Agriculture equipment leasing nears 40% for industry: Discussion with Massey Ferguson’s Whorton

Increased farm income pressures have led to increased demand for farm equipment leasing as farmers and OEMs look to find a balance in the market.

Farmers continue to navigate farm income pressures caused by tariffs and rising prices, Joe Whorton, director of marketing at Duluth, Geo.-headquarter global agriculture equipment manufacturer Massey Ferguson, tells Equipment Finance News on this episode of “The Dig” podcast.

“There's no doubt that net farm income continues to be tight, and so you've got these multiple years of inflationary pressure, you've got elevated input costs, you've got high interest rates and then tariff uncertainty that's stressing farmer cash flow,” he said. “It's really driven a pretty high uptick in leasing activity recently, especially when you talk about mid-range and high horsepower tractors reaching its highest levels in the last five years.”

Over the past five years, Massey, a subsidiary of AGCO has gone from leasing 15% to16% of farm equipment to nearly double that amount, Whorton said.
“Into 2025, we're up at almost 30% and the industry is actually higher than that — the industry is almost up at 40%,” he said. “Some of the growth for Massey that we've seen in leasing is industry-based and uncertainty-based, and then a lot of the uptick has come in the fact that we've had our residual values continue to improve.”

The increased focus on meeting farmers' needs and ensuring a positive user experience has led to rising residual values for Massey's high horsepower products, Whorton said.

“As a positive consequence and outcome, we can now offer farmers some of the most aggressive lease deals in the industry, and so we've seen that segment grow a lot,” he said. “With all the uncertainty I mentioned before, allowing our farming customers to maybe de-risk themselves in the near term by having that fixed cost of ownership or fixed payments there.”