Seed pioneer Simon Groot leaves legacy of farmer-focused innovation

Simon Nanne Groot, a pioneering Dutch agronomist who dedicated his life to bringing high-quality hybrid vegetable seeds to smallholder farmers globally, died Sunday at age 90 in Enkhuizen, the Netherlands, where he was born. Groot was the founder of East-West Seed, a Thailand-based for-profit vegetable seed company that aims to improve the livelihoods of subsistence farmers. In 2019, Groot was awarded the World Food Prize, which is regarded as the Nobel Prize of food and agriculture, for his efforts that lifted millions of smallholder farmers out of poverty in more than 80 countries by providing them with quality seeds, along with training and education on improved cultivation techniques. His work also made nutritious vegetables — and healthy diets — more affordable and accessible for hundreds of millions of consumers. Groot lived and worked by a simple mantra: You serve the farmer first. “Simon was a bundle of great energy and spirit and a positive force in the role of private for-profits in the global agricultural development enterprise in lifting the poor out of poverty and enhancing nutrition in vulnerable communities,” said Gebisa Ejeta, chair of the World Food Prize laureate selection committee and a 2009 laureate himself. Born in 1934, Groot was a sixth-generation seedsman who joined the family seed business, Sluis & Groot, just after college. During a 1965 business trip to Indonesia, he realized that a variety of cabbages bred and distributed by his company — one that grew uniformly in temperate climates throughout Europe — did not thrive in the tropics, where it produced lower yields that were misshapen. That was where he first thought of the idea to introduce hybrid cabbage to the tropics. It would not be until 1981 that he could start to work on that idea. That year, he visited the Philippines for the first time, a trip that would result in the launch of East-West Seed in 1982. “I was so sad about the low quality of the seeds in that spot of the world, compared to what I was used to in the Western world, where I had worked in the seed business for 25 years,” he told Devex in an interview in 2019, when he won the World Food Prize. “You see, people there have little money and lousy seeds. That is not a good combination.” He set out to bring technological innovations in seeds from the Netherlands to Southeast Asia, where he eventually supplied and created the region’s first commercial market for locally developed vegetable hybrid seeds. This work started in the Philippines with his business partner Benito Domingo. These were fast-growing varieties with high yields, also resistant to local diseases and other stressors. But in order for farmers to maximize the value of these seeds, Groot realized farmers needed to be trained on their cultivation. Training locals as plant breeders and technicians became an essential component of his work. Later, Groot worked with local and international experts and NGOs to set up East-West Seed’s knowledge transfer program in 2008. This initiative, unique for a seed company, trains tens of thousands of farmers annually. It has led to further increases in farmers’ profits and helped develop markets for nutritious vegetables. “While we were working on hybrid [seed] development, we discovered that farmers were extremely reluctant to spend their own money on purchasing hybrid seeds, because they had their own seeds, which were free of charge, so why would they?” Groot told Devex in 2023. “We came up with a modest attempt to teach the farmers about how to handle those seeds better, to not waste any seeds, and make sure that every seed makes good plants. And that was the beginning of what we now call ‘knowledge transfer.’ And it was a tool needed to make the concept of hybrid seeds palatable to small farmers. They would all benefit from it if they found out what improvements to their income the hybrid seeds could make.” After receiving the World Food Prize, Groot donated a majority of his $250,000 prize money to improving pumpkin farming in Uganda and kick-started one of his biggest dreams: Increasing pumpkin production across Africa. Uganda was a logical place to start, as demand was already high — Ugandans use every part of the pumpkin as food or medicine — but production was held back by lack of access to seeds as well as market opportunities. Over four years, the pumpkin project taught more than 14,000 smallholder farmers in Uganda how to grow pumpkins for the market while also strengthening the local and regional pumpkin value chains. It led to greater demand for high-quality seeds and Ugandan pumpkins from traders in neighboring countries such as Kenya. Today, East-West Seed remains a family business as three of Groot’s four children followed him into the company.