NY 986: I agree that your equipment can make or break you. Reliable is the key not cost. I have cheap equipment that is dead reliable and expensive stuff that is not.
The one case I can think of equipment failure breaking a fellow is my cousin. He bought an new IH 2+2 right when things started to get tough in the early 1980s. IRC it was a 3588. The first year he had moderate issues. None really cost him much in repair costs but the down time really hit him. He missed a narrow planning window of just 5 days in 1981. I let him use my JD 4440 at night when we where done. So he was running it 10PM to 6AM, eight hours. Compared to running his own 16-18 hours a day. He was only able to get around half his corn planted in those five days. It rained and we did not get back into the fields for three weeks. We where behind to begin with. Then we had a early killing frost. All his later planted corn got hit hard. He was not able to harvest any of it for #2 corn. He chopped a lot of it and feed it up but it was poor quality of feed. The market took off higher and he had to buy corn to fill lower priced contracts. Then the next year the IH 3588 was out of warranty and hit him hard in repair costs. This finished him off. He sold out the next spring. I know some fellows that talked about how he went into debt on equipment. NOT true. When he bought that IH tractor he was debt free. He even had all of his operating money in the bank too. Loosing half him corn crop put him into debt. The falling markets and over $10K in repairs the next year finished him off. He sold out in 1983 while he had equity to do something else. He bought a dozer and pull scrapper. He did any kind of dirt work he could find. He retired last year with 10 employees and a line of paid for CAT equipment. His boy is doing well growing the business. He cusses anytime he sees a IH 2+2
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