In this episode of On the Record, brought to you by Associated Equipment Distributors, we take a look at a recent lawsuit between Case IH dealer Burks Tractor and Monarch Tractor. In the Technology Corner, Noah Newman catches up with the precision crew at John Deere dealer Riesterer & Schnell for an inside look at their most popular product in 2025. Also in this episode, highlights from the dealer panel discussion held during the Farm Equipment Manufacturer’s Assn.’s Fall Convention in Las Vegas and a look at how dealers’ forecast for 2025 compare to what they are currently reporting.
This episode of On the Record is brought to you by Associated Equipment Distributors — the leading association in North America for the equipment distribution industry. Don’t miss the 2026 AED Summit – January 19-21 in Dallas, TX!
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On November 18, 2025, TechCrunch published news of a lawsuit filed by Idaho-based dealership Burks Tractor against Monarch Tractor for breach of contract and violating warranty after the California-based startup’s Monarch’s tractors failed to operate autonomously.
The dealership claims the 10 tractors it purchased via interest-bearing financing for nearly $800,000 are defective and did not live up the driver-optional, or autonomous, claims of the company.
Burks Tractor’s claims it purchased the 10 tractors from Monarch starting in early 2024 with the intent of being among the California-based startup’s first retail dealers. Burks claims Monarch misrepresented the tractors as “fully autonomous and not limited by location or time.”
The article states that Monarch attempted to make the units work autonomously but failed and eventually admitted the limitations but refused to take back the defective inventory.
According to TechCrunch, the suit is now in federal court.
Ag Equipment Intelligence reviewed a November 19 letter from the Monarch Tractor’s HR department to 102 employees that warned of pending layoffs while communicating that the firm was moving to a new business plan of direct licensing for software and development to OEM customers.
An industry insider told Ag Equipment Intelligence that the troubles of the lawsuit and staff layoffs were not a result of the economic downturn but rather due to an avoidance of making necessary changes to strategy. The Monarch story, we were told, is another example of where the agtech industry’s founders and engineers are so far removed from the real-world of ag production that they can’t comprehend the changes that are needed to make their inventions work.
This week’s Dealer on the Move is Acme Equipment. The Kubota dealer opened a new location in Minot, N.D., its fourth store in the state.
I tagged along with the precision crew at John Deere dealer Riesterer and Schnell in eastern Wisconsin last week. Among the several takeaways from the visit, they told me there’s one precision tool in particular that’s really paying off for farmers right now
“Big one we’re utilizing here into harvest is AutoPath. That would be something we set up in the spring with putting a receiver on the planter and mapping every single corn row through the field. That basically sets up for our application passes and harvest passes to where that equipment pulls into the field, knows where every single corn row is in the field, to be the most efficient through the field as possible. The customer doesn’t have to count rows when they’re getting in with the sprayer or the combine or the sidedress machine. It automatically knows where they need to be in that field, and it continues to put those passes in the same exact spot if you’re pulling in multiple times with an application piece. There’s been a huge take rate on that. Once customers utilize it, they often question why they didn’t do it earlier.”
I’ll have much more from my visit with Trevor soon on PrecisionFarmingDealer.com.
As of November 24, corn prices were $4.23, down 9 cents from our last episode. Soybeans closed at $11.23, down 4 cents. And wheat closed at $5.22, down 14 cents.
During the Farm Equipment Manufacturers Association Fall Convention in Las Vegas in October, four dealer executives took the stage to share their expectations of independent manufacturers. The discussion covered a number of topics from used equipment to the challenges they face from the major line OEMs as it relates to doing business with the shortline manufacturers.
Tim Brannon, president of AGCO dealership B&G Equipment in Tennessee, shared the cost impact some dealers are enduring on their used equipment inventory in a high interest environment.
“You can look at some of the Fastline, Machinery Pete, some of the machinery people, there’s some dealers packing $300,000,000 and $400,000,000 of used equipment. They’re paying interest on it. We figured out one of them, that was over $1,000 per day, per store, on 29 stores. Folks, that’s unsustainable. In Kentucky, we have AgRev because Boyd Equipment called up AGCO and said, “We’re no longer in the business”, called up Claas, “We’re no longer in the ag business.”
Eric Retuerskiold, president of Wisconsin-based Case IH and Kubota dealer Johnson Tractor, highlighted some of the realities dealers face from their major manufacturers when as dealers they invest time, talent and dollars in shortlines. Here’s what he and Brannon had to say on the topic.
Eric Reuterskiold: “That’s becoming a very, very big issue currently. Our majors have stated to us that they’re only going to grow with dealers that don’t have competing lines. So they want exclusive rights to your lots, to our stores. And while you can sign up anything, we can become a dealer for anybody, but they’re saying if I want to buy another location today, they’re not going to let me do it or sign me up if I have a competing line. So it’s huge. And it’s not just one manufacturer. We have a couple of different majors and they’re each saying that.”
Tim Brannon: “Every single dealer, every single location has its own special needs. You’ve got areas where certain products are hot and others where they really won’t sell. And this again adds to the bottom line. Anything that adds to the bottom line as far as a product should be welcomed onto a dealer’s life because it gets more customers in to look at the big three or four. Why would they want to take these guys off the lot and alienate those customers and send them to somebody else? It makes no sense.”
“I’ve been there for a bunch of years. I was calling on dealers. And I saw a dealer that started selling my brand new tractor and losing out because he had a shortline. And people would come in buying his shortline, and all of a sudden, they started buying his tractors, my tractors.”
Cami Erickson, president of North Star Ag in Tower City, N.D., joined the panel representing the shortline-only dealer perspective. Here’s what she had to say on how shortline-only dealers can find a greater position due to purity in mainline dealerships.
“So where we come into play and kind of how we started and ran our business over the last 16 years is that anybody that the mainlines don’t want to, so they’re saying purity and they’re saying, “Hey, you have to service our stuff over the shortlines,” that’s where we kind of come into play. Sometimes they can buy them from a mainline but they don’t get the service and the after sale. So then they’ll come to us and say, “Hey, can you service this? Can you warranty this? Whatever problem we’re having, we can’t get them to come out and do it because they don’t get the backing from the shortlines, maybe on the major side,” where we’re strictly that way. We know how to deal with it on that side of it.”
“So I guess that’s kind of where we come into play sometimes where we have competing things, or is when they let a mainline stock one particular product but they don’t let us stock it because the mainline stocks it. Then we have issues with with like, “Hey, why can’t we have the full line?” We want the full line of shortlines if it’s accessible to our business and stuff like that. So we have certain manufacturers that won’t allow us to stock X, but then they don’t want to do business with their current mainline or their local mainline, they want to do it with us. So I guess they kind of have it on both sides of it. I understand only wanting to provide one product, but then for us it’s kind of the opposite.”
New equipment sales have been a challenge for dealers and manufacturers alike in 2025, with large ag equipment sales down 26.5% through October, according to the Assn. of Equipment Manufacturers.
Preliminary results of Ag Equipment Intelligence’s 2026 Dealer Business Outlook & Trends survey show over two-thirds of dealers are reporting their revenue from new equipment sales will be down vs. 2024, largely in line with their forecast from a year ago.
While the total percentage of dealers reporting their new equipment revenues will be down in 2025 remained fairly even with what dealers forecast for 2025 a year ago, there were shifts in how much of a decline they expected. For example, a year ago just over 28% of dealers forecast their new equipment revenue to be down 8% or more. That number grew 11.6 percentage points to 40% of dealers now saying their 2025 new equipment revenues will be down 8% or more compared to 2024. On the flip side, there was some improvement in dealers reporting revenue growth.
On the used equipment side of the business, the percentage of dealers reporting 2025 revenues increased by at least 2% vs. 2024 increased by about 3 percentage points compared to what dealers were forecasting for 2025 when surveyed a year ago. However, the percentage of dealers reporting a decline of 2% or more (46.3%) vs. 2024 was also up compared to the forecast from a year ago (37.1%).
This week’s DataPoint is brought to you buy the Precision Farming Dealer Summit, coming to St. Louis Jan 5-6. To view the program and to register, visit PrecisionSummit.com.
According to the latest USDA Census of Agriculture, nationally 54.9 million acres in the U.S. were irrigated in 2022, down from 56.3 million acres in 1997. Between 1997 and 2022, total irrigated agricultural land in California decreased from 8.8 to 8.2 million acres, while irrigated land in Nebraska increased from 7 to 8 million acres. Over this same time period, irrigated cropland acreage in Arkansas increased by more than 1 million acres while Texas saw a decline of nearly 2 million acres. In 2012, Arkansas replaced Texas as the State with the third-most irrigated acres, behind Nebraska and California. The decrease in irrigated area in the West — where a generally arid climate has required irrigation for most crops — primarily reflects surface and groundwater shortages due to drought and groundwater depletion in the face of competing demands for water. In some areas, urbanization has also contributed to this shift. The increase in irrigation in historically rain-fed eastern agricultural regions largely reflects the benefits of irrigation in areas with unreliable rainfall.
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