Aufrufe
vor 4 Jahren

XtraBlatt Issue 01-2019

  • Text
  • Contractors
  • Farmer
  • Farms
  • Agricultural
  • Forage
  • Silage
  • Farmers
  • Machinery
  • Krone

INTERNATIONAL 1 2 3 1

INTERNATIONAL 1 2 3 1 Fredy Hirter (l.) and René Tschanz manage the contractor business in the second generation. Before them, their fathers also worked together. 2 On grass, the contractor chops around 350 ha with up to six cuts. 3 Many farms ensile their forage in silo towers filled via powerful blowers. that, the drought became noticeable. “However, we weren’t affected quite as much because for many customers we take just a single cut”, explains Fredy Hirter. “There are others we do second and third cuts for, but only for very few do we help with all (up to six) cuts.” The complete harvesting chain including transport is only ordered by very few customers. Such a chain (silage harvester, three silage dosage wagons including blower with engine, inclusive drivers) is mostly ordered just before the farmer starts mowing. At that time, harvesting date would be arranged together. Harvester and trailers working in grass are billed based on drum hours. In a season, the company records about 150 drum hours. Tractor and blower are billed for by working hours and each driver by man-hours. The grass area covered is around 350 ha over all six cuts. Here area plays no role in billing. With many customers the grass cut is completed within one to two hours. Accordingly, often five to six farms are on a daily work list. “Grass ensiling is very time-sensitive and customers demand absolute punctuality. Because we are able to manage this, we harvest markedly more grass than maize. We would be delighted when we got to harvest more than just the grass on some farms. But better one service than none at all”, smiles Fredy Hirter. Only in grass harvesting does billing by the hour function. With maize, the area harvested is billed - an almost constant 200 ha each year. Last autumn was optimal for maize. “We have very heavy soil in the region with a high water table. For maize, this was an advantage in 2018, the quality too was top!”, recalls René Tschanz. The Hirter & Tschanz AG has 63 maize customers. The firm travelled to those customers 108 times over the last season. The journey to the furthest away customer is 30 km. In Switzerland, many farms are small and the tendency towards amalgamation seems to be less than in Germany, for instance. While, here too, some farms are not taken over by a family member, the change to bigger units is a creeping one. On the other hand, there are increasingly more part-time farmers, and these are very powerful because through their full-time work they have a good income. “For them, we as farm contractors are naturally particularly interesting”, says Fredy Hirter. MAINLY TOWER SILOS “With maize harvesting, we see with our customers a growing interest in longer chop. With the VariLOC transmission from Krone we are able to offer this, but remain unsure whether this is really wise in consideration of the dominance of tower silos on farms and the associated dangers of compaction and reheating.” What is definitely unusual for upland regions is that there are contractors here without round bale silage in their services. Hirter & Tschanz is one of them: no round balers and only forage harvesters. This means the two owners have to accept that other contractors may pop-up ion their customers’ farms. After all, most farmers plan for round bale silage nowadays because bulk silage storage facilities are becoming squeezed. “This lack of silage space for herds that are expanding is a limiting factor now for silage harvester demand”, Fredy Hirter admits. This affects maize too, with forage maize increasing baled and wrapped. Additionally, such bales have the advantage of being practical for handling. “When we in Switzerland talk about silage space then mainly meant is the classic silo tower. By almost every barn there stands such a feed tower; as a rule, 10 to 15 m high and with volume capacity of a good 100 m3. The larger ones offer volumes of up to 700 m3. Higher silos have established themselves best and older silos are being replaced by new ones, although now mostly built with glass-enamelled steel and no longer with plastic protection. Our customers mainly have high silo towers. This naturally has consequences for the silage-making chain.” This is why Hirter & Tschanz run two high-performance blowers of 250/300 HP to keep workflow and area performance high. Also helping in this requirement are four tandem dosage wagons with cross conveyor belts in front. Three normal silage wagons are also included. These unload at the rear into a special dosage machine that feeds the chopped silage into a blower. A 23 m3 tandem wagon, points out Fredy Hirter, can unload in three to five minutes. Mostly, three wagons are used in a chain with one tractor and trailer driven by the farmer. Important: one Hirter & Tschanz employee is always on duty at the blower. ”When the silo filling falters, the chain stops, the harvester too - we cannot afford this with our long daily list of customers”, emphasises Fredy Hirter. Just as important is that an experienced eye is always kept on how full the silo tower is. INCREASING ORDERS This contractor business started with a combine harvester and still carries out this job on farms, although nowadays together with another contractor. “The combining jobs have continually fallen off. We could have invested more, but in the end we decided to give up”, relates René Tschanz. Regular customers continue to be served, with one combine standing ready on the Hirter & Tschanz premises every summer. Either an employee drives it, or the partner contractor gets the job. On the other hand, grass cutting continues to do well. Here, Fredy Hirter and René Tschanz aim to expand their customer base: an ambition not without its difficulties. There’s not a lot of extra grassland to share between contractors. Both businessmen aim to convince new customers that they have the right capacity. A step in this direction is adding their second Krone BiG X 580 to the equipment line-up. “We wanted to have two machines of the same type and so didn’t buy the successor model. For our people in the workshop it’s much easier this way, and the spare parts fit for both machines”, explains René Tschanz. It was definite that it would be Krone again. “The chop quality greatly impresses us and the service is very good. If we have a problem, with Krone we find a solution directly.” The second machine is nothing like fully occupied so far, although already it has a lot of jobs, helping to get a foot in the door with potential customers. “We can offer the complete package: grass harvest with pick-up, wholecrop silage with the XDisc from Krone, maize harvest (OptiMaize) for all chop lengths with 8 to 10-row EasyCollect and milled corn com with an 8-row Ziegler maize plucker. Fundamentally, we want to offer what others cannot.” Thus the extra BiG X 580 is an investment in the future. « 58 59