Encompassed by one exceptionally eventful day, one event stood out among all others. We began our day with a tour of Hagie Manufacturing Company in Clarion, Iowa. Hagie is a family operated company offering crop protection for its customers through high clearance sprayers. Within our short time in Iowa, we have seen hundreds of sprayers and heard from numerous farmer’s their conventional uses. However, we have never once considered where such large machinery comes from or even the mechanisms it requires to build it. As we would expect, large companies like John Deere machine and robotics operated.
Likewise, Hagie Manufacturing is no John Deere, in terms of production. Hagie is a manual labor based production system in which every scrap of metal on their 25 ton tractors is shaped and collectively together by Hagie employees.
Our tour of Hagie consisted mostly of a walk through the Hagie Manufacturing workshop where we saw the production of a large sprayer. As we came see, Hagie employees are mostly skill welders and engineers. Each engineer is responsible for welding and shaping every piece of the puzzle that is the large sprayer in an assembly line type production system. This type of requires group selected work as opposed to individual effort in that each employee relies on the competence of the other. This is encourages a group action environment. Moreover, there are four symbols painted on every garage door in workshop, all representing collaborative work efforts. These symbols act as reminders to employees, to “work hard not to f*** over their other partners,” as our tour guide described.
Notwithstanding, the individual parts welded by Hagie employees, Hagie Manufacturing doesn’t design every aspect of their sprayer. The most important part of the operation, the engine, is delegated to John Deere construction. Hagie solely modify John Deere manufactured engines. After the engines are added to the sprayer along with all other parts, the sprayer goes through extensive field test to ensure stability of the product. Any blemish or damage acquired by the field test is repaired at the end the process.
Our tour of Hagie ended with a walk of the show room of Hagie Sprayers. We were allowed to run and climb on top the sprayers, where we took some amazing photos for memories of such a fantastic day.