Crystal Rose-Fricker, the president of her family’s new company, Pure Seed, was not only born into the turfgrass seed business but she has stayed in it all her life.
From picking Marionberries on her grandmother’s farm at age 9, Rose-Fricker graduated to helping her siblings with irrigation and driving the combine and truck on the family farm. When she was 13, she started working at Pure-Seed Testing, the turfgrass breeding company founded by her father, Bill Rose.
As an undergraduate at Southern Oregon University in Ashland, Rose-Fricker majored in biology, ran cross-country and track and toyed with the idea of being an accountant. Her dad had other ideas. “He said, ‘You don’t want to be an accountant and stay inside all day,’” she recalls, and he took her to meet Warren Kronstad, Ph.D., an internationally renowned wheat breeder and geneticist at Oregon State University in Corvallis in the heart of grass-growing country. “As soon as I had that meeting with him, it all clicked. I thought ‘I could do that.’
After graduation from Oregon State, Rose-Fricker worked at Pure-Seed Testing as a full-time plant breeder, took charge of the company’s breeding program in 1996 and became president in 1999.
As Rose-Fricker worked in the turfgrass seed industry, evidence accumulated indicating that she had merited and not just inherited her position. In 1999 she was named Outstanding Young Farmer; in 2000, Sports Illustrated called her the “Sixth Most Influential Woman in Golf”; and in 2008, she was awarded the National Council of Commercial Plant Breeders Genetics and Plant Breeding Award for Industry, which is administered by the Crop Science Society of America and recognizes “scientists who have made significant contributions to plant science through basic, applied, or developmental research in genetics and plant breeding during their careers in the private sector.”
In addition, Rose-Fricker’s name is on five U.S. patents for turfgrass varieties, and she has been involved in the development and release of more than 200 turfgrass and forage cultivars, including the first seeded seashore paspalum.
The Rose family sold Turf-Seed Inc. and many of its professional turfgrass varieties to The Scotts Co. in 2006, but Rose-Fricker continued to head Pure-Seed Testing, developing and testing new cultivars in Oregon and at the company’s 20-acre research station in Rolesville, N.C. In the meantime, her father and her brother, Ed Rose, continued to run Rose Agri-Seed, a forage seed and seed coating, packaging and distribution business in Hubbard, Ore.
Fast-forward to 2011 when the Rose family announced that, through an amicable agreement, it was re-acquiring some of the varieties it had sold to Scotts and was forming a new company, Pure Seed (www.pureseed.com) in the former Turf-Seed Inc. location in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. The new company’s board includes Rose-Fricker as president; her father, Bill, vice president; her brother, Ed, president of Roselawn Seed; and her sister, Cara Rose Tuggle.
To clarify the current structure and relationship of the Rose family companies:
- Pure Seed markets, provides services such as packaging, blending and coating, and distributes professional turfgrass varieties.
- Pure-Seed Testing is a research company that develops new turfgrass varieties.
- Roselawn Seed grows plants for seed in the commercial market.
- Tee-2-Green, the marketer for the Penncross Bentgrass Association, is owned by select growers. Bill Rose is the president of Tee-2-Green, which is separate from the Rose family businesses.
Pure Seed is focusing on the entire professional market: golf, professional sports, athletic fields and landscaping. In 2012, 90 percent of the Pure Seed varieties released will be varieties re-acquired from The Scotts Co., and 5 to 10 percent will be new varieties developed over the last few years by Pure-Seed Testing. Pure Seed has the rights to license new professional turf varieties from Pure-Seed Testing and to market Pure-Seed Testing varieties worldwide.
The varieties purchased from The Scotts Co. include: Greenwich velvet bentgrass; Enchantment chewings fescue, Shademaster III creeping red fescue, Bighorn GT hard fescue and Seabreeze GT slender creeper. The Kentucky bluegrasses are: Right, Jumpstart, Full Moon, Moonlight SLT and Vibrant. The perennial ryegrasses are: Silver Dollar, Gray Fox, Quicksilver, Brightstar SLT, Citation Fore and Eliminator GT; the tall fescues are Tar Heel II, Endeavor II, Dynamic II, Coronado TDH, Gazelle II and PST-5T8E (an unnamed experimental); and the bermudagrasses are Transcontinental and North Shore SLT. Pure Seed will also be producing and distributing Soil Guard (a hard fescue) and perennial ryegrass PST-2TSE (called Carleve in Europe) along with several new experimental varieties that are in the seed stock phase.
The Roses are happy to be back in the professional turfgrass business, and Rose-Fricker says, “It’s challenging, but it’s really rewarding for me see that people are excited to have us back. We are selling great varieties with specific traits, but it’s more than just the varieties, it’s the people and how you do business,” she says. … (For growers) it’s important to have a company that you can trust and will stand behind the grower. … Traits and good seed yield allow the farmers to make a profit. We have worked hard to develop varieties that provide both.”
When she looks toward the future, Rose-Fricker has a broad view. “The seed industry has so many ups and downs. Why does it have to be that way?” Noting that Pure Seed will have a small booth at the Golf Industry Show in Las Vegas to talk to customers about their future needs, Rose-Fricker says, “We need to know what people want. We don’t want to plant acres of varieties that people don’t want.”
“If you want to stick around, you have to be global,” she says. “We want to be very intentional in planning for the global market. We have always been in a global market --- we have been in Europe and China in the past.”
Making the customer happy is Pure Seed’s ultimate goal. Rose-Fricker sums it up when she says, “We will do everything we can to deliver to the customer what they want.”
Recent Comments