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.

Nearly anything to make an agricultural combine simpler and crop harvesting more productive could be considered a breakthrough. AGCO says they’ve done just that.

The fact that Deere & Co. is suing AGCO and Precision Planting is no more surprising than Case IH filing a complaint with the U.S. Dept. of Justice that Deere’s acquisition of Precision Planting would create a monopoly in the high speed planting market.

Mark Core of Vermeer Corp. and Richard Fox-Marrs of JCB Inc., top executives from two long established, family owned manufacturers of specialty farm equipment, explore their strategies for helping their dealers be profitable by providing services that go beyond traditional product support. Also, providing highly innovative products gives them an edge that competing dealers don’t have.