JOHN Deere South Africa has announced Mascor as its top dealer,
while the Kokstad branch is also branch of the year in the Mascor group.
Mascor CEO Bill Comins said this was the third year running that
the Greytown-based company was awarded the Dealer of the Year title.
He told Wheels the
group’s area stretches from Kokstad on the KZN border with the Eastern Cape; to
Malelane in Mpumalanga.
Comins credited the quality staff, coupled with Mascor’s ability to
finance the latest technology with the necessary parts for its knowledgeable
farmers, for helping the group to be dealer of the year three years in a
row.
Mascor director of sales and marketing Francois Marais said just
owning a John Deere saved farmers days in maintenance and repair time, compared
to other tractors.
Marais said Mascor invests millions of rand each year to ensure
there is an up-to-date and qualified technician near every 50 self-propelled
units. In the very rare cases where the diagnostic system show a service issue
not yet recorded on John Deere’s extensive database, the technician can access
an engineer at head office within 20 minutes on a 24/7 basis through JDLink.
This global intranet system logs technical data and customer recommendations for
all John Deere technicians to use.
“Using JDLink, our technicians can monitor a tractor on the field
and we can tell a farmer keep an eye on idle machine time, or get our driver
trainer in, or even implement guidance systems using our geo-satellite
positioning base stations.
Marais said the mechanics’ ongoing training includes refresher
courses every three years, as the technicians’ certificate automatically expires
to ensure the staff on the ground are as up to date as the equipment being
sold.
Robot tractors
Such constant training is vital to stay abreast
of constant modernisation in farming, where Precision Farming has become the
buzz word, with smart ploughs equipped to send signals to self-steering tractors
to ensure planting and spraying happens with 20 mm accuracies.
Precisely turning a tractor to make a new furrow without any
overlap of old tracks in KZN’s typically big fields saves at least 10% just in
diesel and fertiliser and then also renders bigger harvests, which is why more
farmers across South Africa are opting to rent John Deere’s towers that relay
satellite signals using the company’s Star Fire system.
This system uses a constellation of GPS satellites to calculate the
positions of each receiver mounted on towed units in a district real time, and
then instructs planters to precisely place each seed, or sprayers to open a
nozzle over exactly the right area.
Dealer principal of Kokstad John Deere, Gary Wells admits being the
top branch of the top John Deere dealer in SA makes him the best in the
business.
He has just finished installing a tower near the town to spread
precision farming into the Eastern Cape.
Wells was optimistic about the R2 billion which rural development
minister Guile Nkwinti recently announced in his budget speech in May to start
agri-parks.
(First published in Witness Wheels.)
