Tobias Grebe and Christine Grieber run a contracting and dairy farm business in northern Hesse, Germany, using John Deere 8006 machines to chop corn and grass for cattle feed. They prioritize chop quality and machine reliability for their harvesting operations.
My name is Tobias Grebe. My name is Tobias Grebe. Together with my father, I run an agricultural contracting business in northern Hesse. Our focus is feed production for dairy cattle in the region. For the past two years we've been using two John Deere 8006 hundreds. We're often on the go with customers with two choppers at once, so it was particularly important for us to have two of the same machines. We opted for two identical 8006 hundreds. What we like most about the machines is the chop quality. In addition to the reliability of the Mach and its operation, we have also been able to score points with our customers in this respect. The machine runs for half of the operating hours in our grass harvest. This was also a decisive reason why the machine performs so well in grass and delivers excellent chop quality in that area as well. The conversion from grass to corn is much easier than in the past. We rely on two different row crop headers for the choppers, one being the 400 series and the other the 300 series.
My name is Christine Grieber. I run the dairy farm along with my parents. We have 400 dairy cows and our output per cow is 12,500 litres per year. I'm responsible for management here and for the cow's health. The quality of the chop is very important to us, especially for health purposes, be it in the grassland where we chop everything, or in the corn so that the kernels are all crushed to the maximum. We don't chop a particularly long length, chop the corn rather short for good firmness in the silo, which is very important to us.
Currently we're chopping at 5mm chop length, 1mm spacing, and as we see here, the chopped material is very well prepared and is being processed here in the silo. At the moment, we're very happy with the machine and at the end of the day it's still chopping.
