Boreal Plant Breeding Ltd

Boreal Plant Breeding Ltd. is a Finnish company specializing in the breeding of field crop varieties for professional farmers working in northern regions.

Breeding programmes

The main focus of our breeding programmes is on spring cereals, forage grasses and oil crops. We also have breeding programs for winter wheat, winter rye, pea and faba bean.

The main emphases of our breeding programmes are yield potential, yield stability and quality. In quality breeding we aim to tailor the quality properties of our varieties to meet the needs of industrial end users.

In breeding for yield stability our main target traits are optimised maturity, disease resistance, lodging resistance, drought tolerance and winter hardiness.

Modern technology

The competitiveness of our variety breeding is based on highly skilled staff, an extensive testing network and modern breeding methods. Our advanced data and biotechnology tools have allowed us to greatly increase the speed and accuracy of our breeding operations.

Extensive testing network

In Finland Boreal is acknowledged by its partner companies as not only providing a highly reliable testing network but also to be a sound provider of the highest level expertise in various variety-related issues. In addition to varieties that we have developed ourselves, we complement our variety portfolio by commercialising varieties from abroad that have successfully passed our testing network with proven adaptation to northern growing conditions.

In the export market we test our breeding material in various countries by cooperating with local breeders and variety representatives.

Marketing

In both domestic and export markets Boreal’s varieties are marketed through production and marketing agreements with selected representatives. In Finland Boreal is the market leader: approximately 65% of Finnish fields are cultivated with varieties bred by Boreal. All major Finnish seed companies are representatives of Boreal varieties. Our varieties are available throughout Finland distributed through the sales network of our representative partner companies. Boreal’s main export areas include Sweden, Norway, Canada, Central Europe and the Baltic States. For export our main crops are barley, oat and fodder grasses, particularly timothy.

Seed production

Our core business, variety breeding, is supported by our own basic seed production. Production is carried out by professional seed growers and processing and storage are handled by our seed centre.