“I know.”
“Then let us finish diagnosing this one.”
“How long?”
“I can’t promise.”
“That’s the problem.”
Mark went quiet.
Derek continued.
“I didn’t buy four hundred seventeen thousand dollars worth of horsepower. I bought capacity inside a short harvest window.”
“That’s fair.”
“If I have to assume every morning the machine might not be there by lunch, I don’t have that capacity.”
Mark offered an extended warranty.
Derek declined to make that the deciding factor.
Mark offered to keep pursuing a loaner.
Derek thanked him.
Mark offered to involve the manufacturer’s regional service staff.
Derek agreed they should.
But he still wanted options.
“Your operation is built around Deere,” Mark reminded him. “Headers, guidance habits, parts inventory, technicians, resale. Switching is not just buying another color.”
Derek stood.
“My operation is built around getting crops out before South Dakota decides harvest is over.”
Mark looked at him.
“I can’t argue with that.”
Derek left without signing anything.
That night he sat at the kitchen table with Melissa.
Later retellings claimed he secretly researched combines while everyone slept.
That was nonsense.
Melissa would have discovered a six-figure machinery decision approximately thirty seconds after Derek made it.
She handled most of the bookkeeping.
She opened his downtime log.
“You have this marked sixty-three percent operational.”
“That’s roughly what I calculated.”
“Of what?”
“Available harvest days.”
“That is not the same thing as machine uptime.”
Derek sighed.
“You’re doing this now?”
“Yes.”
“The machine is broken in a soybean field.”
“And bad math won’t fix it.”
She turned the laptop toward him.
“Some of those days were weather delays. Some overlap parts delays. Some include hours where the second combine was running. If you go into a dealership saying the machine only functions sixty-three percent of the time, somebody will rightly challenge you.”
Derek stared.
“So what can I say?”
“That you documented four significant fault events during critical crop periods and enough downtime that you no longer consider the risk acceptable.”
He looked at her.
“That sounds less dramatic.”
“It is also defensible.”
Derek smiled.
“Why did I marry you?”
“Poor judgment.”
They worked until nearly midnight.
Remaining balance.
Trade risk.
Interest.
Depreciation.
Expected annual acres.
Fuel.
Parts.
Header compatibility.
Dealer distance.
Service coverage.
Resale.
Derek had spent much of his life assuming buying another Deere was automatically the lowest-friction choice. Now, for the first time, he wrote competing brands on the same sheet.
Case IH.
New Holland.
AGCO.
Several models beneath each.
Melissa looked over the list.
“What matters most?”
“Reliability.”
“That’s not measurable from a brochure.”
“I know.”
“So what can you measure?”
Derek thought.
“Service history. Parts availability. Dealer response. Simplicity where it matters. Capacity. Operator comfort. Actual owner experience.”
“Good.”
“And price.”
“Yes.”
He leaned back.
“I hate this.”
“Why?”
“Because Dad is going to act like I joined another religion.”
Melissa smiled.
“You’re forty-six.”
“I’m still his son.”
“That condition appears permanent.”
The next morning Derek did something more useful than reading brand forums.
He called farmers.
A Case IH owner near Watertown described excellent capacity and one electrical issue that cost him a day.
A New Holland operator west of Sioux Falls loved his combine but complained about dealer distance.
A farmer in Minnesota running an AGCO-built IDEAL machine said the drive system had been reliable, but parts support depended heavily on the dealer.
Another owner had lost a rotor belt during corn and warned Derek never to confuse “good machine” with “machine that cannot fail.”
Derek wrote down everything.
The negative comments mattered more than praise.
Then a farmer named Neil Abramson told him, “Call Ron Keller south of Sioux Falls.”
“Who’s Ron?”
“Dealer.”
“What dealer?”
“The red machines you’ve been pretending don’t exist.”
Derek laughed.
He drove south the following morning.
Keller Agricultural Equipment sat behind a gravel frontage road outside Sioux Falls. Compared with the dealership Derek knew in Brookings, it looked almost modest: small showroom, practical parts building, service bays, rows of equipment with no decorative landscaping pretending machinery needed scenery.
A man in his early sixties came outside.
“Help you?”
“Looking at combines.”
“What are you running?”
Derek hesitated.
“S790.”
Ron Keller showed no expression.
That impressed him immediately.
No smirk.
No comment about green paint.
No salesman’s delight at a competitor’s failure.
Ron simply said, “What are you trying to improve?”
“Uptime.”
“That all?”
“Right now.”
Ron nodded.
“Come look.”
Near the back stood a two-year-old IDEAL-series combine traded by a producer who had expanded acres and moved into a larger machine. It had just under seven hundred hours. The paint was clean but not polished enough to hide use. Several service panels carried small scratches around fasteners.
Derek walked around it.
“What has broken?”
Ron smiled.
“That’s your first question?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
He retrieved the service history.
A chafed wiring section had been repaired.
An idler replaced.
A leaking hydraulic hose changed during pre-season service.
One software update.
No documented engine or rotor failure.
Derek looked toward the machine.
“What are you not telling me?”
“Unload elbow has wear. One rear tire is halfway through its useful life. Rotor belt is serviceable, but I’d budget replacement sooner rather than later.”
“You’d sell it like that?”
“I’d show you first.”
Ron opened a service panel.
The machine was not magically mechanical.
Derek noticed that immediately.
Sensors.
Controllers.
Electronic monitoring.
Emissions equipment.
Hydraulic valves.
Modern harvesting equipment was modern harvesting equipment.
Anybody claiming this one had escaped electronics entirely was selling nostalgia rather than machinery.
But the design philosophy differed enough to interest him.
Drive paths were accessible.
Routine components were visible.
Some major systems used belts and mechanical transfer arrangements Derek understood easily.
The interface was unfamiliar without feeling intentionally complicated.
Derek climbed into the cab.
Ron stayed below.
“No sales speech?”
“You know how a combine cab works.”
“Tell me what you hate about it.”
Ron laughed.
“The menu logic will irritate you for a week. Some service access is better than what you have, some worse. If you expect our dealership to stock every unusual component, don’t buy it.”
That got Derek’s attention.
“What do you stock?”
Ron took him inside.
Filters.
Common belts.
Bearings.
Sensors.
Hydraulic fittings.
Consumables.
Then he pointed toward the computer.
“Major assemblies depend on distribution. Usually fast. Not always.”
“Field service?”
“Three technicians.”
“How fast to Brookings?”
“Depends where they already are.”
“Average?”
“Harvest day? I’d rather promise six hours and arrive in four than promise four and arrive tomorrow.”
Derek nodded.