Auction service a longtime advocate for preserving agriculture history

PENFIELD, Ill. — An auction company that nears its 40th anniversary and has a large audience for its online bidding platform continues to show its support for preserving agriculture’s history.

BigIron Auctions is a major sponsor of the Half Century of Progress, set for Aug. 24-27, and Mark Stock, who founded the business along with his brother, Ron, appreciates the work of the I & I Antique Tractor and Gas Engine Club in keeping the past alive.

I & I’s annual Historic Farm Days is slated for July 13-16 in Penfield.

“I & I is a great organization. I think it’s important to maintain the history of agriculture,” Mark Stock said.

Stock added that he has cousins who are a generation removed from farming “who have no idea how corn is grown, how tractors run or the amount of work that goes into raising food.”

“It’s automated today. I tell my kids, who farm, that they don’t have any idea how easy they have it when they get inside their climate-controlled cab and push that auto-steer button,” he said.

The Stocks grew up on the family farm in Nebraska, two hours west of Omaha.

“I remember being on an IH 806 with a six-row planter. You didn’t get any time off because just as soon as you got done planting, you had to turn around and start cultivating the corn that was only two inches tall because the weed pressure was coming,” Stock said.

“Nobody used herbicides like they do today. We had to cultivate everything twice. We even had to rotary hoe some stuff. That’s just the way it was. That’s how we controlled weeds.”

Beginnings

The seeds of what is now BigIron took root in the early 1980s when farmers were struggling to make ends meet.

“BigIron first started out as Stock Auction Company with my brother, Ron, and I in 1984. We started doing some auctions, mostly household sales. In the beginning of the 1980s, my dad was a farmer and he said, ‘you guys are going to have to find something to subsidize some income here’ because things were tough,” Mark said.

“Ron went to auction school and began doing small benefit auctions at halftime of the basketball games selling pies and cakes, and then some folks who were moving asked if he could do their household moving away auction. I was in college at the time, and he asked me to do the paperwork.

“That turned into more household auctions, and after a few years, we were able to get a few farm machinery sales. We were young and aggressive, and we weren’t scared to get dirty. We farmed since we were old enough to stick a clutch in on tractor, so we could run about any tractor or machine.”

He recalled one of the earliest sales they conducted for a farmer in failing health.

“His wife called and said her husband couldn’t do much and their kids lived in another state and asked if we could help them. We were there for three weeks lining everything up, cleaning everything up, shining it up, advertising, taking pictures. Back then nobody had a website. We marketed it and had a phenomenal sale. There were a lot of people there because they had late-model equipment that drew a lot of attention,” Mark said.

Word spread after the auction of the Stocks’ willingness to do all the extra work.

“The phone started ringing after that sale, and we had created our ‘niche,’” Mark said.

Many families were in the same situation in Nebraska and Kansas and that is how the business grew.

“Please liked us because we knew equipment and we could describe items well because we were farm kids,” Mark said.

Web Spread

As the business grew, so did technology and the endless opportunities that would provide.

The notion began in the late 1990s when their cousin married a “computer guy” who suggested that auctions should be broadcast via internet.

“I said we have dial-up internet in rural America, there’s no one going to sit and listen as their phone squeaks and screeches when it dials up. That isn’t going to happen,” Stock said.

Tragically, their cousin’s husband died in a car accident, but the thought of entering the internet world of auctions remained and Mark wrote some letters to a university about developing software that would allow for auctions to be broadcast in real time over the internet.

“There were a few people doing it at fixed sites like the fancy auction house in New York, but nobody was doing it in a remote rural setting. We developed a product in 2001 that worked very well for several years,” he said.

Then in 2008, ethanol came into play that provided strong support for corn prices.

“Farmers were making more money than they ever made in their life selling corn for $3.60 a bushel. Our average of three and a half auctions every week across six states went down to three and a half auctions every month. No one was retiring, so we only conducted auctions because of health issues or for estates,” Stock continued.

“There were farmers who had four or five items for sale, and they would ask when we were going to have a consignment sale in the area. We said it wasn’t effective to do a consignment auction unless there was enough equipment to justify the advertising spend.

“We decided to turn our real-time auction experience into a timed-only auction. So, in February 2009 we had the first timed only BigIron auction. We were still known as Stock Auction Company.

“The first online auction had 21 items and 890 people registered. Items sold unbelievably well. Farmers had money in 2009 because of ethanol. Farmers were used to selling corn for half the price and they were willing to take a chance and buy something that they couldn’t touch and feel.

“It worked out well because right after that first sale we had people interested in selling their excess equipment.

“We put ads in the newspaper asking if there was interest in selling some of their excess equipment over the internet on our online-only platform — bigiron.com — give us a call or attend the public informational meeting place. The rooms were packed.

“We had five meeting locations and the rooms were packed full of farmers wanting to learn about the online platform.”

As a result of those informational meetings, interest grew and they had 65 sales item sell the next month and over 175 online items a month later, Stock said.

“We went to two auctions a month and in less than six months we went to one auction every week and it’s been growing ever since,” he said.

“We changed the name from Stock Auction Company to BigIron when we noticed people were registering on the internet from all over the U.S. and many areas had never heard of Stock Auction Company.”

Platform Transitions

BigIron now has 305 sales reps across the United States.

“We changed our real estate platform to align with the way we do the machinery and that worked out really well and now we’re adding livestock,” Stock said.

“We acquired Sullivan Auctioneers in Hamilton, Illinois, last July. Their company mirrored everything we were doing. Sullivan didn’t have their own technology and they wanted to build their own. They were in the process of doing it and that’s extremely expensive. It was a natural fit for us to put the two companies’ people and processes together and make it work.

“All of our auctions are timed only. Sullivans do virtual auctions to sell real estate, but we moved everything else to the BigIron bidding platform. We have over 600,000 registered bidders and will have 1.4 million different IP addresses every month view our website. We have a tremendous viewing audience and it is growing every day.

“A lot of the success is we don’t try to deceive anybody in any way. If there is something wrong with it, our reps are trained and schooled to identify and describe all that is good and bad.

“Our large viewing audience is due to smart computer people, a fabulous marketing department, hardworking field reps and a customer service team that does a wonderful job keeping everybody in the loop. It’s a team effort. There’s a lot of people making this thing work.”