Soest, Westphalia · since 1948
A farmer's son, a corrugated tube – and the sowing of a whole world.
In a workshop in the Soester Börde, an idea took shape in 1965 that today works on almost every large grain field on earth: meter the seed centrally and distribute it with air. This is the story of the Weiste family, of their company ACCORD, and of an invention nobody saw coming.
Figures for 2012, compiled by Helmut Weiste.
What this is about
Three inventions, one family
Heinrich Weiste, a farmer in Sieningsen, spent days before the war planting cabbage by hand. In the evening his back hurt. “I would rather have had it more comfortable,” he said later. Out of that sentence came the first workable planting machine in Germany – and, in 1948, a company.
His son Helmut, born a month after the end of the war, was a seventeen-year-old apprentice tidying the workshop when he noticed a square tube lying inside a U-section where it did not belong. Two days later the quick-hitch triangle stood in the yard. A year after that, watching the eddies in a brook, the thought came to him that would change seeding technology: the grains would have to be swirled.
In between lie a father-and-son conflict, a composition with creditors, a second chance, and a decade the family calls “the golden eighties”.
The ACCORD planting machine, 1963: cast gearwheels gave way to interchangeable plastic ones.ACCORD – Helmut Weiste
The ACCORD quick-hitch triangle – German patent no. 1,215,419.ACCORD – Helmut Weiste
1966 · PNEUMATIC prototype: 15 m seed drill.ACCORD – Helmut Weiste
Where to start
Choose your way in
Timeline 1945–2012
From the farmstead at Sieningsen to cathodic dip painting in Soest – every stage in one timeline.
To the timeline →
The PNEUMATIC system
Central metering, pneumatic distribution, separated coulters. What was new about it – and why it works.
Understand the technology →
Inventions & patents
The Weiste triangle, the corrugated-tube distributor, the injector sluice, the CX coulter – and a six-year patent battle.
All developments →
Worldwide impact
Melbourne 1971, Saskatchewan 1979, Kansas 1977, Kiev 1992: how technology from Soest travelled the globe.
Follow the journey →
Family & company
Heinrich and Marie, Helmut and Bärbel, three sisters, a conflict, a fresh start – and 240 colleagues.
The people →
Picture archive
More than 200 photographs from six decades: brochures, prototypes, workshops, journeys.
View the pictures →The ACCORD PNEUMATIC system was surely as much of a revolution in seeding as the combine harvester was in harvesting. Helmut Weiste in the preface to his book, 2013
The book behind this site
These pages retell, in extracts, what Helmut Weiste set down on 224 pages in 2013: The ACCORD PNEUMATIC System – From the invention to worldwide application. With hundreds of archive pictures, patent drawings, measurement series and figures – and with a candour about mistakes, crises and conflicts that is rare in company histories.
Published by Landwirtschaftsverlag, Münster-Hiltrup; designed by Bärbel Weiste; foreword by Bernard Krone. ISBN 978-3-7843-5278-7.