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Farming equipment manufacturer prepares a new path for growth

Learning to resolve challenges paves the way for Bazooka Farmstar to add manufacturing capacity

A farmer spreads liquid manure over a farm field.

Bazooka Farmstar, Washington, Iowa, fabricates the equipment that handles and distributes liquid manure to farm fields. Farmers like this type of equipment because they are recycling the animal waste instead of spending money on commercial fertilizer to enrich crop land.

Most people’s knowledge of farming in the U.S. goes back to a Fisher-Price playset or something they saw on television. They simply have no idea of the work involved in growing crops or raising livestock. When the food they are looking for is available consistently at the store or restaurant, people take it for granted.

The people involved in farming and ranching don’t. It’s a lot of work, and they are faced with the same challenges that people find in other industry segments. They are having to learn to work smarter to be more productive and efficient in the face of erratic pricing.

While it may be easy for most consumers to overlook, farming is a significant industry segment. According to the Economic Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the output of America’s farms contributed $136.1 billion to the overall U.S. economy—about 0.6% of overall GDP. Metal fabricators, particularly in the Midwest and Plains states, recognize this because they produce plenty of metal parts and end products for use on farms and ranches.

Bazooka Farmstar, Washington, Iowa, is one such manufacturer. (The company formed when Bazooka Grain Handling Systems and Farmstar Manure Handling Systems merged in 1976.) Its main business is fabricating liquid manure handling equipment. A dirty business to be in, perhaps, but it’s recycling at its best, turning dung into dollar savings by eliminating the need to purchase commercial fertilizer to enrich crop land.

On large hog and dairy farms, animal manure is collected in ponds or similar types of holding areas. Bazooka Farmstar fabricates the equipment that takes that liquid manure from the pond and transports it via a hose to a toolbar attached to a tractor that distributes the liquid across miles of fields. The manure is the perfect addition to the soil to improve crop growth. It provides nutrients for the plant and raises the quality of the soil to foster healthier crops.

Eric Hahn joined the company 11 years ago after spending time working in the aerospace and office furniture industries. He called his early days with Bazooka Farmstar “eye-opening.”

“It was a low-volume manufacturing operation when I started, and we were only about 20-plus people,” said Hahn, who is now the company’s managing partner. “We were closer to a job shop than a manufacturing company.”

Back then, one welder handled the production of one product—from the first weld to the last. It might take him 300 weld-hours and about six weeks to complete a single project. That translated into one product completed about every six to eight weeks, given work schedules, material availability, and avoiding rework. The end result was a limited amount of liquid manure handling systems that could be sold.

Evolving Into a Modern Fabricator

Hahn recognized that for the company to grow, it had to ditch the one-product-at-a-time manufacturing approach. Bazooka Farmstar needed to adopt modern manufacturing technology and processes.

The first step was digitizing production information. Everything was on paper. Product designs were hand-drawn, and work instructions for the assembler and welder were typed out.

An agitator stirs up the liquid manure in a retention pond.

This Bazooka Farmstar agitation boat is equipped with a pump and has the ability to feed liquid manure to the toolbar that is running in the field. The equipment’s primary use, however, is to thoroughly agitate lagoons. Stagnant agitators along the outside stir up all of the solids to ensure the solids are suspended in the liquid as it is being pumped out to the applicator in the field.

“We needed to get the information into the computers and out of employees’ heads so that the work could be repeatable,” Hahn said.

The 2D drawings represented another shortcoming: It wasn’t much of a foundation from which to adjust product designs. As a result, its liquid manure management product offerings really never evolved.

With the digitization underway, Bazooka Farmstar brought on a design engineer to help breathe new life into the product line. Relying on input from customers about what they would like to see in potential new products, the design engineer got to work on expanding the product line. That’s when the company started to see growth that it hadn’t seen in many years.

Having 3D computer-aided designs in place really helped to expedite product launches because, while the new products did have different options and features, the models still looked and operated somewhat the same. They just differed slightly to meet customers’ needs no matter where they might be.

“Because of geography and the different types of fields and conditions in each location, what works in a big open field in Iowa, such as a 50-ft. toolbar, is not necessarily going to work in New York or even in Wisconsin because of smaller fields. So, what we learned was that if we wanted to grow, we had to make our products to accommodate the differing landscapes across the country,” he said.

As Bazooka Farmstar started to sell more products, it discovered some bottlenecks that were getting in the way of smoother manufacturing. One of the most instantly recognizable problems was that as the products got bigger, the shop floor needed a better way to move the workpieces around. Lift trucks weren’t necessarily the best devices to maneuver a 50-ft.-long toolbar through assembly.

Investments in hoists seemed to do the trick. Now the company could spend less time moving product around the shop floor and more time actually fabricating.

With good engineering drawings, good prints for the welders, and easier movement of fabrications on the shop floor, Bazooka Farmstar was ready for increased capacity. Even the workforce embraced the changes.

“It was intimidating for a few, but overall, the majority of people embraced it,” Hahn said. “For example, welders really like having good prints to work with. We continue to hire welders, and they want even more detail on the prints as far as weld quality details.

“That’s been an interesting shift as we have continued to grow. People now have access to all kinds of details at the beginning when they start a job, instead of a few people having too much pride and thinking, ‘I produce this product, and no one else knows how to do it besides me.’”

Bazooka Farmstar recently has added 37,000 sq. ft. of manufacturing space.

Bazooka Farmstar also just added 37,000 sq. ft. of manufacturing space to house its prep, paint, and final assembly operations.

Continued Improvement

Market success is a good thing, but it introduces stress to any manufacturer. How can the company introduce more capacity without simply throwing labor at it and spending money on new capital equipment?

Hahn said that’s been where the company’s management team has really grown. When a question is raised about shop floor inefficiencies, they are now more likely to take a critical eye to processes before making the request about an investment in people or technology.

Hahn illustrated his point with the tale of how a manager was able to boost the productivity of a welding cell just by observing how the welders went about their business working on a particular product. What the manager learned was that welders were spending about half of their time sorting and getting parts ready to weld. The parts, hundreds of them sitting disorganized on pallets, were dumped off at the weld cell for the welders to go through.

“After the manager found the root cause, we hired a material handler, which made one specific person responsible for sorting and getting the parts ready for the welders. With that slight change, we were able to almost double their throughput,” Hahn said.

Bazooka didn’t have to double the number of welders to double the output. It just found a way to work more intelligently.

With internal changes like that, capacity has really opened up in the welding department in recent years, putting the bottleneck more in the fabrication department. Investments in capital equipment have helped to address that obstacle.

The purchase of a Bystronic laser cutting machine a little over a year ago made a dramatic impact on the company’s manufacturing process efficiency. It not only helped to increase laser cutting productivity because of its speed, but it also helped to create volume on the company’s mills because precise holes could be cut. Before the arrival of the Bystronic laser, Bazooka Farmstar couldn’t rely on its plasma table to deliver such precision, so the sheet metal or plate would have to be taken from that workstation to the mill for further processing.

The laser cutting machine processes mainly material 0.50 in. and thinner, but it can cut up to 1 in.

“It’s a little slower when you cut that thick, but I still don’t have to take [the material] back to the mill to get drilled,” Hahn said. “The part is precise the first time, and my production teams don’t have to take the time to double-handle it.”

The manufacturer has increased its machining capacity in recent years as it looks to keep most production in-house. This includes three machining centers, two mills, and a lathe.

Bazooka Farmstar has a new paint booth.

In its new expansion, the company has a new paint and curing booth (top), which is much larger than the previous booth (bottom).

Bazooka Farmstar also just added 37,000 sq. ft. of manufacturing space to house its prep, paint, and final assembly operations. The addition is attached to its 110,000-sq.-ft. facility where most of the fabricating work takes place. About 200 ft. east of this building is another 150,000-sq.-ft. facility which is now used for warehousing and parts storage. An above-ground tunnel connects the two buildings for more efficient flow of production materials.

The company has plenty of space under its roof, but most of its roof wasn’t tall enough for producing and painting the large workpieces. The expansion gives Bazooka Farmstar “the right ceiling height and the right amount of square footage to effectively build our equipment that continues to get larger in size,” Hahn said.

The new paint booth is 25 by 80 ft. long and features the ability to cure the large products that are being painted inside of it. The old 20- by 30-ft. booth didn’t have the curing functionality, so the company relied on a quick-dry coating that was touchable after about an hour but needed seven to 10 days to fully cure, Hahn explained. That’s where that extra space in the other building came in handy as these newly painted large products waited until their coatings dried.

Also in this new space, hoists have been included as part of the overall design. The eight-bridge system spans 240 ft. long and 80 ft. deep and provides coverage for every final assembly bay. It is the right material handling tool for moving the large engines, pumps, and hose reels that are part of a complete liquid manure handling system. Hahn said that the workflow from the shop floor to final assembly is light years ahead of where it was a decade ago.

All of these internal improvements have created new opportunities in the welding area specifically. Bazooka Farmstar now has room for more products volume and welders.

The company is already preparing for that growth. It has invested in Bluco modular welding tables for each of the bays to assist with efficient fixturing practices and ensure accurate fit-ups. It also has gone to a cart-based system for moving parts to the weld cells, rather than relying on pallets. These production carts are product-specific and are filled with all of the parts needed to complete a job. They are loaded, organized, and wheeled over to the welding area when part production is finished in the fabrication area. Welders don’t have to worry about losing parts off multiple pallets, and they no longer have to wait for a lift truck to be available to move those pallets to welding.

“These products aren’t getting easier or simpler to make. They are only getting more complicated and bigger, so the key is to find safer, smarter, and more efficient ways to produce them,” Hahn said.

More Serious About Growth

As Bazooka Farmstar was expanding its manufacturing square footage, it also built a pond on the company campus. This was no landscape improvement project; this was for both product testing and development.

The company’s products rely on pumps to move the liquid manure from storage units, through several lengths of hose, out to a toolbar that injects the liquid manure into the ground as it’s pulled behind a tractor in the fields. Bazooka Farmstar needs to test the pumps to see if they meet gallon-per-minute expectations prior to shipping. Now they can do it on company property instead of sending the equipment out for testing.

The pond is also going to be useful in testing agitation equipment, a relatively new product segment for Bazooka Farmstar. Because solids in the liquid manure tend to fall to the bottom of a storage unit, the liquid needs to be agitated to ensure the solids are suspended in the liquid as it is being pumped out to the applicator in the field. Agitation equipment mixes the manure to ensure the nutrient value is correct before pumping. The company now can test this on campus as well.

All of the elements are being put into place for consistent growth in the near future: at least 10 design engineers on staff to help with product development; a manufacturing workforce that is comfortable with continuous improvement efforts; shop floor supervisors that can think creatively to help resolve production challenges; capital equipment investments that help employees work more efficiently; and shop floor reporting that provides management a real-time look into manufacturing activity and manufacturing productivity. Bazooka Farmstar is ready to keep pushing itself to serve its customers better and create new opportunities for its 120-plus employees.

“We just need to keep going back to the basics of quality and success, and really preach the importance of organization across the shop floor. Do you know what you have, what you need, when you need it, and where you can you find it if you don’t have it?” Hahn said. “And with the product development that we have in the works over the next three to five years, we’re really going to be able to grow efficiently, and I think we are setting ourselves up to do just that.”

About the Author
The Fabricator

Dan Davis

Editor-in-Chief

2135 Point Blvd.

Elgin, IL 60123

815-227-8281

Dan Davis is editor-in-chief of The Fabricator, the industry's most widely circulated metal fabricating magazine, and its sister publications, The Tube & Pipe Journal and The Welder. He has been with the publications since April 2002.