Agco Gleaner

      Well, we received a new Titan Trader magazine in the mail today. For those of you who are not familiar, Titan is a Case IH mega dealer with stores in 7 states in the Midwest and West. One hundred forty seven pages of used equipment for sale. I don't like the mega dealer concept, but that is the way things have gone for the most part. I counted 197 used combines for sale in the catalog, and not one Gleaner. They have multiple of about every other brand. It got me to wondering. Is there any way to find out how many new Gleaners are being sold by AGCO? Not much around here. No Fendts either. This winter when the new Gleaner calenders were at our dealership i noticed all 12 months had the same combine in the picture, just different angles on the photos. Seemed kind of cheap to me. When Keven Bien died it was like all the excitement about Gleaner died with him. I would just like to know how many Gleaners are being sold compared to say 5 years ago.

AGCO seems to keep a pretty low profile, at least around here anyway. It's good to hear that they are selling some combines.

Well Agco's purchase of MF introduced them to the world. I remember Bob Ratlif telling of the first European meeting - Libia ( MF sold 30,000 tractor to Kaddafi who put hiis own licensed perkins engine in them) India, where Gandhi's nephew was the MF liaison to African nations galore who nationalized the tractor sales and on and on. He said he kept and old MF man by his side to explain all the introductions.  He said he thought to himself ""what have I got myself into" .  Then the purchase of Fendt which is the  best selling tractor in Germany and many other nations, to the Fella knuverland group and on and on. Brazil is high profile  MF as is Argentina. Then there is China - they build Gleaner R55's and Hesston balers there for Asian sale branded as MF.  It pains me to say, the dealer organization which was decimated by the German occupation for 5 years,  and then the early struggle with SAME before MF,  has not been friendly to market shares enjoyed by them elsewhere in the world.  Deere, Case and Kubota got a big headstart in the market.  Agco's path to the future will be the AGRev company stores. They have a really good leader (from Deere) who is making great strides in finding the way to make company stores customer friendly.  As old dealers die and or go broke or age to the point of not being aggressive - these will fill in the gaps in the next 15 years. ( you don't find many who fell off a turnip truck with 3 million in cash who want to marry a farm equipment business 24-7 for low single digit  ROA's.)  And for those who say well AGCO jerked my dealer's contract - there are laws against that without reasons.  It gets complicated and there were some bad decisions made by bean counters over sales depts - bean counters win every time but very few dealers  fall in this catagory.. Thats enough for now.