WesWorld

In September 1893 the brothers-in-law Franz Ramesohl and Franz Schmidt opened up a workshop under the name of Ramesohl & Schmidt in the Westphalian town of Oelde, where they undertook the manufacture of milk separators for the growing German dairy industry. In the year following the company’s foundation, the number of employees rose to twenty and the production facilities were expanded by a further building. In 1897 annual production was 2,000 centrifuges, with sixty employees. In 1899 the partnership was converted into a limited liability company as Ramesohl und Schmidt AG, by which time the firm had diversified to the manufacture of machines for the manufacture of margarine. The company constructed its first butter-making machine in 1902. It was able to overcome the disruption caused by the Great War and its aftermath and in the 1920s introduced new lines of equipment - bucket milking installations, mobile milking installation for pasture land operation and the first self-cleaning separator. The firm organised a subsidiary in the United States of America, Westfalia Separator Company, in 1929, and quickly became a major force in the American market for dairy processing equipment. In March 1941 the company adopted the current corporate style.

In 1881 the engineer Paul Reuß established a forge and foundry in Artern to meet local needs for agricultural equipment and machinery. The firm rapidly diversified and engaged in the production of milk separators, steam generators, low-pressure boilers, potato-washing equipment and other sorts of agricultural processing equipment. The firm was incorporated as the Maschinenfabrik Kyffhäuserhütte in 1910. The firm survived the turmoil of the Great War and in the 1920s was able to regain a significant portion of its foreign market and become one of the nation’s largest manufacturers of agricultural processing equipment. In 1938 it acquired the facilities of the neighboring Brünner iron works in order to undertake the manufacture of field kitchens for the Heer.

This firm, a specialist in the production of agricultural equipment for the potato industry, was founded in 1880 by Andreas Jakob Tröster. Initially located in the village of Griedel where it initially produced wind mills and field mills; the firm moved to the town of Butzbach in 1891. Beginning with the sale of imported American agricultural machinery the firm in 1898 filed patents for its first design of potato cultivator, and rapidly expanded its production capability through the construction of its own iron foundry. Its first planter design was introduced in 1910. Today the firm employs more than six hundred workers and exports its equipment to more than seventy countries around the world.

This concern, which specialises in the construction of agricultural equipment for harvesting potatoes and sugar beets, was founded in 1908 as Wagen und Karosseriebau Willi Frank, coach-and-wagon builders for the Imperial Army. In the wake of the Great War the firm switched its production to support agriculture, and in 1922 was reorganised as a joint-stock company in the current style. The factory, located in the Pomeranian town of Gützkow, employ several hundred workers and includes its own forge and foundry.

The present firm came into being through the merger in 1911 of two Austro-Hungarian agricultural engineering businesses; Clayton and Shuttleworth, which had originally been founded in 1842 in the English city of Lincoln, but which had established themselves in Wien by 1857; and Hofherr-Schrantz, a venture begun by Mathias Hofherr of Wien in 1869 and joined in 1881 by Hungarian-born János Schrantz. By the late 19th Century both firms had expanded substantially, with Clayton and Shuttleworth having established no less than five assembly plants and factories throughout the Austro-Hungarian Empire and in the newly established kingdom of Romania.

In the aftermath of the Great War the concern underwent a period of contraction and reorganisation. Production was concentrated at the Wien-Floridsdorf factory, while the factory in Budapest was closed for several years, though it would reopen in 1928. The former assembly plants in Lemberg (Lvov), Prague, and Krakow were nationalised or lost through nostrification. By the latter part of the 1920s these difficulties had been substantially overcome and during the following decade the firm would see considerable expansion; indeed, by the 1930s it was exporting tractors to more than twenty-seven countries throughout south-eastern Europe and South America.

In addition to tractors, the concern’s present product line includes mowing machines, combine harvesters, threshing machines, and potato harvesters.