A line graph of the typical forage harvester market would look a lot like a rollercoaster — thrilling ascents and deep drops, though the lows tend to last much longer than the highs. “With forage harvesters, it’s feast or famine,” says Casey Seymour on the latest Moving Iron podcast. “There’s no steady business on the used side. You have to have really high milk prices or a drought to make that forage harvester move, and we don’t have either one of those conditions right now.”
New Moving Iron co-host Greg “Machinery Pete” Peterson agrees. “Outside of those conditions that you describe, there’s not a lot of spike in activity,” he says. As producers start getting ready for haylage season, some dealers might expect a bit more activity in the market for forage harvesters, AKA “choppers,” but at the moment, Seymour says, it’s just “bumping along.”
While both have seen an occasional old pull-type forage harvester at auction, those models have become rare, especially in the past five to ten years. “When I see them, they make me smile,” Peterson says. It’s been a busy week for him, traveling to three states for auctions, and he has noticed an optimistic outlook among buyers and sellers of ag equipment. “We are starting to see a strengthening on auction prices,” he reports. “Over the past couple of months, the general attitude is more hopeful with what has transpired politically.”
Adam Verner from Elite Ag, a dealership in southern Georgia, and used equipment specialist Aaron Fintel join the podcast this week to offer their perspectives on the forage harvester market. Verner has seen dairies in his area relying more on custom chopping services rather than investing in their own equipment. Beef cattle producers, however, have been more active in chopping their own silage, creating, he says, “a little uptick in the 500 to 600 horsepower market, mainly on the used side.”
Fintel is seeing similar activity for lower horsepower forage harvesters. “If there is a chopper that is hot right now, it’s that. We have some big feedlots that have their own choppers, but the bigger dairies are, for the most part, using custom services.” While the “chase for a thousand horsepower” is still being run by custom service providers, Fintel says even some of those businesses have dropped down to slightly lower horsepower equipment.
“It’s not like combines, where everything is getting bigger,” Seymour says. “On the chopper side, you have these swings from bigger to smaller to bigger. You have that ebb and flow.”
