Collection NSDO - NSDO Collection

Extent: 1 box, 3 albums, 4 folders, 1 book

NSDO (The National Seed Development Organisation) seed varieties catalogues, leaflets, marketing material, newspaper articles, annual reports and accounts.

Admin History: NSDO (The National Seed Development Organisation) The NSDO was incorporated as a company on 6th March, 1967, its main aim being 'to provide a means of marketing crop varieties produced by the state-aided plant breeding stations in the new conditions arising from the Plant Varieties & Seeds Act 1964' and to collect royalties and market all new varieties produced by state funded breeding. The NSDO worked closely with the PBI. In 1984/5 over 80% of NSDO's revenue came from royalties on over 130 varieties created at PBI. On its formation the NSDO assumed a large part of the responsibilities the multiplication branch of the NIAB (The National Institute of Agricultural Botany). The NIAB, founded in 1919, was set up as a charitable trust by Sir Lawrence Weaver, the Commercial Secretary of the Board of Agriculture and Fisheries as a response to the food crisis of 1917-18 and requests from farmers and seedsmen in a push to promote better seeds and better crops. Its aims were the improvement and increase in varieties, improvement in methods of husbandry and the promotion of research aimed at improvements for the benefit of the seed industry or any of the allied or accessory trades or industries. In 1917, the Board of Agriculture and Fisheries had established the Official Seed Testing Station (OSTS) for England and Wales under the Seeds Act, and in 1921 it became one of the branches of the Institute at its newly built headquarters in Cambridge. In 1956 a New Seed Multiplication Branch was set up to handle the increase in state-bred varieties and to produce seed for trials. The NIAB's seed multiplication role was taken over by the NSDO in 1967. Both the NSDO and the PBI were privatised in 1987, bought by Unilever as a package for £66 million. The part of the PBI/NSDO that had charitable status was retained under the responsibility of the existing PBI Governing Body. Because of its charitable status the PBI was able to keep £38.8M that would otherwise have gone to the Treasury. The privatised part was renamed the Plant Breeding International Cambridge (PBIC) which was expanded, and breeding stations set up in Europe. Unilever sold PBCI to Monsanto in 1998. The site was developed with plans for it to become a world centre for breeding wheat, but public hostility to GM led the company to withdraw much of its activity from the UK and in 2004 Monsanto sold the wheat breeding programme to the French breeding company RAGT and sold off the Trumpington site for housing development. The non-privatised part of PBI became the 'Cambridge Laboratory', part of AFRC's new Institute of Plant Science Research (joining the John Innes Institute and the Nitrogen Fixation Laboratory) at Colney, Norwich. The Cambridge Lab financed the building of a new three-storey Cambridge Laboratory building, a suite of glasshouses and a new library to house the libraries and archives of JII and PBI and many other facilities. Based in Newton Hall, Newton, Cambridge.