Penn-dale Farms first broke ground in Hastings, Michigan in 1972. Owned and operated by the Pennington family – Jack and Gloria, and their son Dennis – the farm has been tended to by four generations (Dennis’ son is also in the business) and now resides on land that has been in Gloria’s family since 1948.

The farm raises beef cattle, but the bulk of their work comes from a custom baling business. Penn-dale Farms bales and stores large square bales of wheat straw and hay for other farmers in the region. On average, they put up around 5,000 large bales a year.

Whether you’re working with motor graders, skid steers, track loaders, backhoes or excavators, the one thing that each of these machines has in common is a hydraulic system. From a maintenance perspective, hydraulic systems are often one of the most overlooked components of a machine, yet they are arguably the most important when it comes to getting the best performance out of a piece of equipment. As best practices suggest, most operators will do a daily walkaround inspection, and as long as there are no leaks and the oil level is good, that’s the end of it. But if you want to protect your investment and keep your equipment performing at its best, a hydraulic system requires much more than that. In this article, we will focus on three key elements of any hydraulic system — oil, filtration and system integrity.

Oil
The mantra today is lowering operating costs. Some contractors will take this concept the wrong way and use the cheapest hydraulic oil in order to keep costs down—this can save a few bucks in the short term, but can cause serious harm to your hydraulic system over time. Will you see a failure right away? No, but using the right kind of hydraulic oil can be the difference between an axial piston pump (a very expensive component) lasting 10,000 hours instead of 5,000 hours.