Wild bidding wars erupt at used-tractor auctions across the U.S.
There are two kinds of optimum strategies for farmers, and there has been a long term shift from one to the other.<p>The older strategy is for a farm to be no bigger than a single family can handle, and to be as self-sufficient as possible.  Here equipment is run as close to breaking down as it can be without actually being broken down.  A tractor would be used &lt;30 days a year (planting, fertilizing, weeding, harvest) and sit idle otherwise.  It doesn&#x27;t make sense to pay for a super-expensive machine to sit idle.  The optimum is lowest cost to purchase, lowest cost to repair, cheapest option that can get the job done.  A farmer builds a collection of nearly-broken down machines over years to have backup options if one isn&#x27;t working when needed.<p>The other optimum is to have the largest, most effective, most efficient machines and use them enough to justify it. This makes sense at the industrial farming scale or as a contracting business where the equipment is owned by someone who does contract jobs for many smaller farmers.  For this case the tractor needs to be running and making money as many days a year as it can; any down time is money lost.<p>The shift over years has been that the second strategy produces more crops with lower expenses than the first, and is taking over to the extent it is almost impossible to run a small farm without going bankrupt.