U.S.-Canada Trade Spat Leaves Farmer’s New Holland Combine Stranded Up North

A farmer and custom harvesting business in Calumet, Okla., finds itself smack dab in the middle of the U.S. and Canada’s ongoing border trade quarrel, and it’s pretty ugly.

Ryan Sorrels, who goes by @Sorrels97 on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, purchased a used 2008 New Holland CX8080 walker combine about a month ago from a dealer up in Saskatchewan, Canada.

Sorrels says he needs the combine to finish up harvest for his customers, and he only uses walker combines because he doesn’t have time to swap concaves between jobs. He cannot use a rotor-based combine, he emphatically states multiple times in his social media post.

That much-needed New Holland walker combine never made it to the border, heck it never made it off the dealer lot where Sorrels purchased it. That’s because a new U.S.-Canada border trade regulation went into effect at midnight on Aug. 18, just days before Sorrels expected his much-need harvester to cross the border and start its southward journey to its forever home in Oklahoma.

Talk about bad timing.

“The Trump administration and some of them decided that to get this machine over the border we need to know where every ounce of steel on this combine — built in Zedelgem, Belgium — where it was smelted, where it was forged, and where it was cast. So that’s anything from the mainframe to the pulleys to the engine block, the rods, the crank, the cam — every piece of steel on this combine, we need to know where it came from,” he says in a video posted to X on Aug. 19. “And I cannot get this combine across the border, and they’re telling me I’m screwed.”

The new regulation that is “screwing” Sorrels, and his used combine purchase, is “CSMS # 65936570 - GUIDANCE: Section 232 Additional Steel Derivative Tariff Inclusion Products”.

You can read the full text of the trade guidance here.

The new guidance slaps a 50% tariff on imported steel products from Canada, and requires detailed reporting of each individual steel component’s country of origin, for tariff accounting purposes, before the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol will let it cross the border.

U.S. Custom Harvesters, Inc., Speaks Up

That new guidance applies to combines like the one Sorrels purchased, but not to tillage tools, according to Mandi Seren, executive director, U.S. Custom Harvesters, Inc.

Currently, its unclear to many in the ag industry exactly what types of farm equipment are subject to the new guidance and which machines are not.

Sorrels’ custom harvesting business is a member of U.S. Custom Harvesters, Inc.

Seren also tells Farm Journal this new regulation is already saddling Canadian farm equipment manufacturers like AGI, MacDon, and others with hundreds of thousands of dollars in extra operational costs.

“Our governments, whether you’re American or Canadian, are acting like petulant children, and I cannot get this combine across the border, because everything they need to know to get this combine across the border, will probably take a minimum of eight years to figure out. This is a 2008 model machine, and it’s been on the North American continent ever since, it’s been here a minute, almost 20 years,” Sorells adds.

“If you’re a farmer in the United States and you are going to try to get a MacDon header — and I’m not throwing you guys under the bus, I’m throwing the American government under the bus — but if you’re going to buy something used out of Canada, whether it’s a auger, a header, a combine, a trailer, anything, whatever it is, they will not let it across the border because they need to know where every single ounce of steel on that thing was manufactured, and its bulls---. It’s a crock of s---.”

Farm Journal has reached out to several Canadian farm equipment manufacturers, as well as the Association for Equipment Manufacturers (AEM), for comment, and we have not received any official statements or comments as of the posting of this article.

In an update posted to X.com on Aug. 20 (embedded above), Sorrels claims USDA Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins and President Donald Trump are aware of the situation.

“My entire life and everything I’ve worked for for the last 20 years of my life hangs in the balance, and I’m trying not to overstep my bounds, but social media is pretty powerful,” Sorrels says. “But I’ve talked to some people here in Oklahoma — congressmen, senators — and they’re working on it. But right now, everything is kind of hanging in the balance, and I’m pretty p---ed off about it. And I got every right to be mad.

“I’m being railroaded right now by the country I was born in and the country I love, and right now they’re a bunch of f---ing kids and acting like petulant children, and I’m done with this. I’ve had enough,” he adds.

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