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Jun 14, 2023

Competing with the big boys

Kinze, in Williamsburg, makes planters, tillers, grain carts Aug. 20, 2023 5:00 am WILLIAMSBURG — In a farm-equipment market dominated by giant multinationals, a smaller independent manufacturer makes

Kinze, in Williamsburg, makes planters, tillers, grain carts

Aug. 20, 2023 5:00 am

WILLIAMSBURG — In a farm-equipment market dominated by giant multinationals, a smaller independent manufacturer makes its own way.

“We have a little competitor that paints their products green, down in Moline,” said Mark Parriott, referring to Deere & Co.

Parriott, Kinze Manufacturing’s senior vice president of operations, was showing guests around the company’s Williamsburg plant one recent afternoon. The factory’s display of bright blue farm implements — including a grain cart atop a pylon — has been a landmark for Interstate 80 travelers for almost 50 years.

“A lot of people who don’t know anything about farming, they’ll still comment about passing by Kinze and seeing all the lawn art,” company president Susanne Veatch said.

Veatch’s father, Jon Kinzenbaw, was just 21 when he opened his welding shop in Ladora in 1965, but almost from the start he built his own implements, adding features or rethinking their design to make using them easier and more efficient.

“He discovered he had a God-given natural ability of being able to problem-solve and see things others couldn’t, easier ways of doing things,” Veatch said. “What started out as some one-off projects for farmers, he quickly saw there was demand for making in mass production.”

Kinzenbaw’s first mass-produced improvement, a tractor-mounted toolbar for applying anhydrous ammonia, was introduced in 1969. His next product came after he went to buy himself a plow.

“He went to look at ordering one and found out you had to know exactly the dimensions you needed,” Veatch said. “He got to thinking, ‘Why not have something adjustable, so if you have different conditions you don’t have to go buy another plow?’ ”

Kinzenbaw’s plow allowed farmers to adjust the spacing between rows for different crops and conditions. He also gave it folding arms so the planter could be towed between fields instead of being hauled on a trailer.

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“When you’re planting a field, inevitably the trailer’s in the way of finishing the field,” Veatch said. “You’ve got to stop and unhook and move the trailer and finish planting. Then you’ve got to load it up and move to the next spot. That got my dad’s creative juices flowing: There’s got to be a way to fold a planter to take it down the road so you don’t have to load it on a trailer.”

Kinzenbaw patented his improved plow and licensed it to a friend’s company for production.

Today, the Kinze planters’ fully extended arms — the booms on which the seed dispensers are mounted — measure more than 60 feet across but can be folded for safe towing behind a tractor.

Kinzenbaw kept listening to his customers.

“A farmer came in and asked him to make a grain cart that would hold more grain and go across the field,” Veatch said.

The result was the Kinze Kargo King, a low-profile wagon with fat, low-pressure tires that didn’t sink into the soil.

“We were the first to do that,” Veatch said.

Today’s top of the line, the Harvest Commander 1721, hauls 1,700 bushels and can be unloaded via a joystick in the tractor cab that controls its two powered augers. With fewer farmers working larger fields, even incremental improvements in speed boost efficiency.

“It used to be you always planted at five-and-a-half miles an hour,” Veatch said. “With the advances technology has made and the accuracy of getting the seed all the way down to the ground, that allows us to go faster. Going from five-and-a-half miles an hour to seven-and-a-half, that’s vast improvement.”

Kinze’s top-line planters — it also makes “classic” models without electronics — carry the latest technology to meter and dispense seed at the correct depth and spacing, adjustable from the tractor cab. Linked to GPS, the planter can adjust depth and spacing to match varied soil conditions and drainage within a field.

Kinze brought its software development in-house in 2014. The company’s software designers work in North Liberty.

“When third parties were doing it, they didn’t have an interest in getting stuff done timely for us, or they didn’t have a deep enough understanding of what the product did in the field,” Veatch said.

Kinze Manufacturing still is privately held by the Kinzenbaw family, with Kinzenbaw, its CEO and chairman of its board.

“While he does not involve himself with day-to-day matters, he can regularly be found in the office or plant talking with employees and telling good jokes,” Veatch said. “He also regularly interacts with members of the senior leadership team and provides mentorship to them during our weekly meetings.”

Kinzenbaw bought the property along I-80 and moved Kinze Manufacturing to Williamsburg in the mid-1970s. The “million-ish”-square-foot plant, in Parriott’s estimate, sits on 30 acres. It’s large enough that employees use golf carts to get around.

More than 800 Iowans (minus office staff) work there, bending, welding, and fabricating raw steel stock into Kinze planters, grain-hauling field carts and tillage equipment.

The business is a major economic force in the city of 3,350. Kinze isn’t Iowa County’s largest manufacturer — that would be Whirlpool’s appliance plant in Amana — but its roots run deep.

“The unique and really great thing about Kinze is that it’s entirely local grown and operated,” said Kristie Wetjen, president of Iowa County Community Development. “That’s unique, especially in the industrial world. Whirlpool has been bought several times. (Kinze) creates a lot of local pride, knowing it’s made here.”

Employees work four 10-hour shifts four days a week, an attractive benefit to potential new hires.

“Even if you get a lot of overtime, you can get it done during the week,” Parriott said. “Anything that sets you apart from the competition is an advantage.”

“To retain and attract people you have to offer a number of things that people want,” said Brenda Martin, workforce programs director at Iowa State University. That’s especially true in rural Iowa.

“I don’t want to say our population is stagnant, but it is whatever it is,” Martin said. “Successful companies really do two simple things exceptionally well: They have effective programs to select and train talent. They just don’t hire them and throw them out there. They give gem a career path.”

Kinze does that through a program offered by Kirkwood Community College.

“There’s not as many young people going into the welding trade,” Veatch said. “We’re doing some scholarships and programs where they can send us interns and we can try out people. We can train people to do the more skilled positions.

“We get that great Midwest work ethic here as far as attracting labor,” she added. “If you have great working conditions and you pay people well and treat them fairly, people love working for a company like that.”

Like farming, Kinze’s routine adjusts to the seasons. On a recent afternoon, workers were building grain carts.

“The bulk of what we’re building right now will be used in this fall’s harvest,” Parriott said. Planters and tillage equipment will dominate the winter’s work. The Williamsburg plant also ships components for assembly in Vilnius, Lithuania, for European markets.

Kinze now has 260 dealers nationwide. The network went global after Kinzenbaw was invited to the Soviet Union in the late 1970s.

“They wanted to get more productive,” Veatch said. “The Kinze planter was the first American planter into Russia. It was a unique opportunity.”

That led to the plant in Vilnius, established in 2013 to serve Eastern European customers. Sales continue to Russia after its invasion of Ukraine, according to Veatch.

“We have some distributors that sell in other parts of the world,” Veatch said. “We know we have product in Australia, we know there’s product in South America, but we don’t have dealers there. It made its way all around the world.”

Kinze’s focus on its core products — its planters, grain carts and tillers — keeps it competitive, Veatch said.

“We don’t make the tractor and the combine and the sprayer, so that allows us to be very focused on the three product lines we make,” she said.

“The Kinze reputation is very high in the marketplace, and farmers know that Kinze products hold their resale value very, very well because of the quality with which they’re built, the innovative features, the ease of use.”

Veatch looks for Kinze’s product focus and measured growth to continue.

“We’re always looking to what’s next, Veatch said.

“We want to do our growth very sustained and be very smart about what we’re doing. There’s a lot of great opportunity, and we’ll just keep growing our technologies and expanding our footprint around the world.”