Horsch's family affair grows global precision cropper following

Still run by its farmer founders, the Horsch family, the 40-year old company's distinctive red, heavy duty precision seeders and cultivators have also made rapid advances in Australia since their almost accidental introduction to the local market just over a decade ago.

In fact, the Horsch Sprinter tyned airseeder unit was designed by Michael Horsch and his team in co-operation with Australian farmers visiting the company's home base in Bavaria in 2012.

The Sprinter's 12-metre to 24m-wide rigs now rank as a best seller for Horsch in Australia, alongside its Avatar single disc airseeder and the Tiger offset disc and tyne combination cultivator.

Horsch also sells the three point linkage PTO-powered Joker cultivator, its Maestro singulated seeder and self propelled and trailed sprayers.

The range is designed for controlled traffic, zero till and conventional farming systems, including high speed disc work for stubble incorporation.

Overseas, its range even extends to an autonomous robotic planting and tillage platform currently at work in pre-release trials in Brazil, where the company has just built a huge factory - one of its five manufacturing plants.

Last year Horsch notched up more than $1.6 billion in global sales from bases in Germany, North America, France, Britain, Ukraine, Poland, Russia, Brazil, China and Australia.

Unlike a lot of compact and intricate European-built machinery, designed for relatively predictable farming environments, Horsch gear is typically big scale, and sells to customers farming anything from 1000 hectares to 1 million.

Many of those vast farms were initially in Eastern Europe where the then fledgling company made big inroads in the 1990s as the company refined its robust engineering and technically smart designs after the demise of Eastern Bloc collective farms.

In addition to the family's original farm, Horsch owns about 20,000 hectares of cropping country in the Czech Republic and East Germany which are ideal for a lot of prototype equipment trials and practical feedback.

"The Horsch's are an extraordinary family," said Australian importer and principal of Muddy River Agricultural, Peter Jack.

"They don't just like making impressive machinery, they love farming.

"They also have huge respect for the Australian market and Australian farmers working in vast, tough and diverse environment."

Horsch sales here have more than doubled in the past five years as the equipment has won a following in grain growing areas ranging from Esperance in Western Australia, to Victoria's Wimmera and cotton and summer cropping areas like North West NSW, southern Queensland and Emerald in Central Queensland.

Horsch gear recently sold to Tipperary Station in the Northern Territory where a big dryland cotton farming push is underway.

"Queensland and NT sales manager at Muddy River, Shane Christian, said Horsch gear suited cotton and sorghum paddock rehabilitation and planting demands in heavy country, but was equally popular further south addressing canola and cereal growers' seed establishment needs.

Muddy River, which imports and assembles Horsch equipment, has just opened its third Australian factory in Perth this month, complementing its head office site in Toowoomba and its northern Victorian base at Mooroopna, near Shepparton.

Last year Muddy River imported the equivalent of 800 six-metre-long shipping containers of Horsch gear.

That's a big step from the company's first, single implement in 2011, an early version of a Joker high speed cultivator.

Mr Jack had spotted the unit while attending France's big SIMA agricultural fair, and was surprised by some of its "quite un-European" characteristics and potential for broadacre Australia.

He subsequently arranged to visit the Horsch farm and factory site in southern Germany with a study tour of growers from WA, western Victoria, Parkes in NSW and the Darling Downs.

During that visit, Michael Horsch responded instantly to the Aussies' inquiries and a design for the Sprinter zero till seeder evolved, adapting Australian specifications to a robust, similarly-styled, Horsch seeding rig built for grain farms in Kazakhstan in Central Asia.

Muddy River has since run another 11 grower trips to Germany, while Horsch family members, notably Michael and his co-director wife, Cornelia, have been in Australia almost annually meeting customers and learning what the local market needs.

Mr Horsch is one of four sons born to a Mennonite Christian farming family, whose father and grandfather were early movers in minimum-till and no-till cropping, having noted better earthworm counts and crop responses in paddocks which were not repeatedly ploughed.

After spending time in the US, he returned home in 1983 and, aged 21, built his first direct drill seeder, almost immediately booking orders for 10 more, and apparently painting them red because it was the only colour available in volume at the local hardware store.

When the Berlin Wall crumbled in 1989, Horsch took advantage of grain regions in East Germany and Eastern Europe opening up to private farmers and corporations which needed appropriate gear to do the job.

Muddy River's Mr Jack said Australia had eventually become a logical market for Horsch and its soil management focus after its rapid growth in Eastern Europe, then the US and Canada.

"They see Australia as a valued marketplace," he said.

"We now represent a respectable chunk of the overall market."

Horsch now boasts spending more on research and development and marketing than any other manufacturer in the seed and tillage industry.

Mr Jack, whose Muddy River Agriculture is the only non-Horsch subsidiary or joint venture responsible for distributing its products around the world, said it was amazing to see how far and fast the family company had grown.

"They're also incredibly humble people, who still live on their farm and live for farming," he said.

"They don't own race horses or big beach houses, they just invest their money back into the business and understanding their customers and their farms."