Living Dangerously - Country Style

Living dangerously - country style:  Your husband goes to a farm auction with the checkbook while you're at a meeting.

It just may lead to a farm fleet expansion. Randy bought a new-to-us combine at a Pratt County farm auction on Tuesday. He purchased a 2010 7120 Case combine, along with a 2011 35-foot flex head header and a trailer to pull the header.

And, just so you know, we DID talk about it before he went, so it wasn't a total surprise. He had a price in mind and doubted it would buy the equipment. However, with a depressed farm economy right now, the price for used machinery is down.

He says he got a good deal. My dad and brother concur, so it must be true. (Either that or the farmers are sticking together.)

The new combine is 16 years newer than the combine we'd been using for 14 years. (We bought that one at a farm auction is 2002.)  The combine has 1,500 engine hours, compared to 3,800 on our old combine.

It has many more bells and whistles. It's our first piece of equipment that has GPS, other than our portable Garmin in the car, which loves telling us "recalculating." I don't think that's a feature of this version: Randy hopes not!

At least he didn't get that message on the drive home. It took him 1 1/2 hours at 23 miles an hour on country back roads to get the combine home. Ironically, along the way, he pulled over to let a tractor pass. It turned out to be a neighbor who was taking a similar route, driving a tractor home after getting it repaired at a Pratt dealership. That's our version of a country traffic jam, I guess.

Randy has a lot of reading ahead trying to figure out all the features. One of the sellers was a high school classmate of mine. He generously spent some time showing Randy the ropes.

But still, Randy has a little "light reading" ahead with four new manuals. Randy already loves harvest. I have a feeling he'll be even more excited this year!