When the world's top footballers take the field at this summer’s World Cup in Brazil, they will be doing so on Danish grass, as they did at the 2010 World Cup in South Africa and the London Olympic Games in 2012. Danish grass also feeds 300,000 Russian beef cattle every year.
Denmark is the world's largest exporter of grass seed, and grass seed producer DLF-Trifolium enjoys 50 percent of the grass seed market in Europe and 25 percent of the market globally. Last year Danish seed export surpassed the five billion kroner mark in a business that continues to sprout profits.
“Denmark has a great climate for producing grass seeds and also a tradition and a culture,” Truels Damsgaard, the head of Roskilde-based DLF-Trifolium, told Politiken newspaper. “Our strategy is to be the global market leader and to be present everywhere in the temperate climate sphere.”
Damsgaard revealed that the company plans to expand into the US, which has 50 percent of the global market, eastern Europe and China, which doesn’t yet produce its own seed.
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A seed for every scenario
Dan Jørgensen (S), the agriculture and food minister, said that he was proud of the Danish seed production, of which 40 percent caters to agriculture and the remaining 60 percent to, among other things, sport fields, golf clubs, parks, city squares and road shoulders.
“We have professional buyers who demand quality, so we spend 50 million kroner a year on improvements,” Damsgaard said. “We must be able to deliver grass that is robust in the face of plant diseases, can endure little or a lot of rain, improves milk production, and is used for lawns of every kind.”
Aside from grass seed, DLF-Trifolium also produces spinach seed – another that the Danish climate also fosters effectively.
