Developed by Wilmington Exporter : Machine Helps Ease Japan’s Hay Shortage
Using a machine that looks like a giant trash compactor, a company in Wilmington is doing its bit to make a dent in the foreign trade deficit.
Orient Hay Cube Distributors has developed a machine that it considers state of the art in the rather specialized business of putting hay into shipping crates for transport to the Far East.
Company officials claim that the new machine will squash hay bales to less than half their original size--thereby allowing double the number of bales to be crammed into a seagoing shipping container--and it will do it in about half the time as earlier models, they add.
About 95% of the 150,000 tons of hay that Orient Hay Cube ships annually is destined for Japan, where it fattens pampered Kobe beef, race horses, dairy cows and other livestock.
As its name indicates, Orient Hay Cube also ships hay in the form of small hay cubes, which are compressed on the farm to about 1 inch by 4 inches, as well as even smaller hay pellets.
Hay is something Japan, with its limited land, must import, and the United States is among those countries that are happy to export it.
About 522,000 metric tons of hay worth $74.8 million were exported to Japan in 1984, according to the Department of Agriculture. That, of course, is only a tiny inroad against the crushing trade deficit with Japan, which totaled $37 billion last year.
“We have slowly been increasing the sales of hay products to Japan,” said Ron Anderson, director of international market development for the National Hay Assn. and owner of Anderson Hay and Grain in Ellensburg, Wash. “Japan is our biggest export market for hay.”
The National Hay Assn. puts the hay exports to Japan slightly higher at about 600,000 metric tons, or slightly more than 70% of the 850,000 metric tons of hay that Japan imported last year.
Somehow, the bulky commodity has to get there. “There are really not that many people who do this (squashing and shipping hay),” allowed Donald Deese, general manager of Orient Hay Cube. “It’s a pretty specialized field.”
Deese acknowledges that his few competitors in the hay-service business own similar compression machines.
But “there’s no manufacturer that makes the machines, so each has to be made by the company that uses it for its own purposes,” Deese said as he watched the new machine pound bales from approximately 50 inches by 19 inches to a mere 19 inches by 19 inches.
None of the competing machines can stomp hay with quite the same alacrity. Orient Hay Cubes’ new machine compresses hay at an unmatched 4 1/2 to 5 bales per minute, Deese said. Orient Hay Cubes’ 6-year-old compression machine reduces bales at 2 1/2 bales per minute.
“We haven’t come across anyone who has a machine that is faster than ours and can load as many bales as ours can,” Deese said.
