COVER TOPIC EARLY
COVER TOPIC EARLY ADOPTER Herbert Ruge bought the first series-production BiG Pack to roll off the production line for his contracting business back in 1993. Over the course of its 16-year service life it clocked up more than 330,000 square bales of silage and straw. Thanks to their outstanding performance, his contracting business is still using several BiG Pack big balers to harvest straw and silage today. Herbert Ruge laid the foundation for his agricultural contracting business in Odderade near the German North Sea coast in the bucolic sandy and marshy landscape of Schleswig-Holstein in 1989. The sprightly 72-year-old pensioner handed the business over to his son Andreas some years ago. But as soon as he starts talking about old times, you can see the pride and sparkle in his eyes and you can tell that his heart and soul are still very much part of this family business. “We started out in April 1989 with an MB Trac 700 and a Krone trailer, a Turbo 5000. We ran this 12
The first BiG Pack 80-80 in the Ruge fleet clocked up more than 330,000 square bales in 16 years. setup for a massive 1,800 operating hours in the first year alone, baling silage for local dairy farms. Everything ran so smoothly that we soon had more customers knocking at the door and we had to go out and buy two more combos the following year.” Herbert Ruge bought one of the first BiG Pack balers to roll off the Krone production line in 1993. TRIAL AND ERROR Soon afterwards the contractor bought two Krone round balers for baling straw and grass silage, a KR 130 and a KR 160. But some of his customers were asking for square bales instead of round ones. “To meet our customers’ demands, we started using big balers from various manufacturers,” Herbert Ruge says. “They handled straw well but they didn’t cope well with grass silage.” He found a sympathetic ear at Krone as they were just about to launch their first big baler. “By then I had been having more and more dealings with Krone, so we were soon offered the first BiG Pack pre-production machine to try out. After a bit of teething trouble the Krone engineers began to get more and more of a handle on the machine as we were trialling it,” he says. The Spelle-based manufacturer went on to present its first BiG Pack to the public at Agritechnica in Hannover in 1993. “Once we saw the BiG Pack on the Krone stand and got talking to the engineers about the new technical features they had introduced, we just knew we had to have one,” Herbert says. 13
