By Cathy Bolt, Perth
Source: The Western Australian

Crop chemical giant Nufarm is quietly positioning itself to be a player in the $32 billion global seed business as opportunities grow to exploit links between the two key farm inputs.

Managing director Doug Rathbone revealed Nufarm had taken over two more seed companies in the past two months after acquiring Victorian canola breeder Agseed Research 15 months ago.

The acquisitions have not been big enough to be reported to the Australian Stock Exchange but Mr Rathbone said they were part of a strategy to steadily develop a seed business again, first in Australia, then globally.

"It's delivering the biology as well as the chemistry," he said. "That's the way it's now going to go."

Last month Nufarm - based at Laverton - completed the buy-out of its remaining two partners in Nugrain, a plant breeding alliance it set up in 1998 with several farm services companies, since reduced to GrainCorp and ABB Grain. Earlier this month Nugrain took over another Victorian plant breeder, Access Genetics, after buying the 50 per cent stake held by founder Donald Coles.

Through aggressive acquisition of companies and brands, Mr Rathbone has built Nufarm into one of the top 10 players in the global crop protection market, with $1.6 billion in sales and a $103.5 million net profit last financial year continuing four years of double-digit growth.

Its business has been built on branding and developing off-patent herbicides, rather than investment in basic research into new proprietary chemicals.

Corporate affairs manager Robert Reis said the strategy would be similar with seeds, where the company was unlikely to invest in fundamental gene technology.

Nufarm sold its first big foray into plant breeding, biotechnology company Florigene, two years ago. Nufarm said then it did not see basic research into genetic modification of plants as its way forward. Rather, it saw its role as marketing biotech products.

Mr Reis noted that some of the patents on the technology underpinning the new GM crops now growing around the world would start to fall away in the next four to five years, 15 to 20 years after the patent applications were first made.

"We don't want people to think we are being distracted by something that's not crop protection, but in Australia we have a position that allows us to take a position over time," he said.

Copyright © The Western Australian