Brian Brett, a writer and farmer, famously said that farming is a profession of hope. Even with the hardest work, the most favorable weather, and the most promising planting season, there is so much that’s out of the farmer’s control.
Equipment failure is one threat to farm operations that often feels like it belongs in the category of uncontrollable forces. When critical equipment breaks down during planting and harvesting windows, it can lead to revenue loss due to downtime and the high cost of reactive repairs.
Thankfully, a farm maintenance strategy can help farmers keep their agricultural operations running smoothly. In this article, we’ll take a look at what farm maintenance is and how farmers can create a maintenance plan that protects their crops and their revenue.
Key takeaways
- Farm maintenance prevents costly equipment failures, which helps reduce unplanned downtime during critical planting and harvest seasons.
- Farm equipment like tractors, combines, irrigation systems, and storage facilities require systematic maintenance schedules that align with seasonal usage patterns.
- Modern, mobile-first maintenance management systems help agricultural operations track equipment status, schedule preventive maintenance, and reduce monthly maintenance costs.
What is farm maintenance and why does it matter for agricultural operations?
Farm maintenance refers to all the activities that contribute to the systematic care and upkeep of agricultural equipment, machinery, and facilities. This includes activities like repairs, inspections, regular lubrication of equipment, and seasonal activities that keep equipment in working order.
Farm maintenance can be reactive or proactive. Reactive maintenance typically refers to repairs (things like fixing your tractor when the front axle unexpectedly fails). Proactive maintenance includes all the activities you perform to prevent breakdowns from occurring, things like regular inspections and scheduled lubrication on equipment.
Leaning into proactive maintenance as much as possible is a smart strategy for any farmer. First, from an investment perspective, preventing breakdowns helps control one of your largest cost buckets. Mississippi State University Extension reports that, after land, farm equipment is the second-largest investment a farmer will make. A significant portion of this investment comes from operating costs, which include maintenance activities.
And it’s not just motorized equipment that needs regular maintenance on a farm. Farm equipment also refers to the electrical, stationary, and structural systems that are integral to any farm’s operations. If any of these equipment categories fail, the farm’s entire operation is put at risk.
The business case for systematic farm maintenance
Reactive maintenance is, as a rule, more expensive than proactive maintenance (and only getting more expensive. Investigate Midwest reports that from 2020-2024, the cost to repair farm equipment rose by a staggering 41%).
Why? First, there are the inflated emergency costs associated with rush ordering spare parts and hiring maintenance contractors to complete repairs. Then there’s the loss of operating hours due to repair downtime, which causes an average annual loss of $3,348, according to a study by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group.
In an industry with such thin margins, unexpected losses like this can make or break both your profitability and output during critical seasonal windows like planting and harvest seasons. It’s in any farmer’s best interests to reduce these costs as much as possible with a proper proactive maintenance strategy.
79% of teams saw the amount of unplanned downtime stay the same or increase over the past year, and 39% say the cost of downtime is rising.
Benefits of proactive farm maintenance
Aside from cost savings, there are both operational and productivity gains to be realized through regular, proactive maintenance of farm equipment and systems. These include:
- Improved fuel efficiency by optimizing engine and asset health.
- Extended equipment life by keeping all critical assets in good working order, preventing you from having to scrap and repurchase expensive equipment too soon.
- Maintained resale value. You won’t hold onto equipment forever, and when it’s time to sell, you’ll get a much better price for assets that have been well-maintained.
- Reduced downtime by addressing any potential issues long before they lead to breakdowns.
- Improved equipment performance, especially during peak seasons when every minute of operational uptime counts.
Which essential farm equipment requires regular maintenance?
There’s a lot of equipment and machinery that keeps your farm going, and it all needs regular maintenance. But different categories of equipment require slightly different approaches, so let’s look at each one individually.
Mobile agricultural equipment
This category includes any equipment that moves from one site to another within your farm, such as:
- Tractors
- Combines
- Planters
- Tillage equipment
Since usage can vary for any of these pieces of equipment depending on the time of year, a usage-based maintenance schedule may be best for this category of equipment.
If you use a modern CMMS, you can track equipment usage and trigger maintenance based on actual run hours. For example, you can log hour-meter readings manually or automatically through integrations. Once a piece of equipment hits a set number of hours, you’ll get an alert that it’s time to perform maintenance.
Stationary systems
Stationary systems include any pieces of farm equipment that stay put, such as:
- Irrigation equipment
- Grain handling systems
- Storage facilities
This type of equipment can be maintained on a pre-determined, time-based schedule, such as once a month or once every 14 days. You can set this alert as a time-based trigger within your CMMS.
Support equipment
Generators, pumps, and material handling equipment all need to be maintained regularly to avoid any catastrophic loss in the event of a breakdown.
We recommend setting up a predictive maintenance strategy for equipment that falls within this category. A predictive strategy ensures that all of this equipment is maintained before it’s at risk of failing, but not too frequently that it’s eating into precious labor hours.
Seasonal equipment
Seasonal equipment includes any equipment you use during a particular season, like planters or tillers during planting season or combines during harvest season.
Since these assets get a lot of use during particular windows, setting an annual pre-season checklist in your CMMS is a great strategy to ensure you’re ready for the season each year. Once the season is underway, staying on top of daily inspections and usage-based maintenance will keep these assets in great working order.
Maintenance best practices for farm equipment
Each farm has its own unique maintenance needs, but there are rules of thumb you can follow to make your farm maintenance as effective as possible.
- Set up a daily inspection routine for frequently used, critical equipment like tractors and combines to ensure they’re in good working order. Daily inspection tasks for this equipment include activities like checking fluid levels, tire condition, belt tension, and air filter condition.
- Document and follow a pre-season equipment preparation procedure. The best way to prep critical equipment for your busy season is to make sure it’s in peak working order before the season begins. Avoid surprises by documenting your seasonal readiness processes for equipment like planters and spraying equipment, then turn it into a checklist you can return to and make notes on each year.
- Set up lubrication schedules, filter replacements, and fluid monitoring for specific agricultural equipment. Relying on memory to know when maintenance activities are due could result in things slipping through the cracks. Set up time and usage-based triggers in your mobile CMMS alert you when certain equipment needs attention.
- Document any seasonal maintenance tasks including winterization, spring preparation, and harvest readiness checks. Like your pre-season prep activities, having these processes documented will ensure nothing’s missed from season to season. You can easily feed any notes you have into your CMMS and use its AI feature to turn those notes into repeatable procedures.
- Properly track maintenance history. Tracking maintenance activities over time will help you improve your overall maintenance strategy. Logging breakdowns, inspection notes, and recurring issues will help you find patterns. From there, you can build the proper proactive measures to keep things running smoothly.
Modern approaches to farm maintenance management
Farming technology is always improving, and so should your approach to maintaining equipment. If you’re still relying on your memory or logging maintenance activities with pen and paper, it’s time to level things up.
Invest in a mobile-first CMMS
A mobile CMMS (that is, a CMMS that comes with its own user-friendly app that allows you to complete work and access information in the field) is essential for farm maintenance. If you can’t get the information you need when you need it, you just won’t be as efficient.
A great mobile CMMS is one that any user can navigate easily, can be used offline, and centralizes knowledge and documentation in one place.
Build (and automate) a preventive maintenance schedule
Farming calendars can get complicated. Each new season brings its own set of activities and equipment needs, and trying to stay on top of things without a maintenance schedule is an uphill battle.
A CMMS can help you build and automate a preventive maintenance schedule that integrates with farming calendars and seasonal demands. This way, you can free up time to work on more pressing tasks.
Track assets and spare parts
It’s frustrating to lose track of an asset or spare part, especially when you need to complete a repair. A CMMS puts inventory and asset tracking at your fingertips, so you always know what you have (and where to find it).
Use CMMS data to optimize maintenance schedules
As your farm’s needs change from season to season, so should your maintenance schedules. A CMMS provides the data farmers need to optimize maintenance schedules and predict equipment needs.
How to build an effective farm maintenance program
Building the right farm maintenance program takes time and patience. However, there are some steps any farmer can take to set up a farm maintenance program they can keep improving over time.
Assess current equipment
To know what your assets need, you need to understand their condition. This allows you to establish maintenance priorities based on how important each asset is to your operations and its level of use.
Develop maintenance schedules
Planning the perfect farm maintenance schedule is a bit of an art. It should align with seasonal farming operations while incorporating manufacturer-recommended service intervals.
Focus on training and change management
For many farms, introducing a maintenance strategy and the proper tools to implement it can feel disruptive to workers. It’s important to give your team the training, information, and practice they need to be able to confidently transition from paper-based processes to digital systems.
Farm maintenance FAQs
How much should agricultural operations budget for equipment maintenance annually?
Equipment maintenance costs vary according to the size of a farm’s operations as well as the condition and age of its equipment. Unexpected repair costs will become more frequent as equipment ages and is used more frequently.
What are the most common maintenance mistakes that lead to equipment failures during harvest season?
Failing to create and implement a maintenance strategy is a mistake that can lead to equipment failures during harvest season. Creating pre-season procedures, performing daily equipment inspections on critical equipment throughout the season, and employing a usage-based maintenance strategy will help prevent equipment failures.
How can farm maintenance teams effectively manage equipment spread across multiple locations?
A multi-site CMMS that comes with an asset tracking feature can help you organize equipment by site location and manage everything from one simple dashboard.
What maintenance management features are most important for agricultural operations?
Maintenance management tools must be:
- Easy to use for all workers
- Equipped with preventive maintenance scheduling
- Able to provide real-time asset tracking and visibility, even across multiple sites and asset types
- Able to document and centralize worker knowledge and asset history
How do seasonal farming patterns affect maintenance scheduling and resource planning?
Farming activities change drastically depending on the season, and so do maintenance needs. During busy seasons, heavily-used equipment needs to be inspected and serviced frequently.
It’s not uncommon for heavy vehicle and mobile equipment service technicians to work six or seven 12-hour days a week during planting and harvesting seasons. During off-seasons, farmers can complete pre-season checklists to make sure equipment is in peak condition when it’s needed.
What are the key differences between maintaining agricultural equipment versus industrial machinery?
There are a few key differences between maintaining agricultural equipment versus industrial machinery. For one, there are many different kinds of farm equipment to maintain: mobile equipment, stationary equipment, support equipment, and seasonal equipment.
Additionally, each category of equipment has its own maintenance needs. For example, mobile and seasonal equipment often require a high level of care due to their high usage during concentrated times of the year. Because of this, maintenance managers need to create tailored maintenance strategies for critical assets that keep agricultural operations running.
