May 17
Today was a slow morning for most
preceding the good time we had at China Ag University. We had a two hour bus
ride to the Tian Jin port. It is the fourth largest port in the world and
second biggest port in China behind Shanghai. They move shipments of coal,
containers, crude oil, iron ore, bulk grain, soybeans, and steel from all over
the world. It has trade relations with over 500 ports in over 180 countries and
regions. In every month there are over 400 vessels that travel through the main
port. We witnessed a large barge dock at the port. They plan to expand to be
even bigger by 2017. We toured their exhibition hall looking at some of their
history. They had a scale model that was 1/1000th of the actual port.
We then took a short bus ride to
John Deere in Tian Jin. We toured their engine manufacturing facility that
opened in 2012, and has only been in production for 2 months. Currently the
factory only makes five engines a day but at max production they can produce
200 engines a day. It is very similar to
the plant in Waterloo, Iowa but they are only making tier three engines instead
of tier 4 engines since China only requires that level of exhaust control. We
learned that China needs to improve their mechanization of agriculture.
Currently only 67% of farmers use mechanization for plowing, 62% for planting,
and 51% for harvesting. The factory currently works 250 days a year with eight
hour shifts five days a week. It was very interesting to see the size of
equipment they use compared to the United States. The tour was led by Troy Schlotman, who is
from the same hometown (Kingsley, IA) as Andrew Langel, who helped arrange the
visit.
We had a two hour bus ride back
to Beijing after John Deere. We then had supper and celebrated our fourth
birthday of the trip. It was Philip Lorch's 21st birthday today, and he got a
delicious cake and crown! After supper we went to an acrobatic show. It was
very interesting to see the way they perform acrobatic stunts. Their ending
stunt was having eight motorcycles in a very small steel globe. It was a very
neat show to witness.
JD Group
Port office
Port
Troy and Andrew
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