Nuts & bolts Equipment work doesn't stop when it's cold; it just moves indoors

During winter, the fields may be sleeping under the snow, but that doesn’t mean farmers are. In shops across Eastern Washington, farm equipment is being cleaned and repaired, all in preparation for another year of hard work.

Rob Wilkins, parts supervisor at Papé Machinery in Tekoa, Wash., believes the work being done right now — getting deep into the bowels of a machine — is even more important than harvest. 

“What farmers do in the winter, taking care of their equipment, saves them downtime in harvest,” he explained. “What they fix, what they repair, what they do maintenance-wise in the winter usually equates to their equipment running longer. Equipment is still going to fail, because we are in a world where metal runs against metal, but most of the farmers that do maintenance religiously every year and go deep, they tend to run longer and smoother in harvest.”

At Papé Machinery, technicians will typically spend two to three weeks disassembling a piece of equipment like a combine or tractor, replacing the parts that need replacing, before reassembling everything and running the equipment to make sure it is back in working order. Big equipment is generally deeply maintained every other year, as most of the hardest wearing parts are on a two-to-three-year wear cycle.

Farm equipment is getting bigger, which means repair crews need bigger service trucks and bigger cranes. But equipment is also becoming more and more reliant on computers, adding another wrench to the works when it comes to repairs, since specialized training is needed to deal with it. The technicians at Papé get that training online and through classes, much of which also happens in the winter.

“There’s pretty extensive training that techs go through to be able to diagnose the problem electronically. The physical parts, replacing bearings and stuff, that’s just diving into the book to figure out how to tear it apart and put it back together. Once you’ve done that two or three times, you don’t have to look at the book as much,” Wilkins said.

Farmers generally can tell when a piece of equipment is having a problem, but during the busy season, they are generally more focused on fixing the problem just enough to get the job done. So the fact that a machine needs some repair and maintenance isn’t a surprise. What can be a surprise is how big the repair ends up being.

“You think something is going to be okay, and you get into it and it’s not. You open it up and go ‘whoa that’s kind of worse than we thought,’” Wilkins said. “That doesn’t happen too often. Farmers can feel, when they are in the combine seat, if stuff isn’t running quite right, or if it’s out of balance, or the bearings are starting to go out. A lot of times, they can feel that from the cab so they know there’s something wrong, they just don’t know exactly where the problem is.”

Farmers will start heading back out into the fields as soon as Mother Nature allows them to. In Tekoa, in Whitman County, that’s usually around the beginning of April, but go west where it’s a bit dryer, and farmers in central Washington can often start fieldwork in February. As fieldwork ramps up, so does the work at Papé.

“If they aren’t using the equipment, they aren’t breaking it. That’s the old adage,” Wilkins said, laughing. “To break parts, they have to be used in the machinery, so once they get going, stuff tends to break.”