What Happens When Your Tech Goes Down During Harvest

IT DOWNTIME DURING HARVEST: WHAT IT COSTS AND HOW TO PREPARE

Harvest is about wrapped up, and if you ask around, somebody at your co-op has a story from this fall. Maybe it was 4:40 on a Thursday in October, when the scale computer at the north location couldn’t reach the main office. The location manager restarted it. Nothing. The main office said everything looked fine on their end. Twenty minutes later, someone figured out a tiling crew two miles down the road had cut the line. The scale software runs off the server in town, and the north location was on its own until the line got fixed.

The short answer: When a co-op’s systems go down during harvest, the work doesn’t stop. It moves to paper, phones, and memory. Scale tickets, settlements, agronomy orders, fuel sales, and member calls all slow down or stop, and every hour costs more than the same outage would in February. Most harvest downtime comes from ordinary failures, not attacks, and the best time to fix them is the winter right after harvest, while everyone still remembers what broke.

That’s the point of writing this now instead of in August. The season is fresh, the pressure is off, and you have months before spring planting puts the same load back on your systems.

This post covers the business systems that run on your network: tickets, settlements, agronomy software, fuel and point of sale, phones, and email. Grain equipment controls are their own world, and we’ll leave those to the people who manage them.

What stops when your systems go down during harvest?

More than most people expect, because nearly everything at a co-op depends on either a central server or the connection between your locations. When either one goes, here’s what stops with it:

• Scale tickets and grain receiving. If the ticketing software can’t reach its database, you’re writing weights by hand and keying them in later.
• Settlements and contracts. Accounting can’t see what came in, and members waiting on payment start calling.
• Agronomy orders and records. Your agronomy software holds the orders, the application records, and the inventory your team needs to keep fall work moving.
• Fuel and point of sale. Card readers and pumps that run through your network can stop taking payment.
• Phones. If your phones run over the internet, a dead line means members can’t reach you either.
• Email and shared files. Dispatch, scheduling, and anything else that lives in a shared spreadsheet goes dark.

None of this is unusual. What makes it hurt is the timing.

What causes IT downtime during harvest?

Usually something ordinary. Harvest puts more load on your systems than any other time of year, and ordinary weaknesses show up when the pressure is highest.

The most common causes we see:

• A failed internet connection at a remote location. Rural lines get cut, overloaded, or knocked out by storms, and many branch locations have exactly one connection.
• Hardware that picks the worst week to fail. An aging server or network switch running at full load for weeks straight is more likely to give out than one sitting idle in March.
• Power problems. A fall storm, a brownout, or a backup battery nobody has tested since it was installed.
• An update or change that breaks something. A software upgrade pushed in the middle of the season can take down the one system you can’t do without.
• Ransomware. Less common than the others, but the most damaging when it happens.

That last one deserves a note, because attackers know your calendar too. In April 2022, the FBI warned that ransomware actors may be more likely to target agricultural cooperatives during planting and harvest. It reported that six grain cooperatives were hit between September 15 and October 6, 2021, and that some had to completely halt production. The FBI’s explanation was blunt: attackers may see co-ops as “lucrative targets with a willingness to pay due to the time-sensitive role they play in agricultural production.”

We covered how to prevent a ransomware attack during harvest in a separate post. This one is about what happens when something goes down, whatever the cause.

How much does downtime cost a co-op during harvest?

More than the same outage would cost any other time of year, and most co-ops have never put a number on it. The cost doesn’t come from one place. It adds up across idle people, lost bushels, rework, and member trust.

You can get a working estimate in about an hour with your controller and a location manager. Here’s where the cost comes from and how to estimate each piece:

The bushels line is the one that stings. A member who sits in line for an hour with a full truck has options, and in a lot of Iowa counties another elevator isn’t far away. One bad afternoon won’t lose a member. A pattern will.

Run the same math for a February afternoon and the difference is obvious. That gap is what you’re protecting during harvest. If you had an outage this fall, run the numbers on it now, while the details are fresh. It’s the number to bring to your board when you talk about what to fix before next season.

What should a co-op do now that harvest is wrapping up?

Hold a short debrief while this fall is still fresh, then turn what you learn into a winter fix list. Two weeks from now, the details will be fuzzy. Two months from now, they’ll be gone.

Get your location managers, your office lead, and whoever handles IT in a room for an hour and ask:

• What went down this fall, and for how long? Every outage, even the small ones. Write down the date, the location, and how long it lasted.
• What did we do instead? Where did paper work, and where did people improvise?
• What did it cost? Use the table above for anything that lasted more than an hour.
• What almost went down? The server that was slow for a week or the line that dropped twice is usually next year’s outage.
• Who did we call, and how fast did they answer? Especially after hours and on weekends.

Then do the housekeeping the season leaves behind. Shut off seasonal staff accounts, collect any loaned equipment, and get the paper tickets from this fall keyed in and reconciled.

How do you prepare your IT for planting and next harvest?

Use the winter. Decide what you can’t run without, and put a plan in place for each of those systems before spring planting brings the load back. The quiet months are when upgrades, restore tests, and new connections are easiest to schedule.

The paper fallback sounds old-fashioned, and that’s the point. The FBI’s own guidance to co-ops says to identify critical functions, plan for operating when systems go offline, and “think about ways to operate manually if it becomes necessary.” A box of blank tickets at each scale costs almost nothing and buys you hours.

What should you do in the first hour of an outage?

Figure out how big it is, switch to your manual process, and get the right people on the phone. The first hour sets the tone for the rest of the day.

1. Find out what’s down and where. One computer, one location, or everything? The answer tells you whether you’re dealing with a hardware problem, a connection problem, or something bigger.
2. Switch to paper and write everything down. Every ticket, every sale, every call. It’s tedious, and it’s the only way to reconcile cleanly later.
3. Call your IT support. Give them what you know: what stopped, when, which locations, and anything that changed recently.
4. If you see a ransom note or files with strange names, disconnect. Unplug the affected computers from the network and call for help before doing anything else. Don’t try to fix it yourself, and don’t respond to the attacker.
5. Tell your people and your members. A quick message to locations and a note to members who are waiting goes a long way. Silence is what makes a bad afternoon feel worse.
6. See how we work with ag cooperatives. 
7. Get an assessment this winter, before planting.

Where to start

You know your season better than anyone. Our job is the systems behind it: monitoring your servers and network around the clock, catching problems before they turn into a dead scale, and being the first call when something breaks. Every one of our managed IT packages includes 24/7 infrastructure monitoring and Microsoft 365 backup.

If you’d like an outside look at where your weak spots are, winter is the best time for it. That’s what our assessments are for. We’ll tell you what to fix first, and what can wait.

Every co-op has a harvest story about the day something went down. The ones that tell it with a laugh are usually the ones that had a plan, a box of paper tickets, and somebody to call. If this fall gave you a story you’d rather not repeat, now is the right time to work on it, while it’s fresh in everyone’s mind and there’s a whole winter before planting. Give us a call and we’ll walk your locations with you.

Ready to GET STARTED?