BCS agricultural machinery

The company BCS was founded in the early 1940s thanks to the simple yet brilliant vision of a young engineer — Luigi Castoldi.

His first steps in business began with a small workshop in the town of Abbiategrasso, located in the Ticino valley near Milan. This region had long-standing agricultural traditions: all sowing and harvesting work was carried out solely through the hard physical labor of farmers.

In 1942, the idea emerged to create the world's first self-propelled mower — a machine with a low-power internal combustion engine mounted on a self-supporting chassis with transmission and mowing system.

This led to the creation of the "243" model, which became a true revolution in agriculture at the time — thanks to its high productivity and significant relief for farmers, who no longer had to cut hay manually for entire days.

For the project, engineer Castoldi involved Camillo Bonetti (a tax inspector in Abbiategrasso) and Severino Speroni (an experienced mechanic). The company name BCS was formed from the initials of their surnames — Bonetti, Castoldi, Speroni — and was officially registered on June 4, 1943.

"A man with a scythe can cut up to 250 m² of hay per hour, with a horse-drawn mower — 2,000 m². And with my new self-propelled machine — up to 6,000 m² per hour… and it costs only as much as a cow!" These were the words with which engineer Luigi Castoldi introduced his mower to excited local farmers.

The success achieved with this machine inspired the "Engineer," as he was called by colleagues, to design and produce a full line of efficient and highly specialized agricultural machinery.

By the late 1960s, following the introduction of mowers with a central cutting mechanism, the first lightweight, compact two-wheel multipurpose tractors appeared, revolutionizing a market previously dominated by bulky and expensive machines.

Starting in 1970, amid growing demand for agricultural productivity, the company introduced disc mowers for tractors.

As a result of several major acquisitions, in the early 1990s BCS developed the first series of tractors with four identical wheels — both articulated and rigid-frame models with conventional steering.

In 2000, the company leadership passed to the founder's son, engineer Fabrizio Castoldi, who became the new president of BCS S.p.A.

Today, BCS Group is a leading multinational company in the field of mechanization. It designs and manufactures agricultural machinery, equipment for green space maintenance, autonomous power systems, and mobile welding units.

BCS Group has three production plants in Italy (Abbiategrasso, Luzzara, and Cusago), as well as branches in Spain, Portugal, France, Germany, India, and China. Its distribution network covers over 100 countries worldwide.