Company was based on a hunch farmers could use such a service and backed up by a month-long road trip in rural Alta.
Sarah Foster built her company doing door-to-door sales.
Make that farmgate to farmgate.
“I just drove and drove, and every farm I saw, I dropped in. Some people were absolutely shocked that I would do that, but how else could I get to be known?” said Foster, who founded 20/20 Seed Labs in 1989.
“I didn’t have a marketing manager, so I was it.”
The idea for 20/20 was born when the federal government privatized seed testing, and Foster’s employer, United Grain Growers, didn’t want to go into that business, despite her urging.
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“I was drawn by customers who came in looking for seed testing, and I had to tell them ‘sorry, I can’t help you.’ ”
So she regretfully left UGG and founded her own company.
“I just felt there was such a tremendous opportunity and it would be terrible if I didn’t do anything about it. It was a gut instinct,” said Foster, as she sat among the staff, farmer-customers and business associates who dropped by for the 10th anniversary of the company’s Winnipeg lab.
From her month-long road trip across rural Alberta, Foster discovered she was right. There was a pent-up demand from farmers and people in the seed business for quick assessment of seed quality beyond simple eyeball measurements.
Foster set up her company in Nisku, Alta., where it served a growing demand for seed testing services, and saw an industry develop in the newly created market.
As seed quality concerns became more general, more testing was in demand, leading the company to expand its facilities.
Foster discovered that Canadian canola seed producers in Chile were having trouble harvesting and cleaning their seed in South America at the end of the Canadian winter, shipping it to Western Canada for spring, getting Canadian Food Inspection Agency phytosanitary approvals on arrival, and getting it out to farmers in time for seeding. So, she hopped on a plane and flew south.
“I went on a whim,” said Foster about her trip to Chile, which led her to establish a yearly “pop-up” laboratory in which canola seed can be tested to CFIA standards and then shipped directly to seed distributors in Canada.
“No planning. I just went down there and thought ‘I just know this is going to work.’”
It’s been working for many years now. Foster hopes to turn it into a year-round operation, with International Seed Testing Association certification, and go beyond testing Canadian canola seed sources.
The Winnipeg operation was born from the observation that it would be better to have a “big seed” laboratory to deal with corn, soybeans, dry beans and other crops typical in the Red River Valley and Ontario, crops that were not common on the western prairies.
As well, eastern prairie farmers and seed trade folks don’t want to wait extra days for seed to be shipped to Alberta for testing.
There’s been a constant flow of seed, especially soybeans, to the Winnipeg lab ever since as soybeans and corn have taken over the valley.
Looking back on her madcap, one-woman, farmgate-to-farmgate trip of 1990, Foster laughs at the zaniness of it, but feels proud of the bustling company it helped produce.
“It was probably the best thing I ever did. I got to see Alberta. I’d hardly been out of Edmonton,” said Foster, an Englishwoman.
“I couldn’t believe how big the skies were, and how long the roads were.”
She is still willing to head into distant prairie horizons following her whims and gut instincts, and is thankful she was willing in 1989 to walk out the door of a safe, good job to chase an opportunity.
“It was the most frightening thing I’d ever done, but here we are after (almost) 35 years.”
