BIGGAR, Sask. – Mobile hydraulics are handy to have on the farm. Richard Elenko, who farms near Biggar installed a hydraulic system on his 4×4 service truck and uses it in all sorts of situations.
Elenko has a 90-litre reservoir in the back of the truck, with a filter to keep the oil clean.
“We haven’t had a cooling issue with it at all,” he said.
“If you ran something long enough, you’d want to run (the oil) through a cooler. Then we’d put another little radiator in front of the fan, which we could. But we haven’t bothered.”
Read Also
VIDEO: Green Lightning and Nytro Ag win sustainability innovation award
Nytro Ag Corp and Green Lightning recieved an innovation award at Ag in Motion 2025 for the Green Lightning Nitrogen Machine, which converts atmospheric nitrogen into a plant-usable form.
The service truck has one set of hydraulic outlets at the front of the truck, coming through the grill, and a second set at the back, coming from a set of controls that are mounted on the oil reservoir.
A 45-litre-per-minute pump is mounted under the hood, driven off the fan belt of the engine. It provides plenty of capacity for all sorts of jobs around the farm.
One of the main functions of the hydraulic system is to drive the auger on a seed and granular inoculant tender Elenko carries in the back of his truck.
“We (also) have a garbage utility trailer that has a hydraulic hoist on it. We plug it into our 4×4, drive out to our dump pit and dump our garbage without any hand bombing,” he said.
“I use the front for hydraulic binsweeps. It saves me messing around with pumps on the main augers. If we want to lift up a piece of equipment parked in the yard, we don’t have to bring a tractor up.
“We whip up with the truck and lift it that way. To lift a piece of equipment isn’t volume, it’s just pressure. We rev it up a bit and we have no trouble lifting things.”
Elenko also has the big tow truck style cables that come out the front of the truck’s grill.
“I never have to lift the hood when I boost something. And we always seem to be boosting something.”
