Devon based engineer shortlisted in Young Engineer Award

Joe Grills from Great Torrington, Devon has been shortlisted for the LAMMA Show and Institution of Agricultural Engineers (IAgrE) Young Engineer Award for his silage and bale trailers.

Joe discovered his passion for farming and engineering when, aged 13, he went to work on a local farm. After studying precision and mechanical engineering at college, he spent four years working on farms in Western Australia and America before returning to the UK. He starting his own mobile welding business and went on to design and build equipment including a hydraulic tipping bale wrap carrier and bale trailers before progressing to silage trailers too.

Joe now runs his Grizzly Trailers business out of a 22,000 square foot factory, does all his own CAD design work and loves taking on custom jobs. Features of his trailer include that it is an 18-tonne model with 23.3 cubic metre capacity as a grain trailer and 36.5 cubic metre capacity as a silage trailer.

Others on the shortlist are Richard Kane of County Down for his SpreadPoint range of agricultural spreaders, and Ieuan Evans of North Wales for his real time telemetry system that inhibits key information from a tractor and umbilical slurry pump.

The LAMMA Show is at the NEC, Birmingham next week (17 and 18 January). The Young Engineers Award winner will be announced at a special presentation with the Institute of Agricultural Engineers (IAgrE) at the end of day one.

It’s the third successive year that the LAMMA show and IAgrE have partnered to run the Award to showcase the best young engineering talent whose work helps UK farms to be more productive and sustainable.

“We are delighted with the growing popularity in this award and the number of quality applications and impressive shortlist which is testament to the immense engineering talent and skills we have in this country,” said Sarah Whittaker-Smith, Event Director at LAMMA. “Our winner will be announced at the Show next week and we can’t wait to celebrate their success.”

Past winners include Daniel Broderick from Omagh for his Cubi-Clean machine in 2022, which makes the process of cleaning dairy cow cubicles quicker and easier, and Stephen Davies, Powys-based inventor of the DTEC feed bucket in 2023.

Registration for LAMMA is free