. When I look at telehandlers on our heat map, I mean, just talking about cattle, it’s no surprise of our darkest states that we have. Pennsylvania, Texas, California, and then actually Georgia, which didn’t think that. Yeah. But yes, it’s the Pennsylvania, Texas and California top cattle states.

Dave Mowitz: Right. Dairies. Markets that would be then. Yeah. That would be always fun to have. Here’s an interesting observation about this. I have to state that again. Yep. The cold is still there. Here’s an interesting observation about telehandlers. They’re on farms are a little rare. You get to the big hay operations out west, you see them more often because they’re stacking big squares or large rounds in buildings.

So they’re selling off to dairies in the off season. But in Europe, almost every farm has a tail handler and they use them all the time. Of course, a lot of them have livestock in every farm as well. So I suppose the numbers in this case would be higher, as I mentioned, out west and in the northeast and southeast when it comes to dairies and livestock operations. And by livestock, I don’t mean hogs either. or poultry, this would be dairy primarily.

Andy Campbell: Yeah, yeah, forage type of businesses and that that makes sense at least with the map that we’re seeing, you know, we only have United States maps, so I can’t go over to France. But, but yes, I imagine that would be the same case there.

Dave Mowitz: Yeah. Yeah.

So in summation, when we’re looking at construction equipment, because it’s such a wide variety of things, it seems to me that researching the machine, researching its background, its construction, its reputation in the industry would be crucial before you enter into this kind of unknown market if you haven’t bought before.

Andy Campbell: Yeah, and it can be incredibly valuable. We haven’t even gotten into like attachments that can go on skid steers and stuff, but as the farmer ages too, mean there’s things that used to be able to just manhandle and take care of with a little bit of, know, throw a little bit of more of your back into it. Can’t anymore. so again, incredibly beneficial types of machines, but yes, you’ve got to be able to work on it and can your dealer work on it or is there another maintenance person nearby if you can’t? So those are all things that are just different enough than the typical tractors that you’ve been working on that need to be thought through before you go out and buy the cheapest one you can find on auction.

Dave Mowitz: Well, and as we mentioned before, if you’re buying in that area and you don’t know, for example, if it was farmer owned, you make the assumption it was well taken care of. Inspection of the machine is so important. Get on it, start it up before the sale or on the dealer’s lot and operate it. Drive it around. Lift that mast up and down, extend it out if it’s a tail handler. Run the excavator boom to see if it runs smoothly. Uh, listen to the transmission when you run. I remember on excavators, one of the big inspection points was spin it around. So crucial to if you’re, if it’s on a, uh, if it’s an excavator that’s on a spindle that, that turns that way, because that’s where a lot of damage can happen depending on how it’s being used. um, yeah, do your due diligence before you get into the machine and then you don’t buy a bunch of, um, maintenance and repair costs that in this machine you brought home.

Andy Campbell:Right? Yeah, yeah, I agree. That’s probably the best thing you can do is your due diligence, the research, like you mentioned at the beginning, check the rubber. Uh, that’s one of the, the early indicators, uh, that you can see. And then the other one that we also see a little bit is, you going to run it up and down the road? Uh, like do you need to traverse long periods or long distances to get to the next farm or are you going to put it on a trailer? And if so tracks, you know, are heating up. and so you just ask that question of how

You know, this is how far I need to go and I don’t want to take forever to get there. Can this actually do that? Don’t just assume that it can.

Dave Mowitz: Yeah, and then if you’re your dad, he may want to buy a machine that’s a little more durable, less likely for yeah, first. Yeah. So good. We’ve we’ve.

Andy Campbell: Exactly, you might have to compensate for some less than stellar operators.

Dave Mowitz: just on the side and we can edit this out. Anything we haven’t covered that I glossed over.

Andy Campbell: We’ve covered a lot, but this has been good.

Dave Mowitz: Well, it’s a wide world. It’s a different, it’s a different deal. So, and I didn’t come prepared.

Andy Campbell: It is. You’ve done extremely well for that.

Dave Mowitz: Well, having I would always do three or four times a year, I do a piece of construction equipment for the magazine. And of course, not knowing anything about it, I would sit there and do, I always called it a knowledge journey. I would just get on the computer and I are on the internet and just start searching for any information that was out there and then putting it all together. So it was fun to get in construction equipment because it wasn’t the same old, same old tractors and combines. So yeah, Jordan let you know I prepared for sprayers and tillage equipment. We already covered that. He knew this.

Andy Campbell: Yeah. Yeah. You can believe my surprise when he gets on there and does the introductions and like we’re talking tillage. I’m like, Oh my God.

Dave Mowitz: Yeah, poor gosh. Yeah, commodity classic and getting RSV. What was I thinking? I think I looked at her schedule and I misread it. So I’ll get back to the schedule. The next one is bailing, hay equipment. Yeah, I think it is. yeah.

Andy Campbell: Is it OK? that’ll be good. I just got done talking to Vermeer. We now actually taught a class for a Vermeer Summit, and so I am well versed in Baylor’s right now.

Dave Mowitz: Okay. Okay. Well, I’m going to end. We will cut this out and then we’ll put this ending on it so we can end it. Well, you can join us again in another month. Andy and I are going to be talking about hay equipment, of course. In agriculture, that means the large round baler. But it’d also be fun to kind of look at the large square baler. It is a regional thing, large hay operators.

I like to run it, but I’m beginning to see more more large square balers showing up in Midwest farms, but large round bales and maybe we can get into ubiquitous rakes. Although that’s always a tough market to track. I have never really found any consistency when it comes to the side hay equipment. think.

Andy Campbell: Yeah, it can be a challenge for sure. It can be commoditized a little bit. There’s less technology, more iron. But then you’ve got, you got bail processors in there and even the small squares, they’re making a bit of a comeback.

Dave Mowitz: Yeah, yeah, I’ve seen that with the guys that are picking up the extra money that comes with selling off large squares. And I’m a little stunned what small square bales can bring. I buy from straw down the road from, I’m paying five to seven bucks a bale for straw. Yeah, well, I’m cheap, so that always bothers me. Anyway, thank you, Andy. We’ll talk again next month. Take care. You bet. Bye.

Andy Campbell: Thank you, Dave. Yep. I’m looking forward to it. Thanks for having us. Yes.