When Time magazine listed what it considers to be the 100 most influential new inventions for 2025 across a number of categories, staff at Thunderstruck Ag Equipment in Winkler, Man., were surprised to see that one of their products had won a spot on that list.
The company was contacted this summer by Time and invited to nominate its unique Razors Edge combine concave to be considered for recognition.
“I thought it was a joke, at first,” says chief executive officer Jeremy Matuszewski.
Read Also
Canola trade watchful during harvest intermission
The flow of speculative money, reacting to whatever world news is available, can be expected to steer grain and oilseed futures in this stretch between Northern and Southern Hemisphere harvests, Phil Franz-Warkentin writes.
“We weren’t aware they recognized inventions every year. After we won two awards at Ag in Motion, they reached out and asked if we were interested in applying. So we applied. It was that simple.”
WHY IT MATTERS: Winkler-based Thunderstruck Ag Equipment has added a nod from Time, following their innovation award win at Ag in Motion earlier this year.
The Razor’s Edge concave beat out five other nominations in the agriculture category.
At Ag in Motion this year, Matuszewski praised the unique design of the concave line, focused more around “how the material flows through a combine,”
The concave line is designed around individual combines, is meant to improve cleaning and separation and removes the need to change between crops. Farmers can have a slower rotor speed, wider concave clearance, and are being sold on the design with a promise of more efficient operation and less fuel cost. They’re likewise promised that they can “say goodbye to the hassle of cover plates,” on the company’s website.
Features include a tighter design on the point of the concave with greatest crop impact. Material posted by the company points to lower grain loss during harvest due to fewer bottlenecks in material flow and, in general, better ability to “keep material flow smooth and consistent —no more overloads or downtime.”
History of wins
It’s not clear if winning the awards at AIM was what brought the concaves to Time’s attention, but, “the timing was pretty particular,” Matuszewski says.
Key prerequisites for nomination were that the product had to be new and commercialized this year and found to be making a difference in the market, Matuszewski recalls about the application process.
On its website, the magazine writes that it has been compiling its list of the “most impactful new products and ideas in Time’s Best Inventions issue” since 2000. It adds that editors evaluated each contender on “a number of key factors, including originality, efficacy, ambition and impact.”
In all, the magazine recognized 300 of what it terms groundbreaking inventions and 100 special mention inventions across a wide variety of categories. Aside from the recognition and publicity, there is no other reward for the winners.
The final list was announced in early October and the winners will be published in the November print edition.
“They put one (winner) on the cover,” says Matuszewski of the upcoming November issue.
“It is a housekeeping robot. It’s pretty cool. But you can order a cover they’ll ship to you with your invention on it. But it’s not the actual cover.
“Anytime you win an award adds more credibility to the product, but how the product performs is ultimately going to dictate the sales and ultimate growth of that product.”
Time’s list can be found online at time.com/collections/best-inventions-2025
