Executives from two American farm machinery companies gave their take on the troubling times when speaking at a Dom Distribution dealer gathering staged at the Toowoomba showgrounds in southern Queensland.

Miller director of marketing, Tim Criddle, maintains the agribusiness environment in North America is "still strong" with "some positives" but concedes commodity prices are not as high as they were 12 months ago.

Agriculture, he says, remains one of the healthiest industries in North America with farmers better able to access credit than most other business sectors.

Having come off a record sales year for the company, Miller, which builds a premium range of self-propelled sprayers, says farmers have reined in capital expenditures associated with machinery across the board.

"Farmers in North America are in a wait-and-see position," Mr Criddle said.

"Apart from being business people, they also make a lot of decisions based on emotions.

"So they are watching the news, they are reading the papers, tracking the global financial situation and worrying about how it will impact them.

"To date it has not impacted them other than, as I say, commodity prices have come down a bit, but so have fuel and fertiliser costs."

Miller is achieving new levels of operational efficiency following the recent acquisition of Canadian firm Spray-Air's application technology that uses new-generation air nozzles to provide instantaneous control of droplet size, spray pattern, to name but a few of its attributes.

Meanwhile the CEO and president of Balzer Inc, Randy McMahon, also confirmed the agricultural economy of the US was "surviving very well", despite some caveats.

"Yes, there is still concern about what is going on in the banking industry in the US," he said.

"So there's a little bit of a wait-and-see attitude on the part of the American farmer as to where interest rates are going to settle.

"But input costs are down, commodity prices have stayed fair and the US farmer is doing adequately, if not a little bit better than normal."

Balzer is known as a "short line" manufacturer of farm equipment in the US which means it does not build headers or tractors, rather specialises in bumper-sized grain haulage carts which are attracting interest on the part of large-scale broadacre farmers throughout Australia.