Every year in May, MacDon welcomes six interns who are about to get the experience of a lifetime as they partake in the custom harvest program – a journey that takes them from Winnipeg to Texas, then north through Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, South Dakota, North Dakota and finally Montana helping custom harvesters do their job.

The team of interns and their accompanying product-support representatives function like a pit crew for custom harvesters whose customers either prefer not to invest in their own equipment, want to reduce equipment and labour costs, or simply lack the time or resources. Custom harvesters provide a full-service solution, arriving with combines, headers, trucks, grain carts, and crews to harvest the crop and deliver it to the elevator.

When that’s done, they pack up, move north, and do it again for the next customer all throughout the Wheat Belt. And the MacDon team moves with them to offer the necessary support.

“The purpose of the custom harvest support is to provide warranty support in both service and parts to the custom harvest during the annual wheat harvest season,” explains Tom Pyle, product support supervisor at MacDon.

“I would say out of all the custom cutters, throughout the Wheat Belt anyways that we typically see on a regular basis, we're talking a very high volume that are running MacDon heads.

It’s a three-and-a-half month period of intense work, but Pyle says the interns they take with them, though green, are keen to learn. They do training in Winnipeg for a week before heading down to Texas where they start working on customer machines and doing walk-arounds, warranty repairs, selling parts and learning how to keep everyone up and running as best and as quickly as they can.

Also a selling point: the prospect of seeing so many parts of rural America, including some of the world’s most famous landmarks.

"Most all of the interns that we get are starting in May, essentially within a week of when they're done with finals in college, they come up to us. We do a week of training in Winnipeg at the factory. They're able to get some hands-on in the shop with the headers. We do go through the factory and do a factory tour. And then, when we turn around and take off to Texas, it is living in hotels, working six to seven days a week. It's a lot of hours for the guys, says Pyle."

“They do get to see all the beautiful countryside. We try to get them out as much as we can when we're in Colorado to go to the Rocky Mountains. Once we get up to Montana, it’s kind of same thing. I encourage the guys to get over to Yellowstone and see that while we're there. Glacier National Park as well. Just beautiful areas that we're nearby. Sometimes, for a lot of the guys, it's an experience that they'll never get again.”

Karl Brooks, U.S. parts manager, agrees. He notes that a lot of employees of the custom harvesters have had a challenging time finding the staff needed to run their equipment. The long hours and intense timelines can be a turn-off for many. So, they’ve had to start looking overseas in countries such as South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, again using that draw of seeing part of the United States (and Canada, in some instances) they likely wouldn’t otherwise experience.

“There are some harvesters I know who have repeat employees who come back every year because they like the journey of travelling rural America from Texas all the way up to Canada; it’s a pretty neat operation, really. Very nomadic, but they get to see the sights,” he says.

Brooks has been with MacDon for 36 years; he started in Winnipeg, Man., at the head office and factory, before making his way south in 1997, getting a “one-way ticket” to Kansas, Mo., to open up a branch office and parts depot there. Things quickly expanded, and in 2006, they grew out of the initial 8,000-sq-ft space and moved into their present facility, which is a massive 40,000-sq-ft space. And another move may be in the cards soon – Brooks says they are growing and actively looking for a new, larger space.

Given his lengthy tenure at MacDon, Brooks is the right guy to ask about the beginnings of the company’s involvement in the custom harvest program. As he recalls, it all started in the late 1980s with one eager customer, Jim Deibert, who was very interested in the front-mounted draper-style headers. With Gary MacDonald’s support and engineering, Deibert started testing headers, which led to the development of a draper harvest header.

Soon after, in the early ‘90s, MacDon began to release that header to more and more people, displaying it at U.S. custom harvester conventions.

“One of the first ones I went to was in Oklahoma City, I believe it was around 1993. So in that timeline, we had a small, modest, I would call it a horse trailer, a tandem axle trailer. I remember going to Cordell, Oklahoma and sitting in that 100-plus degree trailer sweating and providing some support to the custom harvesters in that duration. We also had one product support rep that would come down at that time too. So we were rather small at the time,” says Brooks.

After an unfortunate accident that resulted in that trailer getting wrecked, Brooks remembers MacDon management telling him the next year, they’d “be doing it right,” and by that they meant getting a brand-spanking new 48-foot semi-trailer.

“I was expecting a used trailer at this point in time but no, the MacDonald's did it right. John Kilbury was my boss at the time, and he went and showed me this new trailer and we got it brand new 48-foot state of the art air-ride suspension and we put parts bins in there and an office desk. That was our first set up.” says Brooks.

It was unique also because we had all these stops but at that time there was no cell phone type service, or it was very cost prohibitive to do it. So we had to hook up landlines at every stop. We had a phone plus a fax machine, which was dating us in that era, but it was functional, it worked. We also got an 800 line so the custom harvesters could reach us directly, and I chose that 800 line, which was 1-800-MACDON1.

And fun fact: That phone number is still the one Custom Harvesters can reach MacDon support reps on to this day.

This year, the team is getting another upgrade. They’ve added a 53-ft trailer for parts storage as well as two mobile office trailers that have much-coveted air conditioning to make what can be extreme weather conditions easier for staff to handle, which allows them to focus on the job at hand.

“We've made some big changes; we got a second semi-trailer, so we are going to run a 53-foot semi-trailer that will have parts only. And our second trailer will be the 48-foot, and that will be parts only. And we added two mobile offices. We ordered one brand new, and then we converted the other enclosed trailer that we had into the second mobile office,” explains Pyle.

“The A/C will greatly improve the morale of the crew because, the heat is always a factor down on the custom run. And the new parts trailers are going to improve our service and how we handle this whole program,” adds Brooks.

Early on in MacDon’s custom harvest participation, the service reps were only supporting one header, the 960 model, in the 25, 30, and 36-ft. sizes. At that time, custom harvesters were cautious of the 36-ft header, expressing concerns about its size and ability to navigate gates.

“I think most of the auger headers at the time were just a 30-ft auger header on the front but once the harvesters got the 36-ft, got comfortable with it they thought the feeding was so much better than all the wads that a corkscrew auger header would feed the combine so they saw the benefits of MacDon Drapers and this program. As time went on headers got bigger, we're up to 61-ft., so it’s come a long way.” Brooks says.

And while MacDon technology has indeed come a long way, and bigger, better headers seem to be the way of the future, it doesn’t mean older models are ready to be put out to pasture just yet. It’s not uncommon to see some of the earlier FD1 headers working the custom harvest because MacDons are built with longevity in mind.

“They're built bulletproof from development to manufacturing, we do so much intense testing and go into far out places the header to different field conditions, different environments, so it's a bulletproof kind of header. Very reliable for the custom harvesters, and all farmers for that matter,” says Brooks.

MacDon’s part of the custom harvest has always been, and always will be, about the support the team can provide to those who need it. The new trailers and new technology help them do that, of course, but both Brooks and Pyle say it’s the satisfaction of getting the job done effectively and efficiently for the customers that is really at the heart of things.

“To me, the support that we provide on the Custom Run is key,” says Pyle.

"The biggest part of that is these customers cannot afford downtime. That costs the customer a huge amount with the labor that they're paying, and it also ends up ultimately costing the farmer as well. That's the biggest key that sets MacDon apart from anybody else, in my opinion, is our uptime is my biggest focus; minimizing the customer downtime, making sure that if they have problems, it is not a MacDon problem."

“They aren’t near their dealerships so we're providing that support along the run at every stop. Everyone very in tune with doing this and very dedicated. The term students we hire are typically engineering students and they have a keen interest in the product because they are typically farm kids. So, they have a genuine interest in it and they get associated with the custom harvesters and have good relationships with them and can reach out to help them so it's a great experience for everyone.”

“For myself just hosting the kicking off in Texas, then orchestrating it all the way up the run, doing it primarily remotely from our Kansas City office. It gives me great satisfaction helping everybody, helping our guys get the parts in a timely manner.”

And for Brooks, this season’s custom harvest may be his last.

“Another year, here we go. I’ve been doing it since 1993 and this may be my final,” he laughs.

“It seems like a long way off, three-and-a-half months that you do this custom run, but it’s all over September 1. When you’re kicking off, it seems like you’re stuck in Texas for two weeks waiting for crops to mature, but then It’s fast and furious, you’re in Colorado, Nebraska by the beginning of July, and by mid-august you’re in Montana, so it’s over quickly.”

To learn more about the U.S. Custom Harvesters, Inc., click here.