Parts shortage

Agricultural manufacturers are still struggling to get enough parts to continue to put together their products. Dr. Kanlaya Barr is director of corporate economics with John Deere. She spoke at the recent Ag Outlook Forum in Kansas City and talks about the kinds of parts they’re regularly missing.

“This is like whacking a mole. You have these parts here, and the next part is missing. So, our employees are working so hard along with our dealers, as well, trying to help work through this. You know, we have chartered company planes or (other) planes to go and pick up parts in different parts of the world. We also chartered vessels to go and do that. So, things continue to be difficult, but, as you know, we have quite a bit of machines that sitting because of a few parts. Once we can get these parts coming in, I think that situation would continue to improve.”

 

Demand is expecting to pull back in the next year or two due to economic concerns. She says that may help manufacturers catch up on their back orders and re-establish supply chains.

“As we think about the economy, the outlook is looking like we're gonna see some of that slowing down in demand over the next 12 to 18 months here, so I think that would also help improving supply. As to when exactly, I can't give the exact time, but I would think that with the macro (economy) softening, we will continue to see that improve in our availabilities.”

 

One of the biggest challenges Deere and other manufacturers are facing is not enough labor.

“As we talked about, the labor availability continues to be a problem. I think that we still have big operations in North America. We still have a big operations in Iowa. But increasingly, we also realize that having rural operations is becoming more difficult for us in terms of labor availability, so those are kind of things that we're thinking about, days in and days out. But we'll definitely to be able to deliver products to our customers in the right time, at the right place, so that continues to be our key that drives our decisions.”