Cultivating your passions for over 80 years!
” Always a step ahead… Because fulfilling the present is never enough! “
Eng. Fabrizio Castoldi (President of the BCS Group)
This is how it all began…
BCS was founded in the early ‘40s from a simple yet brilliant insight of a young engineer: Luigi Castoldi.
His first business revolved around a tiny workshop in Abbiategrasso, a town in the Ticino Valley on the outskirts of Milan. The area has a strong agricultural tradition: all the sowing and reaping work is the mere result of the farmers’ sweat and toil.
Hence, in 1942, the idea to design and manufacture the first self-propelled motor mower in the world: a machine equipped with an internal combustion low-power engine, secured to a self-supporting chassis that houses the transmission and cutting system.
Thus, model “243” was born – a real revolution in the agricultural world of that time, thanks to both its great production capacity and the tangible improvement it brought about in farmers’ lives, no longer forced to long days of manual reaping.
In his project, Ing. Luigi Castoldi involved Camillo Bonetti, in charge of the tax collector office in Abbiategrasso, and Severino Speroni, a proficient mechanic. The abbreviation “BCS”, coming precisely from the initials of their surnames, gave the name to the company, which was officially founded on June 4, 1943.
A real revolution.
” A man can cut up to 250 sq metres of hay an hour using a manual scythe and 2000 sq meters an hour using a horse-drawn sickle mower. With my new self-propelled machine, you can cut as many as 6000 sq metres an hour… at just the price of a cow! “
It was precisely with these words that Eng. Luigi Castoldi presented his motor mower to the ecstatic local farmers.
A highly specialised complete range.
The success achieved with this machine gave “L’Ingegnere” – as his collaborators called him – wings to start designing and manufacturing a complete range of efficient and always highly specialised agricultural machines.
In the late ‘60s, the motor mowers with central cutter bar were followed by the first lightweight and smaller multi-function two-wheel tractors for a market in which, until then, there had only been expensive and bulky machines.
Starting in 1970, to meet the growing demand for increased productivity in agriculture, discs mowers for tractors were introduced.
As a result of major acquisitions, in the early ‘90s BCS developed the first range of tractors with four equal wheels in the articulated and rigid versions with steering wheels.
In 2000, Eng. Fabrizio Castoldi, the founder’s son, took his father’s place at the helm of the company and became the new president of BCS SpA.
The BCS Group today.
Today the BCS Group is a leading multinational company in the mechanization industry.
It designs and manufactures agricultural and greens maintenance machinery, autonomous electrical power systems and mobile welding equipment.
The BCS Group has three manufacturing plants in Italy (Abbiategrasso, Luzzara and Cusago) and branches in Europe (Spain, Portugal, France and Germany), India and China, as well as a distribution network covering more than 100 countries around the world.
BCS Group company profile (.pdf)