Bridgestone America Firestone Brings Innovation To Farm Tires
By Amanda Brodhagen, Farms.com
Bridgestone Americas unveiled a new product at the 2012 Farm Progress show in Boone, Iowa this week – a tire that contains 10% soybean oil. The soybean tire is part of the Firestone brand of agricultural tires. The tire is for farm use, weighs 900 pounds and is made up of 90 pounds soy oil. This is a special year for the Harvey Firestone’s tire line celebrating their 80th anniversary and staying true to their heritage – improving tire technology and innovation for farm use.
“The soybean oil has replaced all the different petroleum-based processing oils used in the tire’s compounds,” said Tom Rodgers, director of sales & marketing at Bridgestone Americas. “Engineers and compounders from our Americas Technology Center, and also the company’s Des Moines agricultural tire plant, have been working on this concept tire project for several months. Based on the progress of the project, we expect to begin incorporating soy oil into some of our agricultural tires by early 2013. Our goal is to have soy oil as a component in all of our agriculture tires by the end of 2013.”
It takes approximately one bushel of soybeans to produce 11 pounds of soy oil. The tire shown below, used eight bushels of soybeans to make 90 pounds of soy oil.
