Misinvestment in seed pelleting

Contrary to the hopes of the leaders at the time, the political fusion of the two German states after the fall of the wall, reunification and currency union resulted in the almost complete collapse of the East German economy.

From the 1970s on, trials to protect seed by means of pelleting had been a focus of research at the Institute for Beet Breeding (IfR) in Klein Wanzleben. With its own recipe and a new fluidized bed process, the GDR hoped to provide pelleted seed for the country’s entire cultivation area as quickly as possible.

The personnel and financial resources poured into developing the process were huge, but it never reached a stage where it could be used in practice. The upshot was major supply bottlenecks. The situation in 1988/1989 was particularly strained. Right after a new pelleting plant was put into operation at “VEB Saat- und Pflanzgut” in Klein Wanzleben, it transpired that the pelleting process had reduced the seed’s germination capacity by ten percent and more. None of the immediate measures to remedy that deficiency was successful.

In December 1989, “VEB Saat- und Pflanzgut” contacted KWS in Einbeck and asked it to pellet seed on its behalf. The costs for pelleting a total of 160,000 U totaled some four million German marks. 1 U corresponds to approximately 100,000 pellets – the amount of seed required today for one hectare of land.

KWS supplied the pelleted seed on time, despite the fact that there were difficulties in pelleting it at Einbeck, since the goods supplied from Klein Wanzleben did not comply with the agreed criteria. There were too many bigerm seed balls and excessive contamination, so the seed had to be processed first in Einbeck.

After spending so much on obtaining the pelleted seed, however, the “VEB Saat- und Pflanzgut” in Klein Wanzleben was unable to sell most of it. After the border opened, most of the agricultural cooperatives preferred to purchase seed directly from West German breeding companies. That meant good business for KWS: Up to April 1990, the company supplied sugarbeet seed to 193 agricultural enterprises in the GDR. The farmers were granted a payment respite until currency union had been accomplished and were also given a quarter of the supplied seed free of charge.

The “VEB Saat- und Pflanzgut” could not match that. After planting the fields with “western seed” in the spring sowing season, it could no longer expect to sell the stocks of pelleted seed it had commissioned. It went into bankruptcy and the storehouses were privatized by the Treuhand, an agency tasked with selling East German enterprises. The new owners likewise did not gain much joy from the seed: The storehouses containing the pelleted seed were destroyed in a large fire set by arsonists on February 10, 1992. The seed that survived was later taken to disposal sites that were unprepared to handle it and is still there to this day – for example in Blumenberg near Wanzleben. The local population’s protests against storage of the seed there went unheard. |