Truck scales are a common piece of equipment found at warehouses and factories, but one overlooked industry for this type of scale is the farming sector. Trucks and tractors hull all kinds of cargo that cultivators need to know the weight of. However, since agricultural businesses don’t use truck scales as often, not everyone knows all the advantages that using one can bring to this industry. That’s what we’re here to outline for you today because these devices are a must-have for farmers, in our professional opinion.
Assists in Complying With Regulations
One of the biggest hassles of being a farmer these days is all the rules and regulations that you have to be sure to follow. Obviously, these are in place for a reason, so you have to do your best to ensure that you follow them. Fortunately, owning a truck scale can assist with that. When you have crops that you sell based on weight, you need a Trade-Approved scale to verify how much of that food you will be selling—and truck scales are perfect for this.
Of course, you could use any other type of Trade-Approved scale for this, but if you buy a truck scale, you’ll be able to check on the weights of your vehicles as well. The need for this first arose in 2018 when the Department of Transportation updated the farmers’ vehicle weight requirements. The tractor and trailer combined can’t exceed 31 tons. This includes the weight of whatever you’re transporting, so since that will vary with every trip, you need an easy way to check the weight before sending your vehicles out onto the road.
Allows for Better Tracking
Even though we already mentioned that some crops are sold based on their weight, it’s never a bad idea to track these measurements for all your agricultural products. Knowing this measurement not only helps you better determine where to store the food, but it can also help you get a rough estimate of how much of a particular product you’ve harvested.
If you know the average weight of a single unit of the food, you can calculate how many you have within a set group. Obviously, these numbers can get to large extremes that might be difficult to compute, but luckily for you, some truck scales have the option to do this math for you. After putting in the average weight, it will output the potential amount of these crops you have.
If you closely track your products’ weights, you’ll also be able to monitor potential waste. There’s always a high chance that some of your food can slip through the cracks. If you know how much it weighed after harvest and how much it does before selling it, you can get an accurate representation of how much you lost. This will make it easier to determine if you need to do something about the number of crops you lose each year.
You can also use truck scales to track agricultural waste, which includes pesticide containers, broken-down machinery, and product packaging. If you weigh all these items each year, you can note how much stuff you throw away and make efforts to reduce that number the following year.
Integrates Well With Other Software
Obviously, the best part of using these truck scales in the agricultural sector is that you don’t have to do any of this by hand. Most scales are advanced enough to be able to upload all your results straight to whichever program you use to track your farm’s output. If you set things up just right, there’s a chance that you would never have to mess with the numbers at all on your own. All you need to do is check in on them and make sure everything is running as intended.
Takes Up Less Time
There are plenty of other ways in which truck scales can save time, though. A lot of the time, farmers weigh their crops by using standard platform scales. While these are pretty effective, they take a lot more time to use. You need to put the food into separate containers, and you can’t weigh them all simultaneously.
Since the crops will be inside your truck whenever in transit, it makes more sense to weigh them all at once with a truck scale. Plus, all you have to do is drive the vehicle onto the scale to determine the final measurement. There’s no need to repackage items and move them around constantly, saving you tons of time.
Increases Measurement Accuracy
The process of using a truck scale also helps increase the level of accuracy of your measurements. The amount of crops you have to weigh will always be quite a lot, and dealing with high numbers such as those can get inaccurate really fast, especially if you do it in smaller increments. Weighing large amounts of crops all at once helps increase the overall accuracy.
Also, since manufacturers made these scales to withstand the total weight of large vehicles, they can easily withstand the pressure of a vast quantity of food without overloading. Smaller scales will overload quicker, leading to delays and potential malfunctions.
Very Flexible Usage
Since truck scales are so large, you can use them to weigh any type of vehicle, no matter what they’re transporting. In a pinch, you could even use one of these scales to measure a trailer full of farm animals, making them quite flexible in terms of usability. Of course, smaller objects like a single crate won’t weigh enough to register on the giant scale, but anything larger than a car is fair game.
The flexibility angle also comes into play when you consider the fact that there are also many portable truck scales for sale that you can buy. If you have a massive farm and don’t want to send vehicles back to a central location to weigh them, you can get a few portable scales that your drivers can take with them and measure the weight of their trucks on the go.
Easy To Install and Maintain
If you decide to go with a classic stationary scale, it’s good to know that installation and general maintenance are fairly straightforward. It won’t be too difficult to put in as long as you have a flat section of ground large enough to fit the scale. Plus, since these scales have to use durable materials in order to withstand the weight of enormous farming equipment, they typically require little to no maintenance. Even when they do, their sheer size makes repairs pretty easy to perform.