"THEY WERE MEASURED AGAINST SIMILAR MACHINES DOING SIMILAR JOBS BY THE AE50’S JUDGES WHO REPRESENT TOP ENGINEERS IN THEIR RESPECTIVE FIELDS. THESE ARE PEOPLE WHO KNOW SUPERIOR DESIGN WHEN THEY SEE IT."

As a company, MacDon has always measured its success by the satisfaction of its customers. Still, it is always nice to be recognized by your industry peers, and when you walk away with a top engineering award from the prestigious AE50 competition, well, that makes you feel pretty special. So imagine how MacDon’s entire engineering, design, development and field testing team felt when it walked away with two top prizes from the 2007 AE50 Awards.

Conducted by the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers, the AE50s honor the top 50 outstanding engineering innovations around the globe for the agricultural, food and biological systems industries. This year the conference in Minneapolis drew 1,800 engineers from around the world where MacDon was recognized for its ground breaking design on its M Series tractors, featuring Dual Direction™ technology, and its all-new FD70 FlexDraper®.

“When we started developing these projects back in 2001 we weren’t even aware of these awards,” said Richard Kirkby, Product Manager for MacDon. “These awards have been going on for two decades, but we have only entered the competition three times; in 2004 with our 974 FlexDraper®, for which we also won, and twice this year.”

That makes it three for three for MacDon. Not bad when you consider the stiff competition the company was up against. According to Kirkby, the awards attract the best of the best in agricultural engineering, and MacDon’s two entries this year were in the category of Complete Machines, which placed them in competition with the top machines produced last year, world wide.