By Ron Wilson, director of the Huck Boyd National Institute for Rural Development at Kansas State University.
The woman in New York pours her liquid laundry detergent into the washing machine. She doesn’t realize that one element of her laundry soap came from a product transported by a machine built halfway across the country in rural Kansas. It’s today’s Kansas Profile.
Karl Matlack is president of Stinger, Inc., a family-owned company which is a leader in building equipment for moving hay for feed and biomass. The Matlack family farms near Burrton. “Our farm has been in the family since 1884,” Karl said.
In the mid-1980s, Karl’s father Larry and uncle Bill started putting up alfalfa into large square bales, but they lacked a good way to pick up and transport those huge one-ton bales.
“Our first unit came from the necessity to pick up the bales in our own fields,” Karl said. Rather than using multiple tractors to load and unload, the Matlacks wanted a self-loading machine. On an old school bus chassis, they built a unit with a tilted bed and put a front-end loader with bale spears in front of the cab to load the bales.
