October 12 Saarland

We began the morning with a visit to the John Deere combine and harvester factory in Zweibruecken.  We listened to a short overview of the John Deere Company as a whole and the Zweibruecken plant specifically.  Then the fun part, we had a two hour tour of the factory and saw the construction of the machines from start to finish.  I learned that they do not start building either machine until they have an order from one of their dealers.  However once they start they can ship a combine in 12 days and harvester in 7.  If was amazing to watch the lasers cut with precision and the robots weld and bend the raw steel into finely shaped parts that fit perfectly together.  Our guide was a funny older gentleman who had worked at the plant for 39 years and knew the place inside and out, he had us laughing through much of the tour and dinner afterwords.  The only thing we were disappointed in was that we were were not allowed to take pictures.  We eat lunch in their cafeteria before leaving.

 From there we drove to Rittershof 2, a hog and beef farm.  The have an inclosed hog barn, we were required to wear disposable coveralls and boots in the barn.  The hogs are raised from 30 kilo's to about 120 kilo's in small pens, first 24 to a pen and as they get bigger the number is reduced to 12 per pen.  The hogs are purchased as babies from a large breeding farm and sold to local butcharies.  About 240 hogs at a time on this farm.  They raise and mill their own grain, but buy soy for protein.  There are also about 20 Limousine cows and calves raised mostly on the pasture.  As seems to be normal the cows are watered using a mobile water tank with a few small water bowls.  The tank is always small and we wonder how the cows get enough water, but it seems to work, the cows looked good.

Next we visited an organic livestock farm.  The main enterprise is a dairy where they bottle milk and yogurt for the local market.  The market is so good that they have to buy milk from other farms, and think they could still sell more if they had the milk available.  They also raise a few hogs for sausage and have started to raise chickens in a new 30,000 E (capacity 200) mobile chicken house.  The chickens are free range and can be seen by the community as they walk and drive past the farm.   They have a small farm store on the farm, as well as a self serve farm stand where people take what they need and pay on the honor system.  They also sell in a vending machine and at local grocery stores.  They seem to do a very good job of marketing and taking advantage of a market that is alive and healthy here.  They sale eggs for approximately $7 dozen (they are actually sold by the egg) and milk is .38/L as compared to .27/L for conventional.

We finished up the day by visiting the home and farm of our host, Peter Hoffmann.  Peter has a dairy farm of about 90 cows and farms 120 hectares.  He also raises a small amount of fruit and has 2 distilleries where he makes shnops and liquor.  Everyone seemed to enjoy the free samples.  We had an excellent dinner of schwenker, Marinated pork cooked over a fire of beech wood.  Quite possibly the best meal yet in Germany.