Potato Review

54 POTATO REVIEW MAY/JUNE 2021 MACHINERY 160th year marked with new Yorkshire depot A NEW, purpose-built, £3m depot selling GRIMME machinery has opened on the edge of Market Weighton in Yorkshire, coinciding with the company’s 160th anniversary. The company is one of the most recognised names in farming and has exported its machinery to Britain since the 1960s but has only had a physical home in the UK since 1993, when it opened a sales and service operation in Sleaford. At that point, just seven people were supporting British users of the renowned German machines. Today, around 100 people are employed across the UK, 25 of whom have just moved into the new depot. When the team outgrew the available space at Dunnington, on the outskirts of York, the team took a detailed look into alternative sites. Managing Director of GRIMME UK, Patrick Graf Grote, said: “We needed to move, but we didn’t want to make it more difficult for our customers to get to us and for our team to visit them. The ideal location, next door to our Dunnington site, was not for sale, so Market Weighton was the location we chose. We then spent considerable time locating the perfect site.’ The new 15,000 square feet depot at Market Weighton offers easy access to the A1 and M62 and is not too far away from its previous home, which was important to the team. Dunnington had been home for GRIMME UK in the region since 2010, in which time the customer base grew from a handful to more than 300. UK parts manager, Helen Spencer, said: “The business-to-consumer side of our business has grown significantly in a short period. We have more than 150 machines in our range, and we need to be able to react quickly when our customers need us. A major benefit of Market Weighton compared to Dunnington is that we can now have over 4,000 different GRIMME original spare parts at any one-time. We will not be reliant on overnight deliveries from Swineshead like we used to be. This means we can respond much more quickly and get our customers up and running faster than before.” Transforming the site, a former farm, took 10 months from demolition to the fabrication of the new steel frame building, fitting out and handing over the keys. Depot Manager Jack Brown said: “We didn’t have the indoor space before and would lose a lot of time moving machines around in the yard. Here, we have the space we need, and we have a new overhead crane. We now have a better layout, making the team more efficient and productive. This will allow us to get machines back to our customers faster than before, and that’s crucial.” When the team first moved into Dunnington, it worked on GT 170 row trailed harvesters that were 10.5 metres long and 3.4 metres wide. Today, that machine has four rows and a cab. Demand for the company’s planting and harvesting machines has grown. Today, more than 400 GRIMME machines are operating within 40 miles of the new Market Weighton site. GRIMME UK supplied its 2,000th CS 150 Combi-Star de-stoner to MH Poskitt in March. New options for hoppers DEWULF, full-liner in machines for the cultivation of potatoes and root crops, has introduced several new options for their MH 24x series of receiving hoppers. The new options for the MH 24x are a central outlet, a presentation conveyor for the variant with two units and larger separation of the PU spiral rollers (up to 70 mm).