Buying vs Leasing equipment

[rottielover]

I was curious if anyone had done an analysis on starting out a farm and if you should lease vs buy equipment. I found an extremely excellent write-up on reddit about crop yeild/prices and the author did a full spreadsheet analysis on it. It's a wonderful post and I was curious if anyone knows of something similar when it comes to your equipment.

Without knowing much about finance... Here is my current take...

If you own the equipment you don't have the per-day and per-hour fees
If you lease, while you have the fee's your going to have much more money on your hands to buy land and placeables like silo's and hay loft. I've noticed (don't ask) that the game will let you hire workers when you have a negative balance in the bank. However you would not be able to buy supplies from the store like seed and fertalizer.

Still, why not lease everything and buy land, make bank, then start replacing the leased equipment once your making profits ??

[Kurt]

Well, first, to buy you have to have the cash available (yours or the bank's), and that might force you into a lease. But even with cash available, leasing can be a great option where you only need the equipment for a few days and a few hours of use. When playing in starting from scratch mode w/ hard economy, I tend to lease everything except my main tractor... especially for equipment I will want to upgrade over time (e.g., harvesters/headers, seeders/planters, tippers, ...) and equipment that gets few hours (e.g., front loader arms, bucket, plows).

[brian_va]

The per hour and day fees can get pretty high if you are going to use it any length of time. If you need something short term, it can work. Remember, you won't get all your money back when you sell, but you'll get some, you get nothing at the end of a lease. With the payouts like they are, starting from scratch you'll probably do best with something like the fendt 515, the larger of the two rear attaching sprayers and doing a bunch of fertilize and weeding jobs. Harvesting can pay well also, especially with getting the surplus grain at the end. Even with workers you will turn a profit.

[rottielover]

hmm, I might do some testing. seems like if I save the bulk of the money for land, placeables, and a good tractor, then the rest could be leased to start with...

[Mod Sloth]

I've been using that very strategy - lease at first, use the short-term savings to buy more land, thus accommodating bigger profits quickly, then replace leased equipment with owned equipment as funds become available to stem the bleed from lease fees.

[ancienthighway]

The most important thing in leasing, IMO, is to not keep long term leases the biggest and best available equipment. The fees will eat into your cash very fast. In my current game, I leased everything and went for the biggest. After a few days of paying between 70k and 80k on fees, I quickly returned items that spent most of the time idle or picked up solely for contract work.

Pick a tractor and tipper to buy, lease what you really need, and borrow equipment on contracts. Decide early how invested you want to be in livestock, potatos, beets, sugar cane, or cotton and base your purchases on that decision.

[Kimmaz]

I only got 1 "game". I play on ravenport on the medium difficulty. I started with Field 12, The New holland harvestor, one large tractor and one large trailer. Then after the first harvest I Leased a plow for that plowing bonus and to extend the field, and bought the largest seeder that I could. At that point I had 500k loan and about 0 money in the bank.

Every other harvest I bought something. like weeder, lime spreader, fertilize spreader and straw trailer all of witch improved my profit. now I just got field 6 And i feel like i am getting somewhere.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1625928297
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1625925522

I dont have farm house or silo or any placeables yet tho ;D

I got like 12 hours of work on my harvestor already. and 33 hours on my tractor at this point.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1625937214

[rottielover]

cool thanks all!!