About Us
Known And Trusted For 100 Years
100 Years of experience,
Success, and Science now Available for Your Garden
Kynoch now offers high-quality fertilizer blends in manageable 2kg and 5kg bags for the avid gardener’s comfort. The Kynoch Garden Range is built on years of experience in agriculture, grounded by strong scientific knowledge.
Our fertilizer blends are known for their high concentration of 25%, ensuring all essential elements are included for the benefit of your garden.
From tunnels with seedlings, vegetables, and berries to large hectare maize and other grain plantations, sunflower, ground beans, cotton, lucerne, and pastures, to bananas, nuts, tea, avocados, celery, and citrus, our knowledge, experience, and service are truly distinctive.
Our History
100 years of Kynoch
The Kynoch brand is more than 100 years old. Kynoch has been a groundbreaker in the fertilizer industry since 1919 and has proven it can stand the test of time.
George Kynoch & Co. first opened its doors in Birmingham, England, in the 1850s, where it manufactured explosives and ammunition. In the early 1900s, Arthur Chamberlain, who was chairman of George Kynoch & Co., explored the possibility of selling explosives to the gold mines in the Transvaal. He found that dynamite was already being produced at Modderfontein and Somerset West, and that exporting explosives from Ireland would have priced Kynoch out of the market.
In 1908, the first few Irishmen left Arklow for Umbogintwini and set about clearing the bush to erect the first part of a new factory. By the end of 1908, the Umbogintwini plant was in full production. Expansions and growth characterized the Umbogintwini factory until 1918, when, at the end of World War I, there was an oversupply of explosives throughout the world.
Kynoch then built the first fertilizer plant in South Africa at Umbogintwini. The British founding father of the company, George Kynoch, died in South Africa while negotiating with the old Transvaal mining houses.
While the British wing of George Kynoch & Co. ended after World War I, the South African company Kynoch Fertilizer grew from strength to strength, becoming the brand that South African farmers countrywide remember to this very day.
Kynoch Today
Enhanced Efficiency Through Innovation
During 2014, Kynoch became a member of Export Trading Group (ETG), a multinational company operating in Africa for more than 30 years. ETG owns and manages a vertically integrated agriculture supply chain across the African subcontinent, with operations spanning procurement, processing, warehousing, transport, distribution, and merchandising.
In FY2019, ETG procured and distributed over 6.7 million metric tonnes of commodities, including maize, pulses, wheat, rice, sugar, oilseeds, cashew nuts, cocoa, coffee, fertilizer, and farm implements. Eighty percent of the African-originated stock was procured at the farm gate level. The group is a consortium of three major investors: Mitsui, Pembani Remgro, and Standard Chartered Bank Plc.
Kynoch Fertilizer is a leading importer, blender, and retailer of a complete range of granular, liquid, and specialty fertilizers (OptimiZers™) in Southern Africa. Our farmers are serviced by a large sales and agronomic technical support team.
Kynoch operates warehouses as well as import and blending facilities in all the major ports in the Southern Africa region and several inland locations. Kynoch is the exclusive distributor of globally proven Agrotain® nitrogen stabilizers supplied by Koch Industries. The company has also developed its own range of enhanced efficiency fertilizer products, including a proprietary foliar range (OEMFF®) that is both crop- and growth-stage specific.
To complete the full range of plant nutrition requirements, other fertilizer raw materials, products, and enhancers are sourced locally and internationally. As a result, your long-standing innovative plant nutrition partner now brings you Enhanced Efficiency through Innovation.
Kynoch Garden Range
100% nutrition for your garden
For over a hundred years, Kynoch has created innovative fertilizer solutions for generations of farmers across Africa. This wealth of trusted experience has now been used to develop a retail range of pioneering, high-quality fertilizer products for the home gardener. In 2019, Kynoch introduced its first garden range products to the market with great success and anticipation. The launch of the new garden range brought the perfect fertilizer blends for your flowers, veggies, lawn, and fruit.