A treasure trove
of breeding work

The quantities of seed required for breeding new varieties have also increased at a pace with KWS’s steady growth. Besides general breeding programs, those that focus on specific traits such as drought tolerance or resistance are gaining importance. This is why KWS began building a new elite storage facility at the Einbeck site in 2022. Spanning a floor area of 13,000 square meters, the new building has significantly more storage space than its predecessor. “The new elite storage facility provides space to safely store up to 1.3 million seed lots of sugarbeet, fodder beet, oilseed rape, catch crops and peas,” explains Robert Heidhues, Head of Global R&D Business Functions. “It primarily houses material from current and past seed multiplications of our breeding programs, which makes it a treasure trove of our breeders’ knowledge.”

Best conditions for seeds

To provide the best possible protection for these valuable goods, the storage rooms operate at optimum climatic conditions. A temperature of 6 to 8 degrees Celsius and 30 percent humidity ensure that the seed’s germination capacity is maintained, and pests cannot thrive. This allows samples to be stored safely for well over 10 years.

However, before finding its way into one of the high-bay warehouses, the material must first undergo several processing steps. Among other things, it is dried, freed of foreign material, cleaned and sort-ed by size. Unlike in the old building, all processing steps occur centrally on one level. The team at the elite storage facility – comprising 50 permanent employees and up to 85 seasonal workers – can accept and process around 60,000 batches a year thanks to optimized processes. Ranging from small plant parts to sacks weighing 25 kilos, these batches come from all over Europe. If a breeder requests stored seed, it is prepared in a further step before delivery: for example, it is equipped with a protective cover, color or plant protection.

Diversity for plant breeding

For a new variety to meet the high demands of agriculture, it must combine many positive characteristics and offer obvious added value compared to existing varieties. To achieve this, breeders select plants with the desired traits and repeatedly crossbreed their most promising offspring in a selection process lasting several years. Each crossbreeding cycle contributes toward a new line that will ultimately combine several advantageous features. Both the starting material for this breeding work and seeds from the ongoing breeding process are stored in the elite storage facility so that they can be accessed again at any time. In addition, parts of the basic seed and other precommercial oilseed rape and beet seed are stored here.

says Robert Heidhues. “With the new elite storage facility, we can process significantly more seed samples and store them in ideal conditions for our breeders. In this way, we take the rising variety of products for farmers into account. This constitutes an important success factor in our increasingly diverse markets.”