Side 4
4 Business report for DLF 2021/22 HIGHLIGHTS 2021/22 DLF strengthens its position in North America In March 2022, we were pleased to announce our acquisition of OreGro Seeds Inc., which is based in Albany, Oregon USA, where DLF has now established breeding, seed production and sales activities. Our purchase of OreGro Seeds, with its portfolio of forage grass, catch crops and turf grass strengthens our value chain in the North American market. OreGro Seeds has mixing and packaging facilities, and the purchase provides us with greater capacity to support our North American customers. In July, DLF also fully acquired Premier Pacific Seeds Ltd., a forage, catch crop and turf grass wholesale seed company based in British Columbia, Canada, which we previously had co-owned with 40% of the shares. DLF grass for top sporting events Some of the most widely viewed sporting events in the world take place on grass. This was the case for the women’s ICC Cricket World Cup in New Zealand, where six of the seven pitches were covered with grass from the DLF Group. The women’s European Championship in football, which was staged in the UK, featured grass varieties from DLF at all 10 stadiums. The DLF Group’s global platform and breeding network guarantees that we can deliver optimum turf solutions for international finals played worldwide. DLF listed among the 20 most climate friendly seed companies in 2021 The international journal European Seed selected and commended the 20 most climate-friendly companies in the European seed industry in 2021. From a strong field of finalists, the jury selected DLF’s plant breeding initiatives designed to develop crops adapted to future climate challenges. Together with its partners at Crop Innovation Denmark (CID), in 2016, DLF built the world’s largest and most advanced root screening facility, RadiMax, which, via advanced camera equipment, gives researchers knowledge of root growth in the individual plant lines during increasing drought stress. This insight is used to identify climate- robust plant lines with large and deep root masses.
Side 5
DLF receives special award at the Sustainable Awards 2022 EY and the Danish Chamber of Commerce distributed Sustainable Awards in 2022, and DLF was nominated together with other companies in Denmark that, in their own ways, pioneer and keep sustainability deeply anchored in their business models. We were therefore both pleased and proud to receive the EY and Danish Chamber of Commerce special award: Long Term Value Creation. The reasons for us receiving the special award included that, as global leaders in our field, we lead the way and engage in researching and developing technologies and products that can help to minimise climate impacts in the agricultural sector while safeguarding future food production. Business report for DLF 2021/22 5 Delegates visit Edinburgh In June 2022, DLF delegates visited our production department in Broxburn, Scotland. The visit, initially scheduled for 2020, was postponed until this year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. And it was well worth the wait. The UK team had pulled out all the stops to ensure that the visit would be a resounding success, and the delegates received an impressive intro duction to the remarkable successful track record of the British business activities. The fully automated mixing and packing facility in Broxburn has an exceedingly high capacity and supplies agriculture throughout Great Britain with seed mixtures. This totals about 12,300 orders annually. New variety delivers resistance to Grey Leaf Spot in Brazil Annual ryegrass is an important forage grass in South America, and DLF has a high-quality breeding programme that includes genetics from DLF in Brazil, Uruguay, New Zealand and the USA. In 2021, five out of six top varieties in the official INASE (Instituto Nacional de Semillas) trials were from DLF – including the top three. The best diploid variety, Feroz , from our breeding programme in Brazil, is the first of our varieties with high resistance to rust and Grey Leaf Spot (Brusone), which can be a wide-scale problem in southern Brazil. The variety gives a large autumn and winter forage yield, and we expect heavy demand in the southern states of Brazil, Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Left, susceptible variety, and right, Feroz, which is highly resistant to Grey Leaf Spot Catarina and Paraná in the coming season.
