John Deere rebellion

One of the local old-timers pulled his 1967 John Deere into the driveway today, and shut it down. That's the signal he's got time to socialize. He's got at least half a dozen Deere tractors, so naturally, that's what we end up chatting about.

While we're chatting, we're continuously interrupted by gravel trucks heading home. The local gravel baron recently sold out to a big-city outfit for a sum rumoured to be well into the hundreds of millions.

Buddy makes the observation that, under the old owner, those trucks wouldn't have been heading home till seven or eight in the evening, whereas we're witnessing a steady parade of hopper trucks heading to the yard, at a very leisurely pace, well before five o'clock.

Rumour has it that in the near future the price of gravel will double and those hopper trucks will be taking gravel Brampton way, but that's just hearsay.

Buddy mentions that he's got a mid '70's Deere that he's had for decades, and it's worth more today than it was when he bought it. That's kind of unusual. There's not much stuff you bought in the seventies that's worth more today. The right kind of art, maybe, and real estate of course, but... farm tractors?

Seems that on the new tractors everything is computer dependant, and the computer codes, the software that's the operating system, are proprietary intellectual property. When your late model John Deere breaks down out in the field, you don't fix 'n go.

Nope, you call JD HQ in Moline Illinois.

That seems to work ok for the big-time cash croppers and the corporate farms, but it doesn't work for your family farmers, the people to whom it matters if you can get another year out of the old rig before you commit a quarter million bucks to a new one.

These are the people bidding up the price of the old John Deeres, and avoiding the new ones.