The used tractor business is quickly becoming a crucial marketplace that’s allowing farmers to keep harvesting corn, wheat and soy day and night at a time of insatiable demand from buyers in the U.S. and abroad. With the four-week-old strike at Deere & Co. factories exacerbating an already acute shortage of new tractors, the used market is the only place for many desperate farmers to turn.

Peterson, known to all as Machinery Pete, says this is the most frenzied he’s seen the market in his 32-year career. At every single auction he’s attended in the past month, records have been smashed on all kinds of makes, models and vintages. Machinery Pete’s Quarterly Used Values Index — which Peterson created after Wall Street analysts kept calling him for on-the-ground intelligence — soared to 9.5 in the third quarter, matching record highs set during the commodities boom a decade ago…

The tax code incentivizes farmers who’ve turned an annual profit to use some of that money to upgrade their machinery before the year is out. It’s just that with prices on many grains surging to multi-year highs and crop sizes robust, farmers have raked in the biggest profits in years and yet have limited new supply to invest that cash in.