Arrived into Köln about 3pm after another good train ride, I have said before but I am incredibly impressed with the rail networks around the world, in Australia we are a third world country when it comes to our rail network.
Here I was off to see Bayer at their Monhiem facility, I must thank Ken Blowers from Australia for organising this for me, here I met up with Hienz-Friedrich Schnier who is head of the seed care centre.
Had a great meeting with Hienz, his background was in soil biology with experience around the world, particularly in low ph, high iron, high aluminium type soils, interestingly similar to some of the issues we can have in the North East.
So to discuss the treatment options and plant availability of nutrients under these situations was fantastic, also his knowledge of products on the market will be extremely useful. As I suspected there are distributors in Australia for companies with products that could help us immensely but the people in these companies in Australia don't realise that we need these products, so at the moment the products don't come to Australia!
We had a long discussion on microbial activity and soil nutrient balance thus resulting in plant uptake of nutrients, VERY interesting, can't wait to get home and try a few things that's for sure, I guess when we still have around 30% crop potential to achieve in most years, it is definitely worth some consideration.
On a lighter note you will never guess what was also on in Köln while I was there, but "INTERMOT" Germany's biggest international motor cycle fair, you wouldn't believe my excitement, the exhibition centre was enormous with 6 pavilions of motorbikes, each pavilion was about 3/4 of the size of the whole Melbourne exhibition centre, just amazing. The incredible thing was that we only see about half the motorbike brands in the world come to Australia, and the aftermarket gear was amazing. The custom bike section of the show was a highlight with some incredible workmanship on display, the attention to detail on these bikes is amazing.
I was like a Kelpie in a tyre shop, I didn't know where to go next!!
One thing that surprised me was how strong the Chinese sector was in the after market space, with some really quality stuff.
You will note I have no photos of any of the big companies this is due to a no camera policies everywhere you go, so sorry for the lack of visual with relation to seed.
The cathedral in the pictures below is truly amazing, the attention to detail is incredible , interestingly it was nearly the only building in Köln to survive the bombings of the 2nd world war, Köln was practically wiped of the planet during WW2, there are a couple of stories as to why the cathedral was spared the first is that the Germans and allied forces agreed to spare historical buildings so as to preserve history, but there were a huge amount of other historical buildings destroyed so I'm not sure I believe this version. The other reason was that the cathedral was the largest most prominent land mark in the city, so the allied planes used it as a landmark to pinpoint everything else to bomb, this seems far more plausible, as I said the pictures you see of the city after the war ended were unbelievable just complete destruction of the entire city.
Next off to Eisenach to meet with Petkus.
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