International Perspective: Agritechnica 2011

How time flies when you’re having fun! Since my last post back in August I have been to several countries meeting various existing distributors and also potential new ones. I even made it to the Farm Progress Show in Illinois earlier this year, which I believe is one of the largest farm machinery shows in the US. However, the big daddy for farm shows in the world has to be Agritechnica, which is held on a bi-annual basis in Hannover, Germany. This year was the third time Ag Leader has been present at Agritechnica and like the exhibition itself, we were bigger and better than ever before!

This year, Agritechnica attracted more than 415,000 visitors from 83 countries. Total floor space was 388,000m² (4,176,397 ft²) with over 2700 exhibitors. As for Ag Leader, we had several distributors helping us out on the stand: Hauke Heinrich from P H Roden in Germany, Volker Smirek from Kress and Co in Germany, Kamil Szymanczak from KAMROL in Poland, Henryk Pawelec from PAWROL in Poland, Mykola Boyko from KonKord in the Ukraine, Geert-Jan Giesberts from Louis Nagel in the Netherlands and Renz Waller from Germany. My thanks go out to all of them for helping us out. As mentioend earlier, this year's Agritechnica was bigger than ever before.

It was also intersting to note just how much precision farming, or smart farming as some would now call it, has increased in the last few years. Certainly from Ag Leader's perspective, we have grown in Europe a lot and when I think back to my first Agritechnica with Ag Leader in 2007, the achievements have been very noticeable. Not least from the fact that our stand size has increased significantly!

Whilst I did not get the opportunity to walk around and see much, I was told by several poeple that even though precision farming has notably increased, there were no siginificant developments in this area from any of the key players. There were of course some of the usual product launches from the big machinery guys with new tractors and or implements as well as some concept ideas:

Overall it was a great exhibition, if not very tiring, so I am thankful it is only every two years!