Most of the numbers are in on farm machinery sales in 2018 and, all in all, it wasn’t too bad of a year for many/most equipment dealers and manufacturers.

Based on the results of the Western Equipment Dealers Assn.’s 2018 Cost of Doing Business Study, North American farm equipment dealers are making progress in improving a number of metrics typically used to measure their financial performance.

If I’ve learned anything in the nearly 14 years I’ve been with Farm Equipment and Ag Equipment Intelligence it’s to not bet against the dealers who participate in our surveys. This is especially true when it comes to what direction the industry is heading.

An old Danish proverb says it best: “It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.” Last Friday, Deere & Co. issued its 2018 fiscal year earnings report and, to say the least, the Big Green Machine had a pretty good year.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City released it third quarter Ag Finance Databook last Friday and its headline read “Large Scale Financing Drives Ag Lending Activity Higher.”

After several difficult years, it looks as if U.S. and Canadian farm equipment dealers are back on firm footing. With that said, probably the best thing the industry can do moving forward is to not compare current conditions to the boom years of 2008-14, which were not typical, and acknowledge that the ag equipment business is actually returning to a more normal state.

Let’s face it. No compromise is going to be good enough for those who are demanding total access to the software that has been developed to make everything work together on today’s tractors. It’s an all or nothing deal. But you have to give the California Farm Bureau Federation (CFBF), which represents farmers, and Far West Equipment Dealers Assn. (FWEDA), which represents dealers, credit for trying.

We used to say, “All important decisions are made on the basis of insufficient data.” That’s probably not the case these days. In fact, with data coming at us from all angles and every direction, “paralysis by analysis” would seem to be more fitting. What is even more correct is “uncertainty reigns,” but then this is nothing new for agriculture.

“I grew up in Missouri and the old school approach to storing grain was to turn the fans in your bins on for 2 weeks and let them run. Then you’d shut them off in the middle of winter and then run them for a week, shut them off, then you run them for another week in the spring and you were good to go. We needed to get away from this type of practice,” says Ian Wade, director of the dealer division for IntelliFarms, a firm that manufactures systems and equipment for monitoring stored grain.