Plastics for agriculture • Röchling has been exhibiting with the High-Performance Plastics Division at the world-wide leading trade fair for agricultural machinery and equipment Agritechnica 2009 with over 2,300 exhibitors (08. to 14.11.2009, Hanover Fairgrounds) with great success.

The Röchling fair stand focuses on agricultural machinery and equipment, animal husbandry and biogas. What Röchling offers ranges from semi-finished products (sheets, rods, profiles) right up to precisely machined components and injection moulded parts made of thermoplastics and fibre-reinforced plastics. Fair visitors showed special interest in the big exhibits: A plough with breast board made of ROBALON and a slide plate for a mower, with grain lifters made of plastic – applications visitors normally know only made of steel.

"Application potential for technical plastics in agriculture is extremely varied. Particularly in those instances where requirements on wear and anti-friction properties are high, plastics are clearly superior to the classical materials in many fields," Heinz Dirksen, who in Haren is responsible for sales of machined thermoplastic components, is well aware. "Also the outstanding resistance to chemicals makes utilisation of plastics in agriculture extremely interesting."

Röchling already has excellent references in agricultural technology. In this light, the 12 metre wide cutting unit Ultralight 800 from Austrian BISO Schrattenecker Erntetechnik GmbH was awarded the DLG Silver Medallion at this fair. Slide plates made of Röchling plastic in this cutting unit make for the necessary reduction in weight. There is a definite trend towards increasingly bigger harvesters to obtain greater harvesting performance. This means the harvesting headers are constantly getting wider, thus heavier, necessitating, in turn, increasingly lighter materials.

The engineers of the agricultural machinery manufacturers are impressed by the properties of plastics and the application competence of Röchling staff. An engineer of a manufacturer from Lower Saxony gets to the point: "We steel people still think in terms of metal. We are highly interested to see how we’ll be able to further extend our technological headstart with innovative materials."

There is a big, global demand for mechanisation and investments in agriculture. The market is largely dictated by the dynamics on the food and energy markets. High energy prices and rising wage costs and the concomitant declining assignment of workers in agriculture even in developing and newly industrialised countries lead to an ever-growing demand for efficient machines. In this context, the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) estimates the necessary mechanisation investments of the emerging countries at annually in excess of 350 million dollars and investments in replacements at over 1.3 billion dollars by 2050. With a third of total mechanisation investments, the South Asian region will display the greatest growth dynamics.