Seed breeding Steinach
| Saatzucht Steinach GmbH & Co KG | |
|---|---|
| legal form | GmbH & Co. KG |
| founding | 1920 |
| Seat | Steinach , Germany |
| management | Thomas Eckardt |
| Number of employees | approx. 70 (2001) |
| Branch | Agriculture; Seed production |
| Website | saatzucht.de |
The Saatzucht Steinach is a German agricultural companies. The seed manufacturer has specialized in the breeding of useful grass varieties. The company has its headquarters in Steinach in Lower Bavaria , where it is even represented in color in the municipal coat of arms.
Company history
Carl August von Schmieder (1867–1941), who later founded the company, bought Steinach Castle in 1901 . In order to supply his stud farm there with the best forage grass, his employees began in 1904 to collect and breed “ecotypes”. The German " grassland movement " began under the estate manager Ludwig Niggl , with the aim of improving meadows and pastures in Germany, the poor condition of which had been lamented. On November 19, 1919, the first grassland association was founded, and other associations throughout the Reich followed. Against this background, the Steinach Saatzucht was founded in 1920 , initially producing grass seeds from red fescue , meadow fescue andWiesen-Goldhafer sold . In addition to grasses, cruciferous varieties were also bred for animal feed.
In 1941 Max von Schmieder (1908–1999) took over the business; he had studied agricultural sciences and agricultural chemistry until 1933 and was head of an “advice center for forage seeds” in the Third Reich. In the post-war period, research into ideal lawn plants began in Steinach: Until then, “lawn” consisted only of forage grasses that were scattered on bare ground and then had to be cultivated. In 1955 the company created the first German lawn variety with the red fescue variety Rasengold , which was crossed from wild grasses; In 1965 this breed was placed under plant variety protection. Other very successful branded varieties that have been grown in-house and marketed since then were Supra (a Läger bluegrass , from 1974) and Loretta (a Lolch , since 1975).
In 1988 the management of the family business changed again when the Kronseder family took over the business. Investments in the estate were followed by the acquisition of competing breeding farms in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania : Saatzucht Bornhof (1992), Gut Ballin (2000) and the agricultural operations of Burg Stargard (2007); these newly acquired goods make up the majority of the nearly 7,000 hectares of the seed breeding company's production area. Steinach is the smallest location today.
Varieties and breeding methods
Other brands of Saatzucht Steinach are: Lato ( meadow panicle grass , since 1989); Arone ( oat , since 1992); Lorettanova ( German ryegrass , since 1996); Silk ( red fescue ), Aberavon (ryegrass with increased sugar content, since 2005), Gersimi ( Italian ryegrass , since 2008), Serafina (first tetraploid ryegrass, since 2011) as well as various feeds such as alfalfa , clover and bean varieties.
For breeding, lawn test fields are created in the middle of tall rye so that lawn pollen cannot contaminate neighboring fields.
In 2001 the company had around 70 employees and was the leading of a total of three grass breeding companies in Germany. At that time, the Steinach breeding program registered an average of one or two types of lawn per year: New commercial varieties went through a program of around fifteen years of breeding and subsequent variety testing at the Federal Plant Variety Office .
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d Andreas Wenderoth : lawn. The dream of the perfect green . In: Geo-Magazin , August 2001, p. 112f. and 116ff
- ↑ a b c Company website of Saatzucht Steinach: Company history
- ↑ Thomas Grundler: Home History Steinach: Max von Schmieder . Retrieved August 14, 2021.