Canadian industrial equipment and parts maker Linamar, the owner of MacDon Industries, is set to further expand its reach in the ag equipment sector by buying the Salford Group.
Guelph-based Linamar announced Wednesday it has an agreement in place worth $260 million to buy 100 per cent of the equity in Salford, which makes fertilizer application and tillage equipment at three plants in Canada and two in the U.S.
Linamar said it expects to finance the deal through its existing credit lines and close the purchase during the second quarter of this year, subject to the usual conditions and regulatory approvals.
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Salford will “continue to leverage its established manufacturing and distribution network” and sell its products under the Salford brand, Linamar said.
Salford Group president Geof Gray said combining Linamar’s resources and brand strengths with Salford’s “will enable Salford to compete and innovate at a higher level with greater market coverage, delivering even more value to dealers and farmers.”
Linamar CEO Linda Hasenfratz said the crop nutrition application and tillage segments where Salford operates are “areas we had identified in our agriculture growth strategy as highly attractive segments for future product diversification.”
“Through MacDon, we already have an established market-leading position in the harvesting segment,” Linamar chief operating officer Jim Jarrell said in the same release. “Tillage and crop nutrition are a natural complement to that product portfolio, which will allow us to accelerate sales of all products.”
Salford, founded in 1978 at Salford, Ont., about 35 km east of London, today has manufacturing plants at Salford and nearby Norwich, Ont., as well as sites at Elie, Man., about 35 km west of Winnipeg; Osceola, Iowa, about 80 km south of Des Moines; and Cornelia, Georgia, about 100 km northeast of Atlanta.
The company’s product lines today include tillage equipment, pneumatic and spinner-type fertilizer spreaders and cover crop seeders under the Salford, AerWay and Valmar brands. It’s billed as the only company in North America carrying full lines of surface and sub-surface granular applicators.
Linamar, meanwhile, is no stranger to agriculture, having owned and operated White Farm Equipment and Western Combine in the 1980s. It later shed both those businesses but bought Harvestec in 2015, then took up Winnipeg-based MacDon for about $1.2 billion in 2018. Harvestec corn harvesting header lines have since been rebranded under the MacDon name.
Jarrell said the ag and food sectors are a “key element of our Linamar 2100 strategic roadmap,” which the company laid out following the MacDon takeover. — Glacier FarmMedia Network
