Zetor Plant Tour

I drove my parents to Brno, Czech Republic for a scheduled tour of the Zetor tractor factory which was one of the only things that my Dad had requested.  After the rain yesterday and last night it had gotten below freezing so there was a rime covering on all the fields and plants.  It was beautiful in the morning sunlight.

On the way, we saw our first tractor in the fields, plowing.  They use hillside plows even on flat ground.  This was a brand that I hadn’t heard of – non-articulated four-wheel drive with a six-bottom plow.  The landscape is relatively flat to the Czech boarder and then becomes rolling with large vineyards on the hillsides.  

This was my first foray into the Czech Republic, and even though Brian’s car already has an annual Czech toll sticker, I wanted to stop at the first gas station and get some Czech crowns (they are not yet on the Euro) to buy lunch for our tour guide; and, even more importantly, for paying an immediate fine in case we were pulled over by the police.  We stopped at three gas stations before Brno and didn’t find an ATM.  

At the factory, I think my dad had a good time questioning our guide Petr Novak and translator Dagmar Dziadkova.  Again due to the poor world economy, this factory is only producing about 5000 tractors per year, is only about one fourth its former physical size, and now employs only 800 rather than 10,000 in its heyday.  Petr and Dagmar declined a "thank you" lunch that we would have liked to take them to, perhaps because they would have lost pay for the time they were away from the plant.  

From the Brno billboards it appears that Bauhaus is the big home improvement store there, but they have all the other names familiar in Bratislava: Ikea, Tesco, Nay Electronics, etc.  We passed a Caterpillar dealer that had more Challenger equipment on display than I have seen at any dealer in the States.  There was a combine and five tractors of differing sizes, all with tires and none with rubber tracks.  We thought we saw a paper plant from the highway.  There were evergreen plantations around, but there was no smell like from the Westvaco plants in Luke, Maryland or Covington, Virginia.  We had made this comment also when we saw what we thought might be a paper plant on our trip to Donovaly.