Seed Master celebrated 25 years of business with an event Tuesday afternoon at its main manufacturing facility in Emerald Park, located east of Regina.
While the company was founded by Norbert Beaujot in 2002, he says the foundation of the business started in the 1980's.
After taking over his father's farm in 1985, Beaujot struggled to plant canola with the technology available at the time and thought there must be a better way.
"I spent a few years sketching out possibilities of ways to improve it. Finally, in 1992, I got to the stage where I filed for patents and ended up having the first ground-following individual opener in the world, with a hydraulic cylinder on each opener and separate seed and fertilizer knives and packer wheels on individual rows." Beaujot said.
Between the early 90's and 2002, he continued to fine tune his no-till seeding technology by creating the company Seed Hawk, then moved on to create Seed Master.
Since that time, Seed Master has grown to a vast network of dealerships across Western Canada, the United States, and Australia. Two years ago, the company invested $10 million to expand its manufacturing facilities.
Beaujot called the company's growth "very rewarding."
Today, companies have incorporated his technology into their products in some fashion, which gives him a sense of pride.
"For sure, it was kind of inevitable because it was a fairly simple overall device. It looked a lot different from what was on the market at the time, but having something simple makes it easy to copy as well." he said.
He believes they are in a position to grow in the next 25 years.
And it's a belief CEO Allan Wiens shares as well, alluding to a multi-year partnership Seed Master has had with John Deere as an example.
"It's an important partner with us. Not only does it drive volume through our facility, but it also drives innovation. It's a privilege to be working with a top-tier agricultural manufacturer like John Deere. We learn from them as much as we can. That's an exciting piece for us." Wiens said.
"I think as we continue to grow market share and innovate around new products and meet new customers, we'll see what the next chapter looks like. I think there's a lot of growth that we can achieve just in our own back door that we're looking forward to achieving."
Wiens hasn't been with the business long but is excited with the opportunity to "take the reigns of a real success story and continue building it forward with new innovation and new investment".
"We just released an e-series air cart design to improve our capabilities and our capacity within our products. It was an important piece to add to the lineup to give it a complete system, both the air cart and the toolbar," he mentioned as one example.
"We have a single knife design that's unique in the industry that we think is an interesting play when it comes to an alternative to a planter. It has individual roll metering. It has singulation that is significantly improved over a typical three-rank drill. We think it has some applications in Western Canada as well. There's always new stuff coming out. It's always exciting to be a part of that."
Among the products Seed Master offers include openers, air carts, toolbars, and an Ultra SR Single Rank Drill.
