Bell Equipment Product Marketing Manager, Tim Beningfield, says that the agreement will strengthen the existing partnership and creates a win-win scenario for both companies and their customers. "Matriarch is owned and managed by the grandsons of Bell founder, Irvine Bell, so the ability to innovate and develop according to customer's needs is entrenched in the genes. However, Matriarch's real value lies in its dedicated focus on agriculture and forestry, and its responsiveness to bring to fruition niche, low volume solutions for these industries in a relatively short period of time.

"With our strong heritage in agriculture and forestry, we are always looking at opportunities to diversify our product offering. With the range of Matriarch products we will be able to better provide a tailor made full line solution to our customers. In return we bring to the partnership a respected and quality distribution and after-sales support network that will provide Matriarch with access to more regions and a larger market."

Bell and Matriarch first collaborated and began marketing and distributing the Matriarch UltECO Slew Loaders in 2014 as a solution to sugarcane farmers wanting to pursue a controlled traffic approach to cane loading and haulage.

Matriarch's Ashley Bell says this partnership with Bell has proven to be beneficial, with a number of Matriarch UltECO units sold into South Africa, Mozambique, Zambia and Swaziland. This has paved the way to extend the agreement between the companies.

"In terms of the new agreement, Bell will continue to distribute the UltECO models along with our Matriarch Skogger timber extraction and loading machine and the FASTfell felling and bunching machine. We will also continue to develop new products which, following an assessment of each of these by Bell, would potentially be included in the agreement," explains Ashley. "Matriarch has always been very customer focused and although Bell will provide after-sales support, we will still keep contact with our customers to ensure that we are constantly developing to meet their needs."

According to Tim, the Matriarch forestry line enables Bell to offer customers solutions that meet their needs for different levels of mechanisation and machine complexity. "The Matriarch range is well suited to southern African timber conditions and contractors with lower production targets and higher cost sensitivities. This means that they will find favour with a number of smaller contractors while high production, larger operations will still make use of Bell Equipment's complementary range of purpose-built forestry equipment.

"Bell, through leveraging our industry leading support network, will ensure that everything is in place to provide these Matriarch machines the same level of service that we provide to all the products in our range. We're confident that this agreement will continue our legacy of providing 'strong reliable machines, strong reliable support' to our agriculture and forestry customers," he ends.

UltECO Sugarcane Slew Loader

FASTfell felling and bunching machine

Skogger timber extraction and loading machine