Maribo Seed - your partner in sugar beet‌ Maribo Seed is fully dedicated and committed to the sugar beet business. We have more than 90 years of experience within sugar beet. We were founded back in 1920 by the Danish Sugar Factories to improve the sugar beet seed
and the sugar yield. This we have done with passion to the benefit of our customers!
Maribo Seed Headquarters, every year many of our customers take their time to visit our headquarters to see how we produce the seed.
Maribo Seed – good service We offer the best possible service to our customers through a dedicated network of subsidiaries, sales offices, distributors and agents in more than 30 countries. Our MARIBO headquarters located on the island of Lolland in Denmark, in the middle of the area where sugar beets are grown, is dedicated to produce the best possible seed quality and provide good service to our customers. We have breeders, product and seed technology specialists who work together to develop our full portfolio
of sugar beet varieties to suit specific growing conditions all over the world. Read more at www.mariboseed.com. See movie about how we produce the seed
15 years hard work to develop a new sugar beet variety Every year, new breeding work is carried out using thousands of isolation tents and cabins. Here the parent lines are grown – plants that are specially selected by the breeders for having the most desirable characteristics for the new generation of sugar beet seed. The most important parameters we select for are sugar yield, disease resistance, low soil tare and resistance to bolting.
Breeding work at the headquarters in Denmark.
After 10 – 15 years of testing several thousand crosses in a huge number of trials, only the most promising candidates remain. We test these in yield trials in several countries and finally the very best are ready for multiplication and production in large scale.
Seed harvest in the Po Valley near Bologna in northern Italy
2 years and a lot of experience to produce the MARIBO
Multiplication We multiply the sugar beet seed in Southern Europe where mild climate and good soil give excellent conditions for the best seed quality. The best seed candidates are sown in August and developed into seedlings. In February, these are ready for transplantation into the propagation fields. Here they
bolt and will start to flower in late May and in July the seed plants are mature and ready for harvest. Every week our experienced field technicians inspect the fields to secure the best quality.
sugar beet seed Seed processing After harvest in Southern Europe the many tones of seed are transported to our factory in Denmark where our experienced seed specialists are ready to turn the raw seed into the familiar green MARIBO pellets. We polish, calibrate and pellet the seed using various techniques and methods developed through many years of experience in seed production.
Two years after the best seed candidates are sown, the seed can then be certified, packed and dispatched to our customers.
Quality check – your guarantee Our seed is checked after every individual step in the process. Vigour and ability to germinate is checked during the entire process. In addition, we carry out a series of different quality tests, checking for example: seed maturity, resistance to bolting, moisture content, the pellet size, strength and roundness of the pellet.
Only 10 – 20% of the harvested seed will pass our stringent testing procedures and reach the customer.
MARIBO SeedPlus – extra security for growth Our team of breeders, multiplication technicians, seed technologists and production people has all worked hard to develop a specialized seed quality concept. After several years of research and development we succeeded and our quality concept MARIBO SeedPlus was launched.
Beet growers all over the world grow MARIBO varieties with good results Varieties grown under different climate and soil conditions must of course have different characteristics. So we offer a full portfolio of MARIBO sugar beet varieties, all developed to suit specific climates and local growing conditions.
The seed is specially selected and the treatment and the entire production process is tailor-made. The final product is seed of a very high quality, giving the beet grower extra confidence in fast, secure and uniform field emergence and establishment – and extra security for growth.
Our history and milestones We have always been pioneers in the sugar beet business. We introduced the first highly competitive sugar beet variety, MARIBO-N, in the end of the 1920s. In the 1930s, we succeeded in developing the first tetraploid sugar beet, and the first polyploidy sugar beet variety, MARIBO-P, dominated the world market in the 1950s. We continued the development and in 1969 we introduced monogerm varieties and at the same time the seed pellet. This was a big step forward and revolutionized the cultivation of sugar beets.
started breeding for resistance to this disease and in the beginning of the 1980s we registered the world’s first resistant variety. In the early 1990s we started revolutionizing the shape of the beet to reduce the soil tare. By the end of the 1990s this new sugar beet was for the first time officially trialed by the Danish trial authorizes. Today we have a range of sugar beet varieties with reduced soil tare compared to traditional sugar beets. In 2008 the MARIBO SeedPlus concept, including the advanced multi-layer pellet, was launched.
Also, we have been at the forefront of developing Rhizomania resistant varieties. Already in the 1960s we
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