Why Off-Season Maintenance Matters

One critical — but often overlooked — wintertime farm task is ensuring combines and forage harvesters are ready for the upcoming, demanding work season.  

Combines and forage harvesters are complex machines that perform in a high-pressure, time-sensitive environment. Downtime with your machinery can quickly escalate, disrupting harvest schedules and — in the case of forage harvesting — compromising feed quality. 

The narrow window for harvesting forages like corn silage is well known — once the clock runs out, it doesn’t restart. Any equipment failure or repair downtime can lead to lost tonnage and feed value. The same applies to combines. Any downtime can still cause a significant disruption that can affect the season’s productivity and profitability. 

Items like belts, knives, sprockets and others naturally degrade over time, but as they wear down, they can begin to impact larger parts. For example: 

• A worn sprocket continues to deteriorate and can damage chains, bearings or drive shafts, leading to much larger, time-consuming and costly repairs directly impacting your season and your bottom line. 

• Worn knives may function at the beginning of the season, but as wear increases, the worn parts can drastically impact cutting performance, rob horsepower and increase fuel consumption. 

• Worn threshing components can impact combine performance, leading to reduced grain quality and negative impacts in variable harvesting conditions. 

• Worn or damaged electrical and hydraulic components can lead to catastrophic breakdowns if not addressed proactively. 

Off-season inspections may seem like a time-consuming or unnecessary expense, but the reality is they can save you time, money and significant headaches in the long run. 

Winter inspections give you the opportunity to replace these parts before they fail and cause additional, potentially more expensive damage. It can also help you anticipate when maintenance is needed, allowing you to manage your machine repair budget confidently. 

Regular inspections allow technicians to proactively replace worn parts, ensuring your equipment operates efficiently and effectively throughout the season. They also help keep dealer technicians familiar with specific machines, allowing for quicker diagnoses and repairs when something does go wrong.  

Machines with a documented history of dealer inspections and service also often have an increased resale value over machines with a limited service history. 

CLAAS FARMPOINT’s 300-point inspection conducted by a CLAAS Academy-trained technician covers everything on your machine, inside and out, and provides an opportunity to get ahead of potential issues, maximize machine uptime and keep your operation running smoothly when it matters most. 

It helps save you time and money in-season and before. 

If you schedule a winter inspection for your combine, forage harvester, tractor, combine head or forage harvester head by February 28, you could be eligible to save up to $200.   

Contact Your Area Dealer to schedule your winter inspection and protect your productivity and profitability for the season ahead. 

• For Indiana and Kentucky Customers: Tony Clark | 270.619.2238 | tony.clark@claas.com  

• For Iowa Customers:  Randy Tegtmeyer  | 712.570.7264 | randy.tegtmeyer@claas.com