History of Dickey Seed Intl. Inc.

   Dickey Seed International had its beginning in 1963. This was Jack Dickey’s second year into his own small farming operation in Northwest Georgia in which he contracted to grow some 120 acres of certified soybean seed for the Cotton Producers Association, a regional farmers cooperative that later became Gold Kist.

   By 1969 Dickey was one of Gold Kist Seed Division’s top seed producers when he got the chance to purchase a local seed processing plant in Rome, Georgia. This plant was the one that Gold Kist employed to process the seed from its contract seed acreage (including that of Dickey’s) from the Northwest Georgia Area. Dickey purchased the seed plant and made an agreement with Gold Kist to continue processing seed from their contract acreage. He then moved the plant’s machinery to a newly constructed plant on his farm approximately 10 miles north of Rome. The new facility took on the name of “Dickey Seed Company” and was part of Jack Dickey’s farming operation until it was incorporated as Dickey Seed Co., Inc. in 1982.

   As soybean acreage in the Southeast continued to grow, and demand for high-quality seed continued to increase Dickey Seed contracted more and more seed acreage for Gold Kist and other wholesale and retail farm supply entities across the region. As a result, the plant facility was under almost continuous expansion. The warehouse section was expanded five times over just a ten-year period.

   Having started out with the purchase of the old Rome plant, consisting of a total floor space of 4,000 square feet and zero bulk storage, the Pinson Road facility by the early Eighties had grown to one of the most productive seed processing facilities anywhere in the South. The Company was processing up to 600,000 bushels of soybean seed per year, which were being produced from approximately 23,000 acres. The plant’s warehouse section now boasted nearly an acre of floor space, enough room for 130,000 bushels of bagged storage. With two receiving elevators, 90,000 bushels of outside bulk storage and another 60,000 bushels of inside bulk storage, the harvested crop could be handled as fast as contract producers could deliver. The company had now gone from being one of Georgia’s small, on-site seed processors to the largest contract producer and processor of certified soybean seed in Georgia, and one of the largest in the Southeastern Region.

   In 1980, President Jimmy Carter imposed the second presidential ordered grain embargo within a decade. Even though the second embargo was only against the USSR it, nevertheless, sent shock waves throughout the major grain importing sections of the World. At this point, the United States had succeeded in proving itself an unreliable supplier of grains to countries throughout Eastern and Western Europe and Asia. Other grain producing countries, such as Argentina, Brazil, etc. quickly took up the slack, and began producing soybeans and other grains for export. Brazil quickly became the world’s second largest soybean exporter, threatening to overtake the US in the very near future. The Southeast never recovered from the embargo jolt. Only a fraction of the pre-embargo soybean acreage remains today.

   Dickey Seed Company realized early-on that large-scale, commercial agriculture was moving toward South America, where there are large tracts of undeveloped, agriculture-class land and abundant supplies of affordable labor. In 1992, the Company started positioning itself for the changes needed to remain in competitive agri-business. Over the next ten years, Jack Dickey visited twenty-one countries in Central and South America and in the Caribbean Basin. After investigating many agriculture opportunities, Dickey Seed Company made the decision to continue in contract commodity production. However, the production commodity would shift from growing soybeans on farms for seed to growing trees on farms for plywood.

   Once the commodity change decision had been made, Dickey and the Company began divesting of farmland, machinery and other assets associated with seed production. Dickey Seed’s last contract seed acreage was produced in 1998, and in 1999 the Company sold the Pinson Road seed processing facility. By now the Georgia Caribbean Association had been organized. New plantations operations companies had been established in Central and South America. Large land holdings were acquired, and Paulownia trees were planted in five-year experimental test plots in preparation for the upcoming contract production of plantation timber for the plywood/veneer industry.

   In early 2003, Dickey Seed Co., Inc. changed its name to that of Dickey Seed International, Inc. (DSI). The minor name change would better reflect the international nature of the business. By late 2005, the five-year experimental trials in Guyana and Nicaragua had been completed, and Dickey Seed International, Inc. was given the “green light” to move production of plantation Paulownia into a commercial scale. In November of 2006, the Georgia Caribbean Association began planting Paulownia at the Kimbia plantation in Guyana, South America. Currently, the Association has approximately 550 acres of plantation Paulownia.

   DSI has a rich and successful history of over 44 years, dating from some of Georgia’s first certified soybean contract production in 1963 to Guyana and Nicaragua’s first Paulownia trees in 2000 to facilitating the manufacturing of Japan’s first plywood made from American-grown plantation Paulownia in 2007. Today, Dickey Seed International, along with its Georgia Caribbean associate companies, is poised to become a major player in Plantation Paulownia ply log production.