Prescott Shibles, CEO of Farm Journal, publishers of the Machinery Pete brand, was interviewed last week by Jacob Donnelly, A Media Operator, at Omeda OX Summit in Chicago. 

Shibles informed marketers of the interest rate challenge facing the entire ag equipment industry, citing an example from Titan Machinery earnings reports.

“The biggest pain point right now in the machinery space is interest rates. So Titan Machinery is a very large ... It's the largest Case IH dealer in the world and they're publicly traded. And so you can see that they sold $1.6 billion worth of agricultural products last year and they lost $28 million. 24 million of that was interest from floor plans. So the equipment that's sitting on their lot, they're paying interest on it. Three years ago, that was two and a half million. So interest is the single biggest ... Back to the thing about finding problems and finding systemic solutions to those problems, the interest expense is the core thing that we're focused on. If we can deliver a faster equipment turnover and better sales productivity, we have an ROI, we can actually measure the ROI of the solution.”

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