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 Robert
Ench founded Hopewell Nursery, located in Bridgeton, New Jersey in 1988.
Hopewell, an 1800-acre production nursery serves retail nurseries, landscape
contractors and wholesale nurseries from Maine to Virginia, supplying
them with shrubs, trees and perennials almost year-round. Because of their
acreage and a wide variety of crops grown, Hopewell requires dozens of
tractors to get the job done in a time efficient manner. Jerry Barberio,
Crop Protection Manager for Hopewell states that reliability and price
points were top priorities when shopping for tractors…. Kubota met
those priorities and more.
Hopewell Nursery has 70 Kubota L and M series tractors operating on its
facility, the majority less than six years old. "Our business is
growing fast and we had to go out and purchase a fleet of tractors every
year, versus buying a few units each year. Price was an issue, but we
also wanted to make sure that the units would be reliable and easy to
maintain", explains Barberio. Hopewell does all of their regular
maintenance in-house, thus the user-friendliness and simplicity of the
tractor design were big selling points.
 Over
30 management employees supervise this
huge nursery including 3.5 million sq. ft. of polyhouse greenhouses and
1400 acres of field production including trees, shrubs, pot-in-pot and
container shrubs and perennials. Hopewell Nursery propagates the majority
of what it grows, over 3 million plants. That calls for tractors to be
operating 11 months out of the year. Planting, cultivating, fertilizing,
spraying, and harvesting are completed on a strict timeline in order to
ship the plant orders each year. "We use our M8200s to fit in between
our 10-ft. rows growing on 400 acres with drip tubing and the M9000 Mudders
work great when we need to spray or cultivate and get clearance over the
top of 1000 acres of shrubs. The smaller horsepower tractors help with
various chores around the nursery", said Barberio.
 With
such a large fleet of tractors, a strong dealership is mandatory. Farm-Rite,
Inc. has
been servicing Hopewell Nursery since 1997.
"It is important to have an excellent relationship with our dealer
because while most of our tractors are new now, later on down the road,
we will need Farm-Rite to repair our units.
They are very customer service oriented and that’s important",
said Barberio. As the hobby-at-home market continues to grow and expand,
the demand for nursery products will increase. Wholesale production nurseries
such as Hopewell Nursery will have a need for tractors with special features
like the M9000 Mudder. Barberio said that he is very pleased with his
Kubota tractor’s performance, reliability and Farm-Rite’s service
oriented business.
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