Our Story
Agri Green Enterprises is a family-operated business in Vanderhoof, British Columbia. We're active farmers — running our own livestock and managing over 1,000 acres of crop production every year.
The Year It Wouldn't Stop Raining
2016 was the year that changed everything. It rained, and rained, and rained. By the end of that season, we'd lost hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of hay — cuttings flattened in the field, windrows turned slimy black, premium grade reduced to lowest feed grade or worse. We watched the work of an entire summer wash away.
Necessity is the birth of invention. We started building what would become the AG Maximizer — a stationary hay dryer that would take the weather out of haymaking entirely. The idea was simple, even if the engineering wasn't: bale at higher moisture, dry the bales in a controlled environment, and stop losing cuttings to weather that hits while you wait for the hay to cure in the field.
Built by the Family
Emil started building the first Maximizer with his three sons:
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Chandler — co-inventor
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Ryan — welder
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Arlan — transporter
There were hundreds of hours of trial and error in the farm shop. As painful as it was, we learned the value of finding out what doesn't work. Welding, cutting apart, rewelding. As the scrap pile grew, so did our knowledge of drying hay — even though we'd been harvesting hay for decades.
Then came the aha moment. We realized the dryer wasn't just insurance in case it rained. Baling hay at high moisture and drying it in the chamber could take our hay to the absolute top in both quality and quantity — preserving everything we had invested in producing the crop: all the pay-back from seeding, fertilizer, good harvest timing, and especially leaf retention. Leaf retention is the single biggest factor in hay quality that most producers don't pay enough attention to — and high-moisture baling is the best way to protect it. That changed everything about how we thought about haymaking.
From Farm Shop to Production
The first 13 Maximizers were built right here on the farm in Vanderhoof. As demand grew, we partnered with industrial manufacturing capacity in Alberta to scale up production of the 400 and 600.
The newest model — the 300E — is being built back at the farm. After years of refining the larger systems, we wanted the 300E's first production run to come from our own hands, on the same ground where the original Maximizer was invented.
What We're Most Proud Of
Of all the things we could say about the AG Maximizer, the one that matters most: it's the most economical, consistent, and simply made hay dryer in the world. Every design decision came from real haymaking — what works on the farm, what holds up over years of use, what a producer can actually operate and maintain themselves. There's no overengineering, no extra complication, no parts that exist for reasons no one understands. Just a system that does what hay needs done.
Where We're Going
What started as a solution to one farm's problem now serves forage producers on five continents. The work continues — refining the equipment, supporting our customers, and helping more producers escape the weather lottery that haymaking has always been.