Pickseed’s owners Tom and Martin Pick, sons of company founder Otto Pick, signed a sale agreement with DLF last month for the company and all its operations across North America, which today represent about $100 million in annual sales.
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."
The company later expanded into the United States 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.
Pickseed’s buyer, which bills itself as the world’s biggest producer of grass and clover seed, started as a Danish farmers’ seed co-operative in 1906. That co-operative, DLF AmbA, still owns 95 per cent of DLF-Trifolium.
