Remember that Remington commercial from the 80s where Victor Kiam said “I liked the shaver so much, I bought the company”?
“Well, that’s sort of the way it worked for us with the Firminator,” laughed Ranew’s Outdoor Equipment’s Adrian Chapman.
The Firminator – a 3-in-1 food plot implement that combines a disc harrow, a precision seeder, and an agricultural-grade cultipacker into one unit – has been around for about a decade, but Ranew’s has been manufacturing it for the last two years. When company founder Lester Ranew bought one for his own use, it was “love at first sight,” according to Chapman, although the manufacturer at the time wasn’t able to get his unit to him in time to get fall plots in the ground.
“He told the owner at the time, if you need someone who can do your manufacturing in a more timely fashion, call me, that’s what I do,” said Chapman. “About a year later, everyone sat down at a conference table with the intention of working out a way for us to do the manufacturing – and two hours later he’d bought the company.”
Chapman calls the Firminator a “small but important” part of Ranew’s business, primarily providing industrial coatings and precision manufacturing for familiar Fortune 500 companies including Caterpillar, John Deere, and Siemens. Unlike a lot of the competition, the Firminator was designed from the ground up specifically for the food plot environment – built to deal with rougher conditions than a typical agricultural implement, the Firminator’s robust steel frame stands up to a lot of abuse.
“It is an American made machine,” said Chapman. “All the parts other than the castings on it are American made – and I even source those castings from an American company. But as far as the frames, the seed box, all those other parts, we buy the steel, cut it, weld it, powder coat it, and assemble it all in our Georgia plant.”
The Firminator can plant anything a wildlife food plot would need, from as small as clover to as large as chufa. The 3-point hitch models are currently available in 4-, 6-, and 8-foot widths, with 5-, 10- and 12-foot models in the works.
“We also have a 3-foot ATV model, with all the utility of the larger machines,” said Chapman, “just for folks who don’t own a tractor.”
For more information about the Firminator, visit TheFirminator.com.