Tractor traders hoping for better sales in 2025

Last year was widely described as a year they would rather forget. The hope now is that the rising milk price, improvements in the other main sectors and falling interest rates will jump-start farmers and contractors into unlocking the top drawer of the desk and dusting off the cheque book.

While the final tally for tractors over the calendar year was down from 3435 to 2806 (-18.3%), there appeared to be a glimmer of hope as the month of December showed a 2.6% rise to achieve 311 sales, which will hopefully be carried into the first quarter of 2025.

Of course it is always disappointing to see any markets retract, but those with less hair on top will remind the young bucks of the industry that in 1986, the market fell to just over 1100 units.

Elsewhere, the Agricultural Engineers Association in the UK was showing a drop in sales of 13%, to finish the year off with 10,241 new tractors registered, a figure that was the lowest in any year since 1998. Painting a gloomy picture, 2024 was also fractionally lower than the “poor” years of 2015, 2016 and 2020.

Like New Zealand, the yearly total might have been lower, save for a rise in sales over 2023, with a 14% climb to 791 units, which was also 5% higher than the average over the previous five years.

There will undoubtedly be lots of fingers crossed and hopes that the climb in December is an indicator of the start of an upward trend, although the current low returns and impending changes to inheritance taxation announced in the November budget might result in the opposite.

Further afield, Europe’s largest markets of Germany, France and Italy all saw negative trends with drops of -3.4%, -8.4% and -12.3% respectively. Powerhouse Germany fell from 29,291 to 28,249 units, France dropped from 26,161 to 23,576 registrations, while Italy fared the worst falling from 17,613 to 15,448 tractors.

Interestingly, Italy also saw a drop in registrations for combine harvesters of 32% to 266 units and a 14.4% fall in telehandlers to 977 machines. It is quite hard to believe that in 2009, tractor sales in Italy were just over 27,000 units.

Across the Atlantic, US tractor sales for 2024 fell to 217,200 (-13.2%), while combine harvester sales hit 5564 (-24.3%), while it was much the same story to the north in Canada, where units recorded in 2024 was 23,444, as against 27,846 in 2023 - a fall of 15.8%.