Henry Guenter has been a well-received part of The Western Producer for the past six years.
As a regular author writing our regular Inside Machines column, Henry received a steady flow of reader mail with questions about maintaining and operating farm equipment.
Henry has chosen to retire from writing his column for our publication, and his readers will miss him.
When Henry began writing for The Western Producer, he had retired from a long career at AGCO as a technical service manager, having started with the company when his part of the company was still Massey Ferguson.
Read Also
Growing garlic by the thousands in Manitoba
Grower holds a planting party day every fall as a crowd gathers to help put 28,000 plants, and sometimes more, into theground
As an accomplished mechanic, he had spent much of his career assisting dealerships and farmers with the introduction of new equipment and helping his company refine its de-signs with testing and feedback.
To that end, he specialized in combine technologies, touring Western Canada to conduct combine clinics for farmers and dealers, helping them learn to make the most of their machines. He would also travel to farms to troubleshoot threshing issues and new machine design bugs.
However, his work extended to all areas of farm equipment, and he helped dealers develop maintenance programs and staff training. By the time he retired and began writing a column for the Producer, he knew “a lot about a little stuff and little about darn near everything” when it came to farm machinery.
“I don’t claim to know too much about the latest machinery and the computer systems that run them today, but I have written about the older stuff and about the things that don’t change too much,” he said.
Henry wrote more than 50 columns for the Producer, and I had the pleasure of editing them and providing ideas that he would develop for his readers.
His columns ranged widely, from reducing wheel hop and properly balancing tractor ballast to maintaining baler knotters and setting combines.
He wrote about the importance of preparing machinery before putting it away for winter and what to do when you took it out in the spring.
I found out why we buy so many batteries for our machinery. I wouldn’t clean off the dust and light debris from the tops in the fall, which would add to the drainage and failure. I now remove them from the machines, clean them off and store them in the shop. We buy fewer batteries than we did previously.
We also grease cold machines ahead of fall storage and roll them over a few times before they are put away. Fewer early season bearing failures have occurred as a result.
He told all of us that setting the combine should begin by putting everything in the tank and then improving the sample from there. You get the most capacity from the combine on that basis and find out where your machine’s limitations occur.
He expounded not only on avoiding machinery failures but also explained the causes, understanding that “farmers always want to know why. They have inquisitive minds and they want to make things better.”
“So I told them,” he said when we discussed the end of his column a few weeks ago.
Henry also helped readers understand how farm equipment dealerships function and why and how to resent their service departments less.
Safety has always been a focus for Henry’s columns, having been an agricultural professional during a time when a noticeable number of farmers had missing digits and safety systems were limited to shields that tended to be removed right after machinery purchase.
He had seen the aftermath of many accidents and he related some of those over the years as warnings to his readers.
Last year we helped Henry put together a collection of his columns in a book format that he sold to readers.
Despite having significant health issues over the past few seasons, Henry has continued to type his columns, although at times I have not been sure how. But he said he felt he had a few more things to say about farm machinery, dealerships and maintenance and would stop when he ran out.
He has recently decided that he has shared the most important parts of his experience with Western Producer readers and will retire this month.
He will continue to answer reader questions by e-mail and sell his book in electronic and print formats through The Western Producer at insidemachines@producer.com.
We will miss his columns and his phone calls to our office, and as his editor I will miss the regular conversations about farm equipment, both new and old.
Thanks Henry, and as you often said to your readers, “be careful out there.”
