Villemoes Fertilizer Spreader

Villemoes fertilizer spreader as it stands on the Green Museum's magazine.

The museum's collection includes one of the most popular fertilizer spreaders, the Villemoes Fertilizer Spreader. It is not part of the visible exhibition, but is stored in one of the museum's magazines.

The invention of industrially produced fertilizer in the early 1900s revolutionized agriculture. In Denmark, fertilizer consumption increased, especially after World War II, from 79 million kg in 1945 to 478 million kg in 1970.

Up until World War II, fertilizer was often spread with shovels from a cart, but from the early 1920s, several experiments were made with mechanical fertilizer spreaders, which were far more efficient. Many of the first fertilizer spreaders were, however, expensive and required a lot of maintenance. In the 1930s, new, better, lighter and cheaper fertilizer spreaders began to gain traction among Danish farmers, and the museum's collection contains one of the most popular, namely Villemoe's Artificial Fertilizer Spreader.

Unlike other spreaders, Villemoes was a so-called disc spreader, which worked by the discs leading the fertilizer out of the fertilizer container through openings in the rear wall, after which the fertilizer was distributed over the discs by means of a rotating shaft. The original Villemoes spreader was developed by Diderik Villemoes in the late 1920s and manufactured at Villemoesgård Maskinfabrik, but from around 1930, Skive Jernstøberi og Maskinfabrik (later A/S Gyro) took over the manufacture of the fertilizer spreader, which was later marketed under the name Vilmo.

The model we have in the museum's collection is an improved version from the 1950s, with 10 discs and a working width of 3.8 metres, and it could be towed by a tractor. The fertiliser was spread forward towards the tractor, which had the advantage that the driver could keep an eye on any blockages in the machine. During the 1960s, the Villemoes spreader was outcompeted by new types of spreaders, where the tractor's PTO shaft could be used to spread the fertiliser by centrifugal force.

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