Ried/Reichersberg. As part of the "Company & Field Days" customer event held from 30 June to 2 July, the market leader in the mechanisation of field experimentation extended an invitation to its company headquarters in Ried im Innkreis/Upper Austria. Numerous national and international customers accepted the invitation and were able to see Wintersteiger and its products for themselves. The visitors included customers from Uruguay, South Africa, China and Russia. However, the majority of customers came from Central Europe.

There continue to be many challenges in plant breeding which concern the breeders. According to climate research, there is also likely to be a continued increase in weather extremes. With this in mind, the stress tolerance of plants and a good ability to regenerate cultivars will become more important in the future. The future priority of cultivar selection, therefore, is an ever-increasing desire for cultivars where quality and yield are stable, even under problematic weather conditions. For the SEEDMECH Division of the Wintersteiger company, it is important to work flat out to develop new, convincing products. There was an impressive presentation of these products at the "Company & Field Days".

In the morning, visitors had the opportunity of looking at a large number of machines at the company's headquarters. Technicians and key account managers presented a range of applications and advantages of the laboratory, planting and harvesting equipment. The presentation on the use of GPS technology in field experimentation particularly aroused a lot of interest. During a visit to the production facilities, Wintersteiger was able to demonstrate the high-quality production of all its machines to the visitors. "We are very impressed with the development of Wintersteiger's SEEDMECH products and with the production processes. I think this could be an impressive global leader," was the opinion of Stephan Bock from the Eichhof Agricultural Centre in Hesse/Germany.

During the second half of the day the customers were able to see the capabilities of the Wintersteiger machines for themselves on a nearby field at the Reichersberg seed breeding station. To organise this, about 500 plots were specially sown last autumn with cereals, rape seed and green fodder. The Cibus F, Classic, Delta, Monoseed B, Plotseed S with GPS, Kubota plot tractor and the new plot dividing machine were presented at four stations.

The customers were extremely enthusiastic about the professionalism of the event and the performance of the machinery. Adam Christie from Scottish Agronomy Ltd., who travelled from Scotland specially for the "Company & Field Days", said by way of confirmation, "Much of interest to see, a good company and fantastic hospitality. The amount of trouble you went to for us was unbeatable."