How Agriculture Machine Maintenance Improves Your Harvest

Working in agriculture means you have plenty of machines you rely on to plant, cultivate, and harvest your crops. However, when these machines and vehicles aren’t maintained, they can cause serious issues for your farm.

When you keep up with your agriculture machine maintenance, your farm can continue running and producing. Knowing how to keep them maintained might feel like a battle. But when you come up with a plan and a system to keep on top of maintenance needs, you can make sure things run smoothly.

Types of Agriculture Machines Used

There are dozens of different types of machines and vehicles you’ll use on your farm. Here’s a selection of some of the most common ones.

• ATV, UTV
• Backhoe
• Balers
• Combines
• Cultipacker
• Cultivator
• Front-end loader
• Harrows
• Harvester
• Irrigation system
• Mowers
• Plows
• Rakes
• Seeders
• Sprayers
• Tractor
• Transplanters
• Wagon

The maintenance necessary for combines will be different than what’s necessary for your sprayers. Your sprayers likely only need to be cleaned out once a month or so, while the combine has many moving parts. Each of those parts need check-ups and sometimes repairs or replacements to keep the machine as a whole working.

What Happens When You Don’t Maintain Your Equipment

Neglecting to maintain your equipment can result in serious consequences. It can be as minor as you having to change your schedule to deal with emergency repairs. Or, it can catastrophically fail while you’re using it and result in destroying your crops.

When your machines break down, you have to take time away from what you were already doing and work on bringing the machine back to operational. This can seriously throw off your schedule and make it so things don’t get done in time.

Creating an Agriculture Machine Maintenance Process

The best way to make sure everything stays maintained properly is to run regular check-ups and tune-ups as part of your daily work.

Before you can create a maintenance process, you have to know exactly what you have on hand. Take inventory of your machines, and list all of them in a system like Asset Panda. Our system is highly customizable, so you can list your machines in a way that makes sense to you. It’s also easy to create asset records and notifications to help you remember to do maintenance check-ups when necessary.

There are a couple of ways to create a maintenance process. You can assign a day each week so that all of your maintenance happens at regular intervals. Set aside a day that you don’t need to take for working on crops, maybe on the weekend, and go through each piece of equipment. Create a checklist in your database with each piece of equipment listed in your system. Then, check on each piece of equipment. List its condition, and if you needed to do anything small to give it a tune-up. Recording the changes you make can help you when machines inevitably do end up breaking down. You can see what you’ve done, what hasn’t worked, and what can still happen.

Another way you can create a maintenance process is to make it part of the steps necessary to use each piece of equipment. Before you put your machines away, give it a quick check-up to make sure all of the parts are working as intended.

Keeping your machines well maintained will help prevent them from breaking down when you’re using them. You can spot problems before they get out of hand and fix them with a small solution instead of taking hours and hundreds of dollars to fix it.