The farm machinery market is full of surprises heading into 2026, and according to Machinery Pete, some of the shifts are unprecedented. While auction volume is climbing and more farmers are making hard decisions, the story looks very different depending on whether producers are shopping for new equipment or turning to the used market.
Across the mid-South and beyond, financial pressure, longer trade cycles and stubbornly high new equipment prices are reshaping how farmers buy and sell iron.
“Buckle Up and Hold On”
Walk any equipment lot in the mid-South today, and the mood is unmistakable.
“Honestly, I think right now, the general mood of the farmers that I deal with is buckle up and hold on,” says Kirk Witcher, owner of Witcher Auctions, LLC, in Wynne, Ark.
Witcher Auctions, a family auction business, turned 50 in 2022. That same year Witcher and his wife took over the company from his father. He’s watched the cycles of agriculture play out, but it’s the current uncertainty that’s been lingering with little clarity about when conditions might improve.
“We had had some forecasts come out from different media outlets that we could lose as many as 30% to 40% of our farmers here in the mid-South,” Witcher says. “I don’t think it’s going to end up being nearly that bad, but it’s definitely making everybody take a hard look at their finances, whether they want to go ahead and retire now, even if that wasn’t the plan, or maybe they just want to do something else.”
That reckoning, he says, is translating directly into more auction activity.
“There’s definitely an uptick in the number of auctions,” Witcher says.
Three Distinct Waves of Sellers
Witcher says nearly any auction company you talk to is seeing more farm auctions on the calendar for 2026. But not all sellers are arriving for the same reasons. Instead, he says the market is being shaped by three very different waves of farmers.
The first group consists of producers who decided months ago that retirement was coming. The second wave made that decision during harvest. But it’s the third group, Witcher says, that has arrived more abruptly and under more financial strain.
“You’ve got a wave of people that probably right about now are meeting with their bankers hoping that they can farm again because they don’t feel like they can do anything else,” Witcher says.
As winter progresses, he says those conversations often turn more sobering.
“By probably mid-February, you’ll have a lot of guys that’ll come to the realization that either they can’t, or they know it’s madness to try to go ahead and farm again and potentially dig a hole even deeper,” he says.
He adds that selling behavior has changed noticeably over the past couple of years. Instead of just producers looking to unload any surplus equipment they might not be using, he’s witnessing a bigger shift to selling everything.
More Auctions, But Fewer Late-Model Machines
It’s not a trend transpiring just in the mid-South. Greg Peterson, who’s more commonly known as Machinery Pete, is also seeing more auctions across the country. But when he digs into the data, he says the story becomes more complicated.
“The number of auctions is up,” Peterson says. “We saw a 4.5% jump in the raw number of machinery auctions in 2025.”
However, he says the amount of newer equipment sold at auction dropped sharply.
“The amount of new to 3-year-old equipment items sold at auction last year dropped over 50%,” Peterson says. “Tractors were down 51%. Combines were down 52%.”
Peterson says that divergence is partly tied to what happened a year earlier, when dealers flooded auctions with late-model used equipment.
“In 2025, that bullseye shifted to the American farmer and the Canadian farmer who was under financial pressure,” he says. “We’re seeing more people retire at the top end. We’re seeing more restructures. We’re seeing more forced sales.”
He describes the market as increasingly K-shaped. If a producer is on the top end of that “K,” then they are choosing to sell and stop the equity drain, but those at the bottom of the “K” are experiencing lending pressure that’s forcing them to sell.
A Used Equipment Signal Like Never Before
Despite the pressure, Peterson says one of the biggest surprises came late in the year, and it’s something he hasn’t seen in more than three decades of tracking machinery values.
“The end of ’25 and early ’26, I’m seeing something that I’ve never seen before in my almost 36 and a half years now tracking this,” Peterson says. “And basically that’s a little uptick in the value of good-condition used equipment.”
Historically, he says, that signal always meant one thing: a correlation to positivity in new equipment sale, as well.
“This is the first time I’ve seen this disconnect,” he adds.
While new equipment sales on the large-grain side continue to fall sharply, Peterson says used values began stabilizing earlier in the year and then moved higher.
“Toward the end of February of ’25, we started to see some stabilizing, and that held through the year,” he says. “Then we get to November, December, and values went up.”
Longer Trade Cycles Show Up in Hours
Peterson says another unusual trend has been quietly building: Machines are showing significantly higher hours than what the industry once considered normal.
“If you go and look at what used to be the number, like 500 hours [of use,] that’s starting to creep up to 750,” he says. “What used to be 250 hours is now closer to 1,500 to 1,700 hours.”
He says that reflects longer trade cycles and hesitation across operations.
New Equipment Sales Continue to Slide
Those longer trade cycles are mirrored in new equipment sales data. According to the latest Association of Equipment Manufacturers December Flash Report:
- Sales of new four-wheel-drive tractors fell nearly 42% over the past 12 months
- While sales of self-propelled combines dropped nearly 36%
Casey Seymour, host of the “Moving Iron” podcast, says the price environment is catching up with buyers.
“This is kind of like the chickens coming home to roost on the equipment side of the business,” Seymour says. “The percentages haven’t changed, but the dollars are significantly higher.”
As a result, he says more farmers are choosing to keep equipment longer.
“With all makes all models of 1-year-old combines on the marketplace right now, I’m talking 2025 model year combines ... under 900 are on the market right now. That’s all makes and all models: John Deere, Gleaner, etc.,” Seymour says. “So that’s going to continue to hinder what you see happen as far as feeding the supply of this equipment on the space there.”
He expects that behavior to extend into next year.
“You’re going to see a similar pattern,” Seymour says. “To me, that’s setting up the building blocks for what the new normal looks like.”
Shortage of Used Equipment
Peterson says some auctioneers are now warning about a potential shortage of 7-to-10-year-old used equipment, a segment farmers increasingly want.
“I first threw a buoy in water, I think it was December of ’24, January ’25, in a Farm Journal column I wrote,” he says. “And I just said, hey, things are different now. Basically, dealers worked through that excess inventory. It took them one year this time, which was 2024. And during the last huge, the biggest downturn I ever saw was back to 2013 to 2015. That took three years for dealers to work through that excess inventory. “
With new equipment prices staying elevated, but not as much equipment in the used equipment space compared to 2024, Peterson says farmers have pivoted.
“They’re looking for the best-condition used they can find,” he says. “That’s why we’re seeing auction prices tick up.”
Will New Prices Ever Come Down?
Auction prices might be ticking up, but the price of new equipment hasn’t come down. Seymour says a broad price cut from equipment manufacturers would relieve some pressure today, but warns that could also come with consequences.
“I could see a manufacturer coming up like a trend level of sorts, similar to when you go buy a pickup truck and you have different trim packages: you have XL, XLT, so on and so forth, all the way through platinum,” Seymour says. “I can see something like that coming into play where there’s different tiers of equipment.”
He says a broad-based price cut, like a 15% to 20% reduction, isn’t likely.
“That’s a scenario that would be short-term gain for a long-term pain, just because of the fact that everything on the used market now has to readjust what’s happened in the marketplace,” he adds.
Trump Says Environmental Regulations “Makes the Equipment Much More Expensive”
During a roundtable discussion with farmers in December, President Donald Trump says the administration will soon target environmental regulations on equipment.
“The other thing I’d like to add … we’re going to also give the tractor companies … we’re going to take off a lot of the environmental restrictions that they have on machinery,” Trump said during the roundtable. “It’s ridiculous.”
He argued added systems meant to meet environmental rules have driven up price tags and made equipment harder to operate and repair.
“You buy it, it’s got so much equipment on it for the environmental, it doesn’t do anything except it makes the equipment much more expensive and much more complicated to work,” he said, adding, “it’s not as good as the old days.”
Trump said the administration’s goal is to remove what he called “nonsense” and require manufacturers to pass savings along to farmers, saying “farming equipment has gotten too expensive.”
Machinery Pete says if that does happen, it would send late-model, used equipment prices spiraling.
“That would be the most interesting petri dish of my Machinery Pete career right there, because you’re right, I’ve just been relaying the truth of what this good condition pre-def stuff is selling for. So even the last number of years when it’s been difficult on the grain side, we saw rising prices on pre-DEF,” Peterson says. “That’s what farmers want. That’s the bottom line.”
A Market Finding Its New Shape
Peterson says the industry might already be settling into a pattern it hasn’t seen before.
“We’re kind of in a set pattern here now, a new pattern we’ve never seen before,” he says. “Tighter supply of used, farmers more focused on used, and the big question is whether there’s any action at the manufacturer level.”
Seymour says if corn prices eventually push higher, demand for new equipment could rise, but supply could struggle to keep pace.
“There’s not enough available equipment on the marketplace right now to service a big run,” he says. “There wasn’t a lot of profit on the farm in 2025.”
For now, the divide remains clear: new equipment sales continue to slide, used machinery is finding support, and farmers are navigating a market unlike anything they’ve seen before.
