Making everyday life better

Electronic controls and regulators, self-developed and built in the farm’s own workshop on the parental farm, brought relief in the handling of combine harvesters through a fully automatic cutting height control. The student at the Georg-August University in Göttingen experienced the need at home and in numerous internships and tried to improve it with digital possibilities at that time. With an electronic tramline control for the seed drills of the Hassia company in Butzbach, a first customer was found, and the sole proprietorship Andreas Reichhardt was founded.

Partnership from the very beginning

The fact that change requires partners who believe in the cause and who are willing to go along with a new path was already evident at the time and so a connection was formed in the meeting with Hermann Paintner that continues to this day.

The Ringelshausen estate becomes a workplace for digital activities. Former stables are revised and create space for rooms where control cabinets are built, meter-long cables are pulled and innovations are developed in modern infrastructure which completely change everyday life in the field. The self-propelled sugar beet harvesting technology of the HOLMER and ROPA brands is characterized by engineering from Hesse.

Pioneer for Precision Farming

Steering vehicles automatically means relieving the driver of a routine task, while saving resources and improving the result. This is the origin and still the basis for precision farming today. Retrofitting the existing fleet to take advantage of new developments as quickly as possible was the goal from then on at Reichhardt. Based on ultrasonic sensors for track guidance, Reichhardt’s PSR steering system was presented at Agritechnica in 1998 together with John Deere, presented as a German alternative on a field in North Dakota in 2003, supplemented with GPS in 2006 and awarded the DLG silver medal at Agritechnica in 2009 for its connection to ISOBUS. At the same time, Reichhardt’s flexible TAC row sensor conquered the corn choppers and combine harvesters.

RTK CLUE brought not only the silver medal in 2011, but a completely new system and distribution model for providing RTK correction data, which is now trusted by thousands of farmers.

Competitive advantages through innovation

Together with HOLMER, Reichhardt is finally bridging the gap between proven vehicle steering with row guidance and the possibilities opened up by satellite navigation signals in sugar beet harvesting technology. Driver relief, soil conservation, resource savings and increased efficiency are also the sustainable benchmarks here, awarded the DLG silver medal in 2017.

Ahead at the cutting edge

Today, apps, tablets, IoT (Internet of Things) and KI determine our everyday lives. The pursuit of sustainability, the challenges of climate change, social changes and responsibility for tomorrow continue to guide our developments.