By CINDY LADAGE
Illinois Correspondent

HANOVER, Germany — While German farmers were of course expected in Hanover at Agritechnica, Irish farmers were a ways from home.

Fred Clarke, managing director of Agri-Gear out of County Covan, Ireland, came for the two preview days before the official start of the show. Clarke traveled with Ronnie Coleman, a co-worker, with a group traveling with the Irish Farmer’s Journal. Derek Casey, machinery editor for the Journal, checked out the array of machinery to be found at this, the world’s largest farm show.

Clarke is no stranger to Agritechnica, “I have been coming over for the last 20 years,” he said. “I come every two years to the show.”
Besides working at Agri-Gear, a tire, wheel and axle sales and distribution firm, Clarke also farms raising mostly wheat, barely, oats and a little maize (corn) “that we must dry.”

Although at the show primarily to hook up with tire dealers such as BKT Tires, as a farmer, part of the joy of the show for him was the wide selection of machines.

Clarke liked seeing the antique vintage machinery placed here and there. Most of the machines at Agritechnica were built for large farming operations. A lover of Massey Ferguson tractors, Clarke said not all farms have to be big though to make a go.

“In Ireland, 100 acres will make it,” he explained. As for livestock, he said sheep and cattle graze together in shared pastureland on the mountainsides.

This Irishman likes to travel and added, “In 1964, I was in America for three months. I made enough to pay for it from two litters, 16 pigs, from two sows.”

Today, that margin of profit would be a different story: “Not now, to buy a holiday like that, it would probably take 100 pigs.”

Coleman said Agri-Gear offers a full range of tires that include commercial, agricultural, industrial and private use. “We take over 200 containers to Ireland each year,” he added, showing the importance of connections made at Agritechnica.

During the main section of the show, which was Nov. 10-14, John O’Donnell, Thomas Forin and Nicholas Hannigan came from Ireland with their families to see all that Agritechnica had to offer.

“It is magnificent,” O’Donnell observed. As a cattle and dairy farmer, he added, “There is so much detail, the show is super.”
Forin, also a beef and dairy man, seconded that opinion.
“The companies show the machinery along with the way they work. The innovation and show is so well laid out,” he said.

Hannigan grows dry stock and does tillage work. For him, the high point of the show was the technology.

“It is nice to see the technology and the machinery along with the different types of farming, than what is in Ireland,” he noted.