B. Mitchell Carlson reporting
EAST MOLINE, Ill. — After its second year at the Bend XPO Center, Mecum Auctions’ Gone Farmin’ Fall Premier tractor and truck auction seems to be set on cruise control as a successful and productive fixture in the collectible vehicle auction world. While not Mecum’s final auction of the year (that honor falls to its collector car auction in Kansas City on the first weekend in December), with the cold hand of winter descending down upon the Quad Cites area again, it certainly felt like a last call of 2022 for many buyers in attendance.
As it has been the case for over half a decade, Gone Farmin’ is not just about selling farm tractors. There is a truck segment on Thursday, the first of the three days of this event. There were also some cars on the docket Thursday, and no-sales were re-ran on the other two days after the tractors. (Three lots re-ran on Friday and another three on Saturday.) Proving that the show works best when you stick to the script, only two of those six where hammered sold on the second trip across the block (and both were on Friday).
Yet Mecum is known for post-block persistence, and here it got them to within one average truck sale from garnering $1 million in sales ($986,400 on the hammer, to be precise). While Mecum sold just 59 of the 91 trucks consigned (down 20 percent from last year’s 84.7 percent sales rate), the 575 sales out of 608 tractors consigned – for a strong 94.5 percent sales rate – helped bring total sales to $5,665,837.
Last year (and at its spring auction at the Bend XPO Center), the trucks and tractors were driven across the block. This year, the staff elected to only sell the vehicles off the monitors. This way the doors on either side of the podium stayed closed and the building stayed warm. With the pandemic closures over the last nearly three years, buyers have become used to bidding on a vehicle that’s not directly in front of them, and at least the vehicles were all on
