It's dry in Texas...

Hi followers, 

this time I can give you only a short update. After a very interesting week in Memphis, I am back in Texas since friday. Yesterday I prepared the choppers for the coming demos in the Southern and Northern Panhandle. Beside the 1100, we want to show the BiG X 700 with the Easy Collect 753. A lot of customers around here have to chop at different places at the same time and like to play the "chess game".


Because of the heat and drought, there won't be much to chop this year. In some areas it hasn't rained for more than a year. High temperatures over 100 degrees and winds up to 35 miles an hour just dries out the corn. The best irrigation can't keep up with that. The yield of the corn is expected to be between only 8 to 17 ton/ac. There will be a big problem to feed the cattle. Right now, they are already trading hay for over 340 USD per ton. 

On the way to the dealer, I made some pictures of the landscape. Where you see the fence, you should see some cows, too. But what to eat? The big role of the pivots shows the last picture. For more pictures, just have a look at Google Earth at "Hereford,TX" or "Dumas,TX".

More about the corn in Texas next week. I will keep you up to date. 

Regards, 

The BiG MAN

Corn and tomatoes...

Hi Followers,

sorry, that it took some longer to keep you up to date. I had a lot of stuff going on the last days. The demonstrations are starting slow here in California. The cool and wet spring delayed the crop, so that I could run only one demo with the BiG X 850 and our Easy Collect 753. It was very nice and tall corn. Unless it was a little bit green, the yield was about 32 Ton/ac. Massive Corn!

The customer was impressed about the performance of the 850 hp-Krone chopper. I was running against the biggest Deere and was going a little bit faster than he did. But: I had two more rows to chop!

On the way home, I passed a tomato field, where they were harvesting. Time to stop and take some pictures. The tomato harvester is working like a potato harvester. A knife is cutting the tomato plant of the ground and sieves are transporting it. Optical sensors sorting out the green tomato, the leaves and the rest of the plant are sucked out with big turbines. The tomatoes are overloaded “on the go.” Tractors are transporting the trailers to the dirt road, where they get picked up by trucks and get transported to the tomato factory, where they make sauce, juice or dried tomatoes. 

Another highlight of last week was the visit of Yosemite National Park. A very nice landscape and it’s for sure worth to visit the park sometime. Here are some impressions for you..

This week, there won’t be any chopping. We are heading to the headquarter in Memphis for a meeting. On Friday, I am flying straight to Texas to get some corn chopped for the feed lots in the panhandle of Texas.

More about that in a few days. So please check back later in the week.

Regards from California

Benedikt

Back in the USA...

Hi followers,

Time is really running. I am already back in the USA for over a week now. At the moment I am at our Krone dealer in Turlock and get the BiG X 700 and the BiG X 1100 ready for the coming corn season. Last week I have spent in Bakersfield and ran several demos with our BiG X 850 with 850 hp and our 10-row header EasyCollect 753. The customers were impressed. They really liked the easy clean-up after work is done: “That was the fastest chopper clean up I have ever done before!”

The dairy men are asking for long chop and well conditioned kernels. That means corn flour! Thanks to our KP with 30 % speed differential, we can run with a wider gap at the same processing quality. More throughput is possible! Especially at this corn here in California. Because of the cold and wet spring, the corn is very uneven this year. But still, in some field we had corn growing higher that the cab and reaching up to 35 ton per acre. I have never chopped corn like this before…

End of the week I should run more demos. I will keep you up to date

Regards from California, 

Benedikt