The commercial seed business essentially involves production, marketing and research/development of new hybrid varieties of crops. The Oxford English dictionary describes a hybrid as “the offspring of two plants or animals of different species or varieties”. In the plant world:

 

At the same time, as the seeds multiplied/produced from a hybrid do not have the same characteristics as their parents, a farmer must buy seeds year after year from a seed producer or company and that is how the “Seed Industry” was born.

 

A plant breeder makes new crosses with the objective of combining desired characters of the parents into the offspring viz. yield, maturity, disease tolerance and quality traits such as taste, aroma, flavour, colour etc. Thousands of crosses are required to be made to develop a single commercially saleable hybrid. This process is expensive and time consuming and used to take several years in the past. With the development of a new technology called “Marker Assisted Breeding or Selection (MAB or MAS)”, it is now possible to test more number of crosses in a shorter time span and with less cost to develop a successful commercial hybrid.

 

The purest of pure seed of a specific crop variety is called the “nucleus seed”. The next progeny is the “breeder seed” and the next, the “foundation seed”. Commercial hybrid seeds are produced from foundation seeds. As the seeds have to be produced only at a specific time and in a specific place, to increase the seeds quantity to be produced, it is not possible to have an “extra shift” or “seven day working”. The quantity and quality of seed produced also depends on nature and therefore, old seedsmen jokingly call nature the “General Manager, Production”. It also takes a long time to produce a single batch of seeds – anywhere from six to 18 months, the latter for seeds of species such as cabbage and sugar beet.

 

The Quality Control or better still Quality Assurance consists of testing for physical and genetic purity, moisture content, weed content, viability (or germination percent), presence of diseases etc. The quality process has to be carried out through the crop production cycle – when the seeds are still being produced – especially for disease control. Training of seed growers is therefore an essential step in quality production.

 

It is said that the variety to be sold changes every 200 km on account of agro-climatic conditions under which the crop is produced as well as the market preference and hence “Seeds" is essentially a local business. Further, ordinarily there is only one planting season per crop and therefore, what is produced over six to 18 months has to be sold within two weeks otherwise carried over for one year. Seeds also need special storage conditions and therefore, it is expensive to carry over seeds to the next year.

 

Biotechnology

The recent technical advances in biotechnology and genetic engineering have made it possible to introduce transgenes (genes foreign to a crop) into a crop and this has revolutionised the seeds industry in the past decade. The first generation transgenic crops or “crops with input traits such as herbicide tolerant soybean or insect resistant maize” have become the minimum industry standards within 10 years of their commercial introduction in the 1990s and they have substantially increased yields of these two crops. The second generation transgenic crops or crops with “output traits" are expected to further increase yield as well as quality of agricultural produce.

 

With the advent of modern technologies such as the markers technology and genetic engineering, seed research has become very expensive and consequently the past decade has seen several mergers and acquisitions in the seeds industry and the emergence of global players such as Monsanto, Du Pont and Syngenta.

 

Read related document "Seed Processing and Storage".