23 June 2016, 12:58
Christof Voß and Andreas Osters moved from Osnabrück to Brandenburg to set up one of the largest private contractors in Germany
"To be quite honest, we loved playing with big machines even when we were little boys The Osters & Voß company presentation starts with just this sentence. Christof Voß leaves no doubt that this statement is correct. The 47-year-old has fulfilled his dream together with his friend Andreas Osters, who is the same age: to set up his own agricultural private contracting company with big machines. The results are well worth a look: Nowadays, Osters & Voß is one of the largest agricultural private contractors in Germany - with about 200 permanently-employed workers.
After the political change in Germany in 1989, they took their chance to "go over the wall" as it was called at the time. However, they did it in the other direction. Andreas Osters and Christof Voß actually lived near Osnabrück. They got to know each other during their apprenticeship at agricultural machine manufacturer Strautmann & Söhne in Bad Laer. They finished their training in 1988, and the wall fell in 1989. "We were on the road in East Germany a lot, introducing Strautmann products there" said Christof Voß with hindsight. One day, during their tours and visits to Brandenburg, Mecklenburg Vorpommern, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia, they had the idea "private contractor that's something which will have to work."
They started in March 1991 with a classical business start-up. At the time, they had nothing in the true sense of the word. No land, no capital, no farm, not even relations in the former East Germany. "Up to the fall of the wall I hadn't been to East Germany once, not even to Berlin. I only knew East Germany from the Nine O'Clock News" said Christof Voß. They rented a farm in Groß Welle and moved house to the rural district of Prignitz/Brandenburg. There they found what they needed: customers. "If I got any customers, I don't get any orders. If I haven't got orders I don't have any revenue, and without revenue there is no profit. That's just about the secret of financial success" is how Christof Voß summarised the business management sector.
Andreas Osters und Christof Voß managed to establish themselves quickly in the East because of their ideas, their technical knowledge, their personalities and their presence, and slowly built their company up to become an enterprise. In addition to agricultural contract services they also have the sectors of sludge recycling, transport services and biogas facility servicing, and they operate biogas facilities themselves. They have their own general managers for each division. The machine fleet includes around 100 tractors, 34 HGVs, 16 combine harvesters, 15 chippers, 16 wheeled loaders, 57 trailers for bulk goods transport, 29 liquid manure sprayers and, recently, a BA 725 DXL biomass processor. This is pulled by an HGV with a permanent driver. The new BA 725 DXL shreds biomasses for their own biogas facilities and on a piecework basis. The raw materials are mainly solid manure and grass silage. These materials have to be re-shredded in order to use the efficiency of a biogas facility. "The finer material, the larger the contact surface for bacteria and therefore the quicker the conversion" explained Christof Voß. The JENZ shredder was subject to a practical comparison with a competing model from Doppstadt and was given preference. Christof Voß: "The JENZ shredder has the advantage of a fixed flail with a counter-cutting edge which means that you need less energy for each tonne of throughput. The JENZ shredder uses about 15% less diesel which, in the end, was the decisive factor for us." After four months of deployment, Christof Voß doesn't think he's yet capable of giving a progress report. "Up to now the machine has been running perfectly, and exactly as we imagined it" said Mr Voß, who has measured a throughput rate of between 70 and 100 t of manure per hour.
Osters & Voß recently presented the BA 725 DXL in a practical test to biogas facility operators in order to acquire new customers. During this, Viola Schnehage (Marketing) and Dr. Henner Paskarbies, General Manager of the biogas sector at Osters & Voß, held a lecture. And the lecture started with the words: "To be quite honest, we loved playing with big machines even when we were little boys.
Source: JENZ GmbH