I am now comfortably located in cool and brisk Madison, WI at World Dairy Expo. The media room is active and a number of us attended a breakfast time press conference given by WestfaliaSurge, now part of GEA Farm Technologies.
The CEO and President of GEA Farm Technologies is Vern Foster. He gave us a comprehensive presentation this morning (media and dealers) to explain the reasons behind the change and what that means for the company and its customers.
He says, “It’s to pull all of the organizations that are part of GEA Farm Technologies, Houle, Norbco, WestfaliaSurge, pull it under a common brand so it makes sense for the marketplace, makes sense for our investors, makes sense for our customers and our dealer distribution.” The GEA stands for Global Engineering Alliance, a 5.3 billion Euro company that operates in 50 countries. Vern says, “It helps us really re-focus under one umbrella as we continue to grow and create additional organizations and innovate into the field of agriculture.”
Since Houle, Norbco and WestfaliaSurge have separate sales forces he says they’ve been in discussion together to “offer a more total solutions package to a producer.”
He says you’ll start seeing the new GEA Farm Technologies brand at trade show and in their advertising. In fact, his business cards already show the new logo!
You can listen to Vern’s full presentation here: wdx-08-foster-presentation.mp3
You can also download the full presentation using this link (mp3 file).
You can also listen to an interview I did with Vern afterward as part of our Milking Parlor Podcast: milking-parlor-30.mp3
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