If you walk into the franchised dealer of any of the big three agricultural OEMs in the UK, the financing is, in practice, already there. John Deere, AGCO, and CNH each operate well-resourced captive finance arms that fund the dealer’s floorplan, support retail customer hire purchase, and tie the whole channel back to the manufacturer’s order book. It works, and it is one of the reasons the franchised network has consolidated as aggressively as it has.
The picture changes the moment you step outside that franchise. UK agriculture is broader than the three main colours, and the network serving it is a long tail of independent dealers, mid-market manufacturers, importers of specialist machinery, and groundcare and turf businesses. That long tail funds itself through general business banking, sometimes through asset finance lines that were never quite designed for inventory, and increasingly through whatever specialist credit it can find.
The shape of the market
The UK farming industry is large and structurally diverse. Defra’s Agriculture in the UK statistics show approximately 209,000 farm holdings working 17 million hectares, with agriculture contributing around £14.5 billion to the UK economy in 2024. England alone has just over 102,000 farm holdings, of which 54 per cent are owner-occupied. Defra’s farming evidence pack sets out the headline numbers.
Behind that population sits a machinery channel that has consolidated dramatically. Farmers Weekly’s analysis of the dealer landscape sets out how each of the major OEMs has restructured. John Deere reduced its UK network to roughly 29 dealer groups across about 105 branches under its Dealer of Tomorrow strategy. AGCO has rationalised from around 100 dealers to about 50 under its Route 66 approach. CNH (Case IH and New Holland) has consolidated more gradually, with New Holland operating around 39 dealers across 117 branches and Case IH around 45 dealers across 74. Farmers Weekly has the full breakdown.
What that has done to the independent network
OEM consolidation has not eliminated the independent dealer. It has created openings for secondary brands (Case IH, Kubota, Deutz-Fahr, McCormick, and the wider tail) and for specialist importers in areas such as fruit and vegetable production, contracting equipment, and groundcare. These dealers carry stock, take part-exchanges, and arrange retail finance for end customers. Their cashflow problem is the classic dealer problem: pay the manufacturer or importer up front, hold equipment until a buyer commits, and live on margin once the unit retails.
What they generally do not have is a captive line behind them. The OEM captives, by definition, fund their own brands. A multi-franchise independent or a single-line dealer for a smaller manufacturer needs to source inventory finance from somewhere else. Mainstream business banking will sometimes fund this, but typically through an overdraft or a generalised asset finance line that was not designed around the seasonality of agricultural retail.
Why a generic line is the wrong tool
The agricultural retail year does not behave like the automotive retail year. Tractors and combines move heavily in spring and through harvest. Implements move with cropping cycles. Demonstration units sit on the floor through long stretches of low retail activity, then turn quickly when the weather and the cashflow line up. Hire-fleet stock for contractors flexes seasonally too.
A line that demands fixed monthly amortisation against this kind of inventory is, in effect, taxing the dealer for the off-season. Audit cycles built around fast-moving consumer goods will sometimes treat eight-month-old demonstration kit as aged stock when it is, in fact, exactly what the buyer expects to see in March. The lender and the dealer end up with the same conversation every year about the same units.
What a sector-aware floorplan does differently
- Pay-as-sold or pay-on-retail repayment that matches the actual sale, not the calendar.
- Aged-stock triggers calibrated to agricultural turn rates rather than automotive ones.
- Audit by serial number and chassis number, with ground-truth reconciliation of demonstration kit and hire-fleet stock.
- Underwriting that treats the dealer’s manufacturer relationships and their forward order book as part of the credit case, not as side information.
Where LMC works
Last Mile Capital provides revolving inventory and floorplan facilities for the independent and mid-market agricultural machinery network specifically. The captive route covers the franchised sheds of John Deere, AGCO, and CNH. We fund the rest, including the multi-franchise independents, secondary-brand dealers, importers, and groundcare and turf businesses. Read more on the agriculture sector at our agriculture sector page, and on the wider customer offering at for customers.
The captives fund what they were built to fund. The rest of the channel deserves a line that was built for it.
Image: “Combine Harvester in Field” by Gerry Lewis, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
