Linamar Corporation buys Bourgault Industies

Dec 22, 2023

Farm equipment manufacturer Bourgault Industries is being sold to Ontario-based Linamar Corporation.

The CAD 640 million deal represents the purchase of 100 percent of the equity in Bourgault.

Linamar President and Chief Operating Officer Jim Jarrell says Bourgault is a well-known agricultural brand that Linamar has admired for some time.

"If you go back to the day when we bought MacDon and did our first growth off-site regarding agriculture with them, this was a clear target and discussion point we really thought were complimentary. And the company - been in business for about 50 years - clear market leadership in the seeding segment with their innovative air carts and air seeders."

The deal also includes Bourgault’s Highline Manufacturing division which produces hay handling and livestock feeding equipment, as well as roto-moulding producer Free Form Plastics.

Jarrell says Bourgault which is based out of St. Brieux has about 1000 employees, very experienced senior management team, and around 500 million in sales, a huge strong order book out of the gate.

In the press release announcing the sale, Bourgault President Gerry Bourgault says the company was started by his father and has a rich history in agriculture.

"The Bourgault family is incredibly proud of the legacy we have created both here in St. Brieux, Saskatchewan, but also around the world. We are excited to have our team of over nine hundred people in Saskatchewan, and over one thousand worldwide, join the Linamar family. Linamar has a proven track record for not only successfully integrating acquired companies, but also for their manufacturing expertise and business execution overall. I am confident Linamar will take the Bourgault brand to new heights in its next chapter, while also allowing Bourgault to maintain and build upon its deep-rooted connections to its stakeholders in Saskatchewan and around the world."

With the Bourgault acquisition Linamar's lineup of products now covers everything from field preparation to seeding, crop nutrition, harvest, and post-harvest.

Linamar is based out of Guelph, Ontario and also owns MacDon and Salford.

You can listen to the official announcement from Linamar announcing the acquisition of Bourgault here.

Source : Pembinavalley online

Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids