CropLife Retail Week: John Deere, National Farm Machinery Show, and CropLife IRON Product of the Year Highlights

Eric Sfiligoj and Lara Sowinski discuss the latest earnings report from John Deere and present takeaways from the big farm show in Louisville, KY.

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Related:

• A to Z: Photo Highlights From the 2025 National Farm Machinery Show
• The Salford Group’s SS400+ Spinner Spreader Wins 2024 CropLife IRON Product of the Year Award

*Below is a partial and edited transcript:

Eric Sfiligoj: Hello. Welcome to another edition of CropLife Retail Week. I’m Eric Sfiligoj, editor, CropLife. Back again with my regular partner in crime, Lara Sowinski. Lara, I missed you for a week. This is the first quarter of the year. It’s usually when most of the trade shows, the state association shows take place, and all the national shows are starting to happen. But before we get into a little bit of a preview of that or highlights thereof, I think, another thing that we’re known for in the first quarter, of course, earnings reports.

Yes, of course, the, one of the big events for the equipment manufacturing side of agriculture, of course, is the National Farm Machinery Show, which took place in mid-February in Louisville, Kentucky, as it always does. And actually, a bunch of us from CropLife were on hand.

And, just some notes on that show. It’s the 59th annual or a 59th, National Farm Machinery show. I think they skipped the year or two for the Covid years. Takes up one point 2,000,000ft² of the Kentucky Exposition Center, but 800 exhibitors. And as you might imagine, Lara, a lot of the exhibits are, you know, it’s everything all across agriculture.

There’s livestock exhibits with gating and stuff like that. You know, there’s a lot of tractors, a lot of combines, not our market. But, as you might imagine, a lot of the companies that ag retailers do business with are present on the show floor. So they’re all fine tenders and spreaders and of course, some sprayers. John Deere was there with the sprayer.

A couple other major of the companies that we know had sprayers on the show floor as well. Again, most of the folks were talking a little bit about tariffs and trade. That was a big topic of conversation. Are we going to kind of worried everybody in a holding pattern at the moment and wondering what’s going to mean?

I know the earnings for folks were not rosy. But on the bright side, most people are planning at least to do some upgrades or introduce some new products into the marketplace here in 2025. I think in a couple of weeks, when you and I are at the Commodity Classic in Denver, we’ll be seeing more of these new products making their market debuts.

But there were hints that that was coming. And then one thing I do want to point out, I did one of the things I attended, National Farm Machinery Show. Of course, the show floor is the big thing, but there were a couple of seminar sessions, educational sessions, and one of them was talking about a disease we know pretty well in corn tar spot and was kind of interesting.

The speaker there was talking about ways to kind of mitigate the risk to having tar spot in your field, mentioned why 2024 was such a terrible year for our spot in the Midwest, but made the point at the end of their conversation that proper fertilization, proper crop nutrients can help corn come back to our spot. They specifically mentioned the use of sulfur and copper and boron and zinc micronutrients as some of the things that farmers can put into their fields to help maybe fight against our spot, make the plants a little healthier so they can fight back.

So I would imagine retailers, if you’re listening to this broadcast for 2025, look for some activity on those in those for for macro and micronutrients.

So, Lara, as I mentioned just before commercial break, the National Farm Machinery Show took place last week in Louisville, Kentucky. And one of my happy privileges that the show was something that we’ve been doing for better than a dozen years now here at our sister publication, CropLife Iron, the magazine every year has finalists for what we call the product of the year.

The readers of the magazine vote over a one month time frame during the fall. And then we award a trophy to the best product for the year, to the company that gets the most votes and I’m happy to tell everyone that the product of the year for 2024 from CropLife Iron Readers was the sell for group for their SS 400+ spinner spreader.

And here is a video of myself. I’m handing off the video of me from the video from the to the video, of myself handing off the trophy at the National Farm Machinery Show. So here. Enjoy this video clip of Salford accepting the trophy.

Here at the 2025 National Farm Machinery Show in Louisville, Kentucky. And I’m here for a very special occasion this year, we are presenting the 2024 Crop Life EIR and product of the year trophy.

And I’m happy to report the winner is the Salford Group for their SS 400+ spinner spreader. And I am here with Gavin Hill. So Gavin, congratulations on behalf of the CropLife IRON readers on winning this award. Thank you very much. So tell me, how does it feel to be the award winner for product in year in 2024?

Gavin Hill: Oh, this is great. A lot of time and effort went into to building this machine and the the design of it. And I’m, you know, very excited for Salford to be able to, to see this award for CropLife. And yeah, it’s been great very good.

ES: So if you could share it with our viewers as we’re running this video, what are some of the unique features of the SS 400+ and what makes it such a special unit for the marketplace?

GH: So what sets the unit apart is that it’s a dual capable lineman fertilizer machine on the fertilizer side of the machine itself. It actually has a the capability of doing 12 section control. So you get the precision application of the machine as well as the the capacity and durability of a Salford built unit. It also has the capability of, of a dual bin, so you can apply multiple products at the same time on the, on the fertilizer side of things.

And then you can also remove that, that rear bin and then do lime application. So it makes it a very, very versatile, and highly productive and efficient machine for, for the operator. It also has on fertilizer side a swapped with 120ft. And so it’s a very productive

ES: Now I know you introduced this unit I saw for the first time at the, 2024 MAGIE Show in Bloomington back in August. And I know that you’ve been doing a lot of field trials and customer, customer tests with it. What kind of feedback have you gotten from the folks that use it for? What do they like about it?

GH: Yeah, the, the main points that we’ve gotten back is, is simplicity on the unit is very, very simple to operate. There’s not a lot of moving parts on it, as well as productivity. Productivity is probably one of the biggest feedback items that we do get on the machine, with its high capacity at 420 cubic feet in a single bin configuration, as well as 120ft spread with the machine loves to consume acres.

ES: And that’s what you know, customers are looking for is that high productivity of the machine. Very good. So again, on behalf of CropLife IRON and its readers and all of us at CropLife, congratulations on winning this award.