AGCO Celebrates 25 Years
Headquartered in Georgia since 1990, the farm equipment maker AGCO is a Georgia company with a long reach into global agriculture.
AGCO’s product line ranges from tractors and field equipment to grain storage systems. And through AGCO’s FUSE technology, data moves between equipment and crop handling systems, helping farmers produce more efficiently and precisely.
AGCO manufactures farm equipment on six continents, but the company’s roots reach deep into the history of farm equipment in North America. The company formed from a management buyout of the Deutz-Allis equipment company in 1990; that company traced back to Allis Chalmers, a U.S. tractor and equipment maker formed in 1901.
AGCO’s Massey Ferguson brand traces its history to Canada’s Massey-Harris Company, which built early farm tractors and the first self-propelled combine. In 1991, AGCO acquired the White tractor business, which traced its roots back to the OliverHart-Parr tractor company. Oliver tractors were some of the earliest “row crop” tractors. Row crop tractors involved the transformation of farm traction engines from huge horsepower machines better suited for plowing and powering threshing equipment to streamlined tractors suited for the entire range of crop tasks: tillage, planting, mechanically cultivating weeds and harvesting chores.
AGCO has grown to include many farm equipment lines, including specialized companies that may not have had whole-farm reach. The 1991 purchase of Kansas-based Hesston company gave AGCO access to leading technology in hay-making equipment. AGCO’s hay equipment lines – including large square balers for hay, straw and biomass – are a global leader.
More recently, AGCO acquired leading brands of grain storage, handling and livestock equipment systems. AGCO’s new FUSE system involves farm data management between equipment at different locations, providing such tasks as tractors “talking” not only to the wagons they are pulling but also the bins where the crop will be stored.
While more than a century removed from when Massey, Oliver and Allis-Chalmers started building traction engines, AGCO’s farm equipment innovation continues in the same spirit of technological progress that helps farmers globally grow and harvest crops as efficiently as possible.