Bloomberg writer Charlie McGee reported earlier this month that, “A company that develops packaging for cotton bales harvested with Deere & Co. tractors says it’s facing Chinese knockoffs and wants a U.S. trade agency to block the copycats from entering the country.
“Israel-based Tama Group and its U.S. unit filed a complaint on July 7 with the U.S. International Trade Commission saying two Chinese companies and their North American distributors are working together to sell cheaper replicas of a plastic wrapping Tama designed and patented more than a decade ago.
“TamaWrap is exclusively designed for John Deere tractors that Tama’s complaint says revolutionized cotton baling, enabling ‘a single machine to do what, until then, was impossible — harvest, collect, bale, and uniquely wrap cotton with a single machine and on-board wraps.'”
The Bloomberg article stated that, “The ITC complaint names Zhejiang Yajia Cotton Picker Parts Co. and its distributor, Arkansas-based Southern Marketing Affiliates Inc. It also names Hai’an Xin Fu Yuan of Agricultural Science and Technology Co. and its distributor, Canada-based Gosun Business Development Co.
“Tama says the companies’ knockoffs use its trademarked yellow color and are designed to uniquely work inside John Deere machines, but don’t work as well. The company received exclusive patent rights in the U.S. for the plastic cotton-baling material in 2004, and TamaWrap launched in the country in 2009.”
