REPORT: We’ve been to Rieste, the German home of Grimme self-propelled potato and sugar beet harvesters, to see how they are made and discuss future plans for the plant.
Grimme has come a long way since it married the front half of a Deutz tractor with a single-row potato harvester to create its first self propelled in 1969. Even in his wildest dreams, Franz Grimme senior, the grandfather of current bosses Christophe and Phillipe Grimme, who recently took over from their father Franz, could have imagined that 55 years later the self-propelled business would warrant an impressive 10,200m² facility to make them at the Niedersachsen industrial park near Rieste.
Opened in 2012, the €17 million investment, which is located on the fringe of the busy A1 motorway connecting Osnabrück and Bremen, assembles all versions of the two- and four row Varitron and four-row Ventor. The six row Rexor 6200 and 6300 self-propelled sugar beet harvesters are also built here, and when all five models are added together, the plant is on target to produce 200+ new harvesters this year.
Where the parts come from
We are grateful to Damme-based marketing manager Maximilian Gerken for the opportunity to tour the facility, which is purely an assembly plant. Nothing is made here. The lack of any noisy metal cutting and bending machinery explains why it is so quiet. While the main components of the engine, wheels, axles and cab are all outsourced, many others are made in-house 12km away at Grimme’s other plant in Damme (this is where the self-propelleds were previously built). This includes the chassis, sheet metal and intake units, and as an example, 55% of parts for a Rexor are made within the Grimme Group and an average of three loads a day are trucked from Damme to Rieste (600 trucks a year).
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