REPORT: Threshing again, as in the days of the GDR — the motto for a special harvesting event that took place at Hohenfinow, Brandenburg, Germany in early July. We take you on a journey back in time.
It’s almost midday — the calm before the storm. A crop of barley will be going under the knife. With 13 Fortschritt combines, the harvesting armada, led by Gerd Mittag, slowly sets off from the Hohenfinow estate in east Germany.
Difficult start
After opening the field and cutting the first few bouts, the crew suffers its first setbacks — a smoking V-belt, a jammed cutterbar. Nevertheless, calm is restored, as the team is all too familiar with such mechanical hiccups. Even though the machines from Fortschritt were technically advanced, they did suffer from some reliability shortcomings. “We had to improvise a lot back then, because spare parts were not always available,” recalls Gerd Mittag, Even though he is retired, Gerd’s Fortschritt dungarees are his dress code for the summer. Since the early 1990s, he’s been driving his own combine every season. “I started out back in 1992 with a second hand Fortschritt E512,” he tells us. Over time, several E514 units were added to eventually form a gang of nine. “For me, these combine harvesters are very reliable machines, and parts are now surprisingly easy and cheap to come by,” he adds. The fact that this is not all about profitability but enthusiasm for the brand is reflected by the many varying liveries the nine combines are dressed in. Gerd has made a point of buying rare specimens, models that were exported to Switzerland and one of the last 514s in blue MDW livery.
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