AgroCentre tours Italy

AgroCentre has organised a new foreign tour for Russian farmers. This time, its specialists visited Italy. During the visit, they went to see AGCO Corporation's facility in Laverda, a dairy farm, and of course, attended places where they were treated to Italian cheese and wine.

At the Laverda facility, the Russian farmers were introduced to the history of the enterprise and taken on an excursion of the production plants. Here, on an area of 60,000 square metres the Challenger, Fendt and Massey Ferguson grain combine harvesters are assembled. 650 people are involved in the assembly process. Each day, 18 to 19 machines are rolled out. The farmers watched all the manufacturing stages, from raw materials acceptance and laser metal cutting to painting and final assembly. The guests visited the modern paint shop currently under construction where dipper bathes will be installed. They also watched how machines are tested for faults. Should just one be detected, the whole machine goes off for re-manufacture. In the test centre, the machines are tested strictly, as the field conditions require.

The farmers were told that AGCO plans to launch production of Challenger fodder combine harvesters at this facility. Already the engineers are developing the model. In the corporation's museum, the farmers saw the first combine harvester, mower and baler.

The farmers familiarised themselves with the country's farming industry on the FATTORIA DIDATTICA PERON farm. Here, a mere five people raise and look after 320 Alpine milch cows. Nine-unit side-by-side milking equipment is installed for convenient milking. Each cow's yield here reaches 28 litres of milk. This is used for production of premium brands of cheese, which the guests willingly tasted.

“We were agreeably surprised by the test centre where the machines undergo a three-hour test run”, says Ivan Gubarev, head of the Gubarev Farming Enterprise (Belovsky district of the Kursk oblast), sharing his impressions. “Here the specialists leave nothing to chance. I assured myself of the high reliability and superior quality of the AGCO equipment. As a head of an enterprise raising 400 milch cows, I found the expertise of a foreign farm extremely interesting. I was amazed by the high level of production culture. Cleanliness and order reign supreme everywhere. There is a broom even in the silo pit! I also liked the system of dung removal. A software-controlled machine travels across the cow-house, removing the dung through a special latticed floor, following which it ends up in containers for various fractions, and then goes to the field as a fertiliser. It's worth noting that one litre of milk, with protein and fat content, respectively, of 3.7 and 4.5 percent sells for 0.40 eurocents, i.e. 16 roubles. Our milk of comparable quality costs more”.