A thriving manufacturing company can go a long way to develop a town’s reputation and legacy. That’s especially true when the company is named after the town itself. The Manufacturing Express paid a visit to New Holland, the iconic agricultural equipment manufacturer from New Holland, Pennsylvania.
The campus we visited is only half a mile from the original factory where Abe Zimmerman started the company in 1895. What started as a small blacksmith shop called the New Holland Machine Company has now grown into a global agricultural equipment leader.
New Holland has facilities all around the world, but their birthplace and namesake today serves as a production facility for Hay & Forage applications and the regional headquarters for North America. With a 350-acre site that includes a 130-acre working farm, New Holland can pursue the entire process of new equipment creation right in its own backyard. “We can go from concept, design, rapid prototype in the field all on the same site, conceivably in the same day,” said Director of Network Development Mark Lowery. “We have all the industrial capacity to test items that we want on site.”
It takes 850 people to operate the New Holland site and their event was a chance to celebrate all of their hard work. People from all across the organization were in attendance, along with the Deputy Secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture Lisa Graybeal and Legislative Director for State Senator James Malone’s Office Stacy Treier.
“This is agriculture and manufacturing working together,” said Graybeal. “It’s a farmer identifying something that can be done more efficiently and then solving that problem. That relationship is really important and I thank New Holland for having all of us here and providing this attention to workforce. Pennsylvania in investing in career and technical education, training, and pathways that help people gain the skills employers need.”
Innovation has always been what has made New Holland so successful for so long. The company is often credited with creating the first commercially successful small square baler and the knotter that made it work back in 1940. Since then New Holland has shaped the advancement of balers and manufacturing technology ever since. For more than 130 years, New Holland has been committed to helping feed the world.
Helping feed America is no small task, and it’s one the employees at New Holland take pride in. Lowery explains it this way: “We serve and advance the people who feed and build a growing world. Our values are built around customers. We go beyond, make it simple, win as one, and we make sure that our employees feel like their work matters.”
That mindset is what New Holland is trying to instill in the next generation. Through the Lancaster County STEM Alliance, teacher trainings held on site, and support for FFA chapters across Pennsylvania, the company gets young people onto the property and shows them what a career here looks like, so the work of feeding America keeps going.
The company has come a long way from its humble beginnings as a Pennsylvania machine shop. Even as New Holland has grown large enough to be on farms in countries all over the world, it has never forgotten where it came from. Just look at the name on the label.
