Technical Assessment of Agricultural Equipment Condition for Sustainability

Due to the seasonal nature of farming, farm machinery is used for relatively short periods of time, resulting in a need to maximize output and minimize downtime. Since lost time is very costly, agricultural machines are designed for high field availability, reliability, and high maintainability. This is a case study where technical assessment was needed for the cultivation equipment operation system monitoring and control. This was for 2017 and 2018 cropping seasons of 1300 ha to optimize expenditure on maintenance and system operation. Among the calculated values, equipment utilization ranged from 81% to 0%, availability from 100% to 0%, and reliability from 36% to 0%. Additionally, there were maintainability values of 1 (functioning state) and 0 (failure state) for 120 equipment fleets assessed for the cropping seasons. Most of the equipment was well utilized, readily available, reliable, and easy to maintain, while few was underutilized, unavailable, unreliable, and difficult to maintain. All these factors help to improve availability and reliability and decrease equipment downtime for higher agricultural operational productivity. This technical soundness and operational overall effectiveness assessment were crucial to decide what equipment to retain, replace, or trade off.