Chayce Schleuter, owner of CWS Custom Welding, has been serving the eastern South Dakota area in mobile welding for the past two years.
“It's busy and you meet a lot of good people,” Schleuter said. “It's nice helping them out when they need it.”
After taking some welding classes while in high school, Schleuter went on to Lake Area Technical College where he graduated with a two-year welding degree in 2020. After school, he began welding full-time at Terex Utilities in Watertown, South Dakota, while also starting his own mobile welding business on the side.
In the past year, Schleuter made the transition to welding full-time on his own, serving the eastern South Dakota area. He said because of the demand for mobile welding in agriculture, there is really no limit to the distance he would go for a job.
“A lot of farmers call me if it’s an emergency. Equipment breaks down, and I'm able to get there,” Schleuter said. “Anything that needs to be welded, if someone needs help, I’m willing to help.”
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Schleuter said he has done work on anything from fencing to irrigation pivots and having the equipment like a mobile welder has been an advantage for his business.
“Equipment breaks down in the middle of the field, I can drive right to them which is nice,” he said. “I have all of my tools in my pickup and can just get it done quickly and efficiently and get out of there because time is money to them.”
Schleuter would encourage anyone with a welding background or any other trade that is needed in agriculture to give it a try.
“Just do it. That's really all I can say is, do it. You'll enjoy helping people and build a name for yourself,” Schleuter said. “It’s endless, it’s a career that’s needed everywhere.”
Craig Peters, dean of management and technical programs for Minnesota West Community and Technical College, agrees that careers in welding and other trades are in high-demand.
“If you look at southwest Minnesota, there are so many jobs open. We could basically keep every high school student in southwest Minnesota, and that would help us fill the jobs,” Peters said. “Right now, there's a huge gap where we have thousands of positions open and a lot of those are in technical programs.”
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, job opportunities for farm equipment mechanics and service technicians are expected to grow about 11% from 2020 to 2030, and the American Welding Society says there will be around 330,000 new welding professionals needed by 2028.
Having over 30 years of experience in education, Peters has seen a shift in the past decade for students to attend technical schools instead of pushing them to attend four-year universities in order to help fill those gaps.
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“You are really seeing the understanding that there needs to be a lot of two-year grads or one-year grads,” he said. “There's actually kind of a magic ratio of 1:2:7 — one person with a master's or a doctorate, two people with a bachelor's and seven people with technical training.”
Because of the high need for these positions, the salaries for trade careers often match or exceed those that require four-year degrees.
“It's a good life for a lot of people,” Peters said. “When you look at the generations, the newest generation is also more open to trades than the previous generation has been.”
Some of the programs being offered at tech schools are attracting students with a wide variety of backgrounds into these needed roles and agriculture.
“In the old days, it was your typical farm kid, but now you're seeing kids from all walks of life,” Peters said. “As part of the farm business management program, we actually have urban agriculture as one of the extensions. It's not out of Minnesota West, but it's still something and so you're seeing new immigrants or people living in a city, get into ag.”
Ryker Gladis, a second-year diesel mechanic student at Minnesota West Community and Technical College from Arco, Minnesota, has been working on trucks, trailers and tractors since he was around 13 years old. He plans to go back to his family’s trucking business after school where he will stay busy in the shop.
“We have a lot of equipment to go around the United States,” Gladis said. That requires “a lot of maintenance and a lot of repairs to keep trucks running.”
Learning more about some of the newest technology was important for him throughout his time at tech school.
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“To learn a little bit more that I didn't know, then I can do my job more efficiently,” he said.
To meet the needs of the trades workforce, Peters said Minnesota West is coming up with some innovative strategies.
“We've actually created some short-term certificates that we are offering through our programs but also available to high schools,” he said. “A great example would be Pipestone — you can get a nine credit certificate in plumbing or a 10 credit certificate in carpentry while you're in high school. You then get a $2,000 scholarship to come to Minnesota West and you only have like a dozen or so credits left. So it's really economical.”
Minnesota West is also offering customized training to try and help fill out the workforce across the state.
“We have a welding trailer that we've just refurbished, we also have a portable generator that we can go to any town in Minnesota and do welding training,” Peters said. “We actually have gone to different high schools who don't have a welding program, just to introduce them to welding. Or we can go out to an industry and we can upskill their welders that they have or have new welders created.”
Coming up with new ways to train the next generation of the workforce has also been the goal of a program between RDO Equipment and Bismarck State College in North Dakota.
Recently, the company has been involved with the college’s custom applicator course to provide hands-on experience with the different technologies that John Deere has to offer including floaters, spreaders and their current sprayer lineup.
Mike Lockard, a precision ag product specialist for RDO Equipment in Bismarck, North Dakota, also works closely with the college to provide industry expertise in some of their course studies, including intro to precision ag.
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“The biggest thing going forward is the new generation that's coming is jumping into a big, big jump in technology, whereas before it was a little bit more of a slower pace. Now it's very, very fast,” Lockard said. “So it's more trying to get these guys going as fast as we can, as efficiently as we can, with them being comfortable and understanding exactly what the equipment is actually capable of doing.”
Through the program, students are able to gain experience using the advanced equipment in an educational setting before they are expected to get to work out in the field.
“We try to cover a large spectrum of it from setup, to setting guidance lines, to what to expect with how the machine operates, what your setup files and things like that all look like, either preseason, once they get there or how to set field settings,” Lockard said.
Lockard said there are jobs out there for students with this training and some of the students he has helped train are now using these skills through their internships or even securing full-time roles.
“There's a huge demand in the agriculture industry now. Not only with custom applicators, agronomists, but also on the dealership side,” Lockard said. “We're just happy to be involved with the community, helping the next generation come up, because we know it’s going to be needed.”
Gaps in the agricultural workforce are also being filled by other farmers or ranchers who have specialized training and are looking to add in another stream of income off outside of their operations.
Jeff Thompson, a farmer north of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, says he sees a need for mechanics in agriculture and has found success utilizing local people who offer those services on the side of their full-time roles.
“A person looks for those kinds of contacts where producers that have gone on to some schooling and can basically do a side job on the side,” Thompson said. “A lot of them are probably farming with their parents, but they still need another source of income. All the trades — welders and mechanics — it gives them an opportunity to bring in some side income.”
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While Thompson farms 850 acres of corn, soybeans and alfalfa, he also started his own cabinet making business because of his passion for woodworking as well a way to bring in some extra income on the farm during the slow winter months. He encourages other producers to do the same if they are looking for a way to generate income and can fit it into their schedules.
“Keep your eyes open for job possibilities or income streams. Everything's changing quite a bit all the time,” Thompson said. “I think that's the only route you have to go forward in trying to source some new income for the farm.”
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