One of Canada’s top forage seed and turfgrass companies has become part of the world’s biggest.
Danish grass and clover seed firm DLF-Trifolium recently closed its deal to buy the Ontario-based Pickseed Companies Group, with operations across Canada and in Oregon, for an undisclosed sum.
Pickseed’s owners Tom and Martin Pick, sons of company founder Otto Pick, signed a sale agreement with DLF in July for the company and all its operations across North America, which today represent about US$100 million in annual sales.
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“We felt that it was important to sell to an entity that would have a good cultural fit with Pickseed. We are confident that DLF-Trifolium as a dedicated turfgrass and forage crop seed company will be able to carry forward and develop the Pickseed business and legacy,” the Pick brothers said in a release.
DLF CEO Truels Damsgaard in July described the Pickseed deal as “a major strategic step forward” for his company.
DLF, Damsgaard said, is “looking forward to developing the Pickseed business in North America, and to further develop a strong platform to promote DLF-Trifolium forage products in Canada, and to bring the Pickseed product potential through the DLF-Trifolium global network.”
Pickseed started in 1947 as Otto Pick Agricultural Service, focused on direct sales of improved forage seed to southern Ontario livestock producers, based on the then relatively new concept of “permanent pasture.”
Otto Pick’s sons and his wife Marie took over the business following his death in 1959, expanding into turfgrass products and expanding both west and east with a Manitoba seed production unit, a processing plant in Winnipeg and a distribution site at St-Hyacinthe, Que.
The company later expanded into the U.S. in the 1970s through Oregon-based Pickseed West, and took over one of Canada’s biggest forage and turfgrass seed businesses, the seed division of Maple Leaf Mills, in 1981.
DLF operates subsidiaries in Denmark, the U.S., the U.K., Germany, Holland, France, the Czech Republic and New Zealand and books sales of over US$350 million per year, holding a worldwide market share of about 20 per cent in the grass and cool-season clover business.
