This is a YouTube video titled "John Deere Yarn On The Farm | Karl and Chris" containing an English conversation between Chris Hess, a sugarcane farmer, and Carl Michulla, a field service technician at Honeycomb Sales and Service. Recorded in April 2023, they discuss farming operations, equipment maintenance, and the value of long-term relationships between farmers and technicians in the sugarcane industry.
Pretty valuable having people around that sort of know what's happening and where things are. I don't think you can place a price on it, really. There you go. My name's Chris hess. We farm 700 hectares of sugarcane here in the Invicta Mill area. It's about 40k out south of Ayr. We also grow some pumpkins and annually we grow mung beans and soya beans, depending on the year.
I'm Carl Michulla. I've been at honeycomb sales and service for the last 20 years. I'm a field service technician in the air branch. So, Chris 2012. I remember delivering the first 3520 cane harvester a few years ago. Now, a lot's changed since then.
So, yeah, I think honeycombs have been in the district a long time and they've turned out some really good tradesmen over the years and we're lucky. There's people like yourself that hang around and pretty much put their whole. Well, shouldn't say their whole life because you're only a young fella still, but put the better part, the best part of their life, you know, into being attack here. Because I know there's a hell of a lot of respect, you know, for guys like you that are around. And continuity is a big thing too. When you ring up, you know you're going to get the same bloke. You've been, you know, specialised in the cane harvester field. I know we farm up in Gordon Vale too, and I get my brother from up there. He brings you down here and you've been up there half a dozen times to try and sort things out for him too. So I know within our family that's greatly appreciated.
Yeah, it's good to have that relationship with a lot of customers through the group. It's really good to put all that together and try and help you guys out. As myself as a technician, I've learned a lot from my farmers as well. I treat my farmers as mates and you guys are in this equipment all year round. So you guys know, have got a great understanding of the product as well. And I do like seeing the difference between this area. Then all the way up to Mosman, we put all that data together and we've been rolling through a program and the failures per machine in the season has dropped right down. So it gives our guys and myself, we're not out there at all hours of the morning when we can prevent these machine downs.
It's valuable for us because I know when you do come out and you do talk about those things you probably bring up. Oh, we did have a failure here. Or here maybe you might want to look at that. And that's really invaluable to us. You no idea how important that is.
Thanks very much for your time, Chris. No worries. I'll be out of time.
