bavarikon4UDescription
In the decades after the First World War, many farms expanded their pig farming. Boiled potatoes were the main diet for the pigs until there was animal feed made from soya beans. Equipment like this was used to steam large quantities of potatoes every year in autumn for storage as pig feed. A machinist cooked between 150 and 180 hundredweights per day with the help of two other people. The afterwards mashed tubers were stored in silos or storage pits. Lactic acid fermentation preserved the mass for several months.
The Raiffeisenbank Bobingen (Augsburg district) acquired this steaming column in 1936, which was still used cooperatively in 1980 and then contracted out for a few years. On the wagon are two steam barrels for six hundredweights of potatoes each, a potato crusher acquired in 1957 and the coal-fired steam boiler from 1967 with a five-metre-high smoke pipe.
The engine belonging to the crusher was made by Adam Baumüller GmbH, a company based in Nuremberg since 1930, the other parts by Gotthard & Kühne, a machine factory for special agricultural, steaming and heating equipment founded in Lommatzsch (Saxony) in 1919 and later to become an important manufacturer. There was a branch of the company in Boxdorf near Nuremberg between 1947 and 1974. The Saxon part of the company developed into the largest private company with partial nationalisation in the GDR. The range included steaming plants and machines, green pea threshers, pine cone and reed dryers.