Farm machinery maker Salford has bought tillage company Aerway, which has added additional capacity to both companies.
The farmer-designed Aerway was brought to North America from New Zealand in the early 1980s and has become well known in the United States as a pasture tool.
The three-tine roller tillage tool’s least aggressive setting shatters soil and leaves a characteristic dotted-slot pattern, but the machine offers aggressive rolling cultivation when set at an angle to the direction of travel.
“Aerway was a great fit for what we are doing at Salford,” said company spokesperson Anson Boak.
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“Our company believes strongly in vertical tillage, and the Aerway is just a different approach to that. It gives our customers, and dealers, another option.”
Aerway has built up a market in Texas and the American Southwest, where cattle producers looking to improve pastures use it for soil conditioning and to break up hardpan and reduce compaction. It is also used as a manure applicator, a pull-between toolbar with a liquid tank and for the turf and vineyard industries.
“Aerway had a working relationship with Valmar (Airflo from Elie, Man.), as they mounted the Valmar units to the Aerway machines to be used for seeding tools,” Boak said.
Salford bought Valmar and fertilizer application equipment maker BBI in the last two years.
Aerway is located 25 kilometres from Salford’s operations in southern Ontario, which made the logistics “a good fit.”
The two companies were already familiar with each other. Aerway had added an Ingersoll wavy coulter toolbar to its system with a finishing rolling basket or tine harrow from Salford for an all-in-one tillage tool.
“They were customers of ours and we had being doing business for years,” said Boak.
Valmar didn’t have a field sales force, and BBI, which is based in Cornelia, Georgia, had a small number of representatives. Meanwhile, Aerway has an American marketing network of manufacturers’ representatives that complemented Salford’s short-line dealers.
As a result, the growing company felt the added brand with a strong livestock following will provide new opportunities.
SAF-Holland of Luxembourg, which owned Aerway until last week, said the agricultural company was not part of its core business. The European company has more than $1.5 billion in annual sales from its highway truck trailer hitches and axles.
The companies agreed not to disclose the purchase price, but SAF-Holland said it was “in the low single-digit million (euro) amount.”
Salford has operations in Canada, the U.S. and Russia and is owned by New York-based GenNx360 Capital Partners, a private equity firm that invests in industrial and agricultural business-to-business companies.
