Chuck Zumbrun

Tales from Skunk Hill

It’s the system, stupid.

In my software job we spend lots of time worrying about the system, the entire combination of hardware, software, processes, people, and everything that works together to make a successful deployment of a software product.

Here’s what happens in the farming world when you (or your vendor) don’t take a systems approach to setting up a corn drying system and instead just look at each piece on its own.


Corn spill

In this case the auger that was taking the corn away from the dryer hadn’t been checked to see if its speed (determined by the pulleys in the silver frame on the auger.  If you look closely you’ll notice the belts are gone, burned up trying to keep up) was fast enough to keep up with the dryer.

A bit of time figuring pulley ratios, 3 trips to town for parts and belts, 2 man-hours of shoveling corn off the ground and we were back in business and dried corn without incident the rest of the season.

One response to “It’s the system, stupid.”

  1. […] so that if the augers failed then the dryer unloader would shut down and not run corn out on the ground. These sensors worked splendidly. We had a couple of auger failures and each time the system worked […]

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