“A farmer without a JCB Backhoe Loader can’t call himself a real farmer” is what William Fullard believes and he should know as most of the customers of their family business are farmers around the town of Bela-Bela, previously known as Warmbaths.

Warmbad Landini, as the name implies, supplies agricultural tractors and implements to the farming community not only in the immediate vicinity of this pretty Bushveld town in Limpopo Province but in a radius of some 400km, even as far as Botswana. The business is now in the hands of a brother and sister team, William Fullard, and his sister, Magdarie van Niekerk, who are the third generation to run it.

“Our late grandfather, Dirk Becker, started Warmbad Landini here in Bela-Bela in 2006 and he still worked here every day until a week before his death in 2021 at the wonderful age of 80,” William tells us. “The example he set for us all lives on in the business where we’re committed to live up to his standards of good business practices through integrity and honesty and above all, looking after our customers.”
“We employ 22 people and we run a busy workshop where two qualified mechanics and two apprentices, who have almost qualified, see to servicing and repair of tractors and implements that come into the workshop,” William adds. “We’re talking to two young men at the moment who wish to become apprentices and we’re looking forward to taking them in, as the field service we offer our customers is a very good learning ground for any aspirant mechanic.”

Warmbad Landini’s mechanics do huge mileage and even cross the international border into Botswana to service some of their customers’ machines.

“Our association with Bell Equipment’s Forestry and Agriculture division is fairly new as we were approached early in January 2023 to be part of this great team and its world-famous brands,” William says. “It’s an opportunity we’ve been looking for as many of our customers for example, when needing a machine with earthmoving capabilities, have gone to our competitors and once that happens, you stand a very real chance of losing that customer completely.”

William’s enthusiasm is palpable when he says that with them now having access to especially the JCB Backhoe Loader range, with its proven reputation and very definite earthmoving capabilities they should retain many customers and add more into the mix. They have subsequently issued a string of quotations to current and new customers and are eagerly awaiting the decisions.

“In our area there are many varied types of farming operations from beef, crops, some big seed growers to game farms, but they all have one thing in common – they all have infrastructure, roads, irrigation ditches, farm dams, culverts and many other earth-based structures that need to be maintained. As farms get bigger and labour gets more expensive, a versatile tool such as a JCB Backhoe Loader comes into its own and that’s where I come from when I say a farmer without such a machine is not a real farmer.”

William is of the opinion that the same can be said of the many varied uses a JCB Loadall could offer from handling bulk bags of seed and fertiliser to pallets with tanks of liquid pesticides and bales of animal fodder.

Although Warmbad Landini is one of the most recent additions to the Bell Forestry and Agriculture network, the company’s mechanics and parts personnel have fully bought into the online training given on technical and parts matters. William and his team have been impressed with specific portals that allow them access to talk to JCB personnel about specific challenges they could encounter, which has given them the reassurance that they won’t be alone in tackling unfamiliar technical territory. This again is all in the name of putting the care of their customers first.

Magdarie van Niekerk and William Fullard.