Brazil’s combine harvester market has shrunk to less than half its 2021 peak, when soaring commodity prices and high farm margins fueled a boom in agricultural machinery.
Harvesters’ annual sales plunged 58% between 2021 and 2025, from 8,000 units to 3,300, according to data released last week by the industry group Anfavea.
In 2021 and 2022, farmers enjoyed margins of as much as 60% in soybeans and corn. The period also reflected a post-pandemic rebound in pent-up demand and abundant financing.
The hangover that followed has been marked by shrinking profitability and rising defaults. As a result, sales dropped sharply in 2023, 2024 and again last year.
In 2025 alone, domestic combine sales fell 22%, a decline attributed to tighter margins in key crops and constrained credit amid elevated delinquency rates and high interest costs.
“Combine harvesters are the main negative highlight of our 2025 results, especially because the country had a very strong crop within the farm gate, but that didn’t translate into machinery purchases,” Anfavea President Igor Calvet said at a press conference last week.
Including tractors, Brazil’s agricultural machinery market contracted 3.6% in 2025, marking a fourth consecutive year of decline.
Tractor sales fell a milder 2.1%, supported by growth in lower-horsepower models, which Calvet said are largely purchased by family farmers financed through the credit lines from Brazil’s development bank BNDES.
The outlook remains challenging. After falling 13% in the first quarter, agricultural machinery sales are expected to drop about 6% in Brazil’s domestic market this year, according to Anfavea.
The forecast reflects a backdrop of uncertainty and expectations that interest rates will remain elevated.
“Wars usually hurt expectations. There’s a lot of uncertainty — high volatility, rising oil prices, a weakening dollar, cost inflation in Brazil,” Calvet said. “We also believe the pace of interest-rate cuts won’t be what we expected at the end of last year. So 2027 is starting to look very risky as well.”
While a recovery remains unlikely in the short term, major equipment makers — for whom Brazil is a key market — are seeking alternatives such as software and connectivity sales.
“At this moment, farmers are not necessarily buying new machines, but upgrading equipment and systems,” said Rodrigo Bonato, vice president of sales and marketing for Latin America at John Deere, in a meeting with journalists recently.
The company expects tractor and combine sales in South America to fall 5% this year. Earlier in 2025, Deere announced temporary layoffs and suspended contracts at its plant in Horizontina municipality, in southern Brazil.
