Harvest Season Roads: Debris, Module Trucks and Your Tires

Harvest puts equipment, mud, cotton lint and dropped hardware on South Plains highways. What it does to tires and radiators, and how to drive through it.

From late summer into the fall, the roads around Lubbock change. Farm equipment moves between fields on the farm-to-market roads, module trucks and grain trucks run the highways to the gins and elevators, and the shoulders fill up with everything that falls off them. For a few months the tire and cooling problems we see in the shop shift, and they shift in predictable ways.

What ends up on the road

• Hardware. Bolts, wire, strapping, and pieces of equipment that shake loose on the highway. This is the season for screws and wire in tread.
• Mud and caliche tracked off field entrances onto pavement, which turns to a slick paste in the first rain and hardens into a rough patch afterward.
• Cotton lint and stalks, which pack into radiator and condenser fins and collect around brake components.
• Gravel thrown off the shoulders where equipment has pulled over.
• Slow-moving equipment itself, which puts sudden hard braking into a highway drive that usually has none.

What it does to tires

Punctures go up. Most are tread punctures from hardware and are repairable if caught early; a piece of wire that stays in the tire and leaks slowly is a routine tire repair. The ones that are not repairable come from sharp debris caught at the edge of the tread or from a tire that ran low on a slow leak until the heat finished it. Checking pressure weekly through harvest season catches the slow leaks before they become a shredded tire on US-87.

Field mud on the highway also matters. A tire that has picked up a coating of caliche mud loses grip on wet pavement, and the mud packed into the wheel throws the balance off. A vibration that appears after a muddy stretch and disappears after a car wash is mud in the wheel, not a tire problem.

What it does to the rest of the vehicle

• Cooling. Lint packs radiator fins the same way dust does and the engine runs hotter, particularly when idling behind equipment.
• A/C performance drops for the same reason, because the condenser sits in front of the radiator and takes the lint first.
• Air filters load up. A filter that was fine in August can be half blocked by the end of harvest.
• Brakes. Lint and debris collect around the caliper and the dust shield. A new rattle or a scrape after a stretch behind a module truck is often a stalk or a rock in the dust shield.
• Windshields. Gravel off the shoulder chips glass. A chip repaired early stays a chip.

Driving through it

• Slow down early behind equipment. Farm machinery on a two-lane may be doing a quarter of your speed and the closing rate is faster than it looks.
• Pass only where you can see the whole road, and be aware that wide equipment may be turning across your lane into a field entrance with no signal.
• Treat the first rain after a dry spell on a road with field mud on it as ice. Why roads get slick in the first rain covers the mechanism.
• Avoid the shoulder. That is where the gravel and the hardware collect.
• Rinse the radiator and undercarriage after a week of harvest roads, from the engine side outward.

For farm and gin fleets

Harvest is the wrong time to have a truck down. A pre-season pass over tires, brakes, cooling and filters on every unit, scheduled back to back at the shop before things get busy, is how a fleet gets through the season without a breakdown on the way to the gin. Getting a farm fleet through harvest lays out the list.

Frequently asked questions

Can a screw in the tread be repaired?

Usually, if it is in the central tread area and the tire has not been run flat. Leave it in until the tire is at the shop; pulling it out lets the air go faster.

Why does the engine run warm behind farm equipment?

Slow speed means little airflow through the radiator, and lint-packed fins make it worse. Pull over and let it cool if the gauge climbs, and have the fins cleaned.

Is a windshield chip urgent?

A chip is repairable; a crack usually means a new windshield. The first cold morning is when a chip becomes a crack, so have it filled promptly.

Tires, brakes and cooling for harvest season, all in our bays at 13209 Frankford Ave, Suite 29, Lubbock. Drivers from Idalou, Slaton and across the South Plains come in through the season. Call (806) 458-2709.