Toro Celebrates 50 Years In Underground Irrigation

Fifty years ago today, The Toro Company purchased a Riverside, California-based company, called Moist O’Matic, which manufactured plastic irrigation products. That purchase proved a wise investment and gave Toro its start in the underground irrigation business. Today, Toro is one of the leading manufacturers of irrigation products around the world.

It all started in 1962 when Moist O’Matic had made revolutionary advancements in the use of plastics and new designs to make water-efficient sprinklers, valves, and control systems. Toro’s 4 ^th president, David Lilly, initiated the purchase of Moist O’Matic and hired John Singleton, a charismatic irrigation contractor he had met on a golf course, to pioneer Toro’s entry into golf irrigation. Initially, John made little progress but, fortunately, in 1969, John and the Toro irrigation team made several breakthroughs with golf superintendents, ultimately convincing them that plastic sprinkler systems were superior to traditional brass and iron systems. A mere three years later, Lilly could state in the annual report that Toro had become “the most widely used automatic equipment in golf course irrigation.”

Throughout the next several decades, The Toro Company made multiple acquisitions to enter new markets and product categories, and bolster its position in the industry. This included:

• Hardie ^® Irrigation (1996)
• EICON Industrial Controls (2001)
• R&D Engineering, a leading manufacturing of rain sensor devices (2003)
• Rain Master ^® (2007)
• Turf Guard ^® (2008)

Today, The Toro Company owns over 225 irrigation patents and manufactures a complete line of irrigation solutions including sprays, nozzles, rotors, valves, controllers, sensors, software, services and more. Through its distribution network, Toro delivers those solutions to homeowners, sports fields, municipalities, golf courses and agricultural growers around the world. The Toro irrigation business is still headquartered in Riverside, California, and remains dedicated to the same core values that made it thrive years ago—high quality, customer-valued innovation and relationships.

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