Midlands manufacturer lands contract for innovative agricultural product

Published by

Nicky Godding

A Midlands manufacturer has landed a new contract to make an agricultural product that reduces water waste and the use of pesticides.

Sarginsons Industries, based in Torrington Avenue in Coventry, has been commissioned by Irish firm MagGrow to manufacture a manifold that can be retrofitted onto crop sprayers to make them more targeted and reduce waste.

It is the latest project for Sarginsons’ Design for Manufacture Technology Centre, which was established in 2019 to support manufacturers from the product concept through to production.

The contract with MagGrow combines the firm’s expertise in aluminium casting with its more recent expansion into offering full product assembly.

MagGrow is a patented, proprietary technology for droplet formation that yields superior drift reduction of over 70 per cent and increased spray coverage performance ranging from 36 per cent to over 100 per cent compared to conventional spraying.

As well as the two core benefits of drift control and superior coverage, MagGrow also reduces water by up to 50 per cent, extends spray windows and reduces labour requirements. The MagGrow system has no moving parts, is easy to install and maintain, and can be fitted to a new or existing crop sprayer.

Sarginsons has an order to supply around 200 units to MagGrow with the potential for around 1,000 a year as global interest grows in the product, particularly in The Netherlands and the USA.

Gavin Shipley, Sarginsons Technology Centre manager, said: “We are delighted to be working with MagGrow on this very exciting development.

“This new division has given Sarginsons a new capability of delivering fully manufactured and assembled products to clients, which has opened up this new avenue of work for the company.

“The manifold we are making for MagGrow is quite complex – with the body requiring a two-part diecast solution under very high pressure.

“We have worked with Ceracon, a German company with a base in Leamington, to develop the manifold and it is a partnership that has worked extremely well.

“MagGrow can see very strong potential for this product, especially as the statistics on water waste reduction and lowering the spread of pesticides are so impressive, and that would mean a good pipeline of orders for Sarginsons.

“The fact that this is another product that has environmental benefits is another factor that is very important to us as a business so, all in all, this is a very exciting development for Sarginsons.”

The new contract follows on from Sarginsons’ contract with Char.gy, which has seen the company developing bollards that can be fitted to lampposts to turn them into electric vehicle charging points.

The work with MagGrow is a further example of the potential to grow this new area of the business.

Fred Dupont, of MagGrow, said: “We are delighted to work with Sarginsons. We very much appreciate not only their manufacturing capabilities but also their ability on helping a young company like ourselves on the design aspect of our products. In the future, we expect to closely work with them to develop many more products including our wonderful technology.”

Nicky Godding

Nicky Godding is editor of The Business Magazine. Before her journalism career, she worked mainly in public relations moving into writing when she was invited to launch Retail Watch, a publication covering retail and real estate across Europe. After some years of constant travelling, she tucked away her passport and concentrated on business writing, co-founding a successful regional business magazine. She has interviewed some of the UK’s most successful entrepreneurs who have built multi-million-pound businesses and reported on many science and technology firsts. She reports on the region’s thriving business economy from start-ups, family businesses and multi-million-pound corporations, to the professionals that support their growth and the institutions that educate the next generation of business leaders.