Smith Seed Services serves the seed industry from their production plant in Halsey, OR. (Smith Seed Services)
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By Chris Lusvardi
Smith Seed Services has been serving the seed industry for over 60 years based in the Willamette Valley.
Through the years, the business has grown while developing products and services that meet their customers’ and the industry’s needs. Innovation continues to be at the center of what they do, says Co-Owner Raymond Zehr.
The Halsey. OR company does everything from producing and packaging seed to coating, breeding, hauling, and storing seed.
Zehr says they integrate many facets of seed production, distribution, and marketing with an array of complementary services including coating, private label packaging, shipping, contract production, and product licensing.
“Just because we don’t do it today, doesn’t mean we won’t do it tomorrow,” Zehr says. “Our company culture is to provide solutions to problems and find ways to satisfy our customer’s needs. We have built lifetime relationships around honesty, reliability, and a focus to help our customers grow their business.”
Raymond Zehr became a co-owner of the company in 2017, along with Joel Schrock. They are following in the footsteps of their fathers, Paul Zehr and Jason Schrock, who bought the business in 1976.
While recounting the history of the company, Paul Zehr said a willingness to make changes has been a key to the company’s longevity.
“Seed companies come and go,” Paul Zehr says. “For survival, the big thing to look at is being willing to change and embrace new ideas. Don’t be locked in as things won’t last forever. We’ve been successful in making changes to grow the company.”
Over the past six decades, Smith Seed Services has produced cool season grasses and legumes, including fescues, ryegrasses, orchardgrasses, cloves, and other legumes. During that time, they’ve been involved with seed production, harvest, cleaning, and shipping.
Company History
In the years after World War II, George Smith started a seed warehouse.
In 1956, he decided to diversify by converting an empty dairy barn into a seed cleaning plant. Soon he was cleaning not only his own seed, but the seeds of his neighbors.
As demand grew, Smith expanded with bigger bins, more cleaners, and more office space. The cleaned seed was sold in bags, which needed to be transported. As the business continued to grow, Smith bought more trucks to load railroad cars, haul containers, and haul seeds.
Smith built a custom storage facility, beginning to fill the industry demand of small pack products.
By the time Smith sold the business to Jason Schrock and Paul Zehr, the foundation for future growth had been built. The new owners were expected to grow the business with integrity, excellence, and innovation.
Zehr says they kept the name because of the solid reputation that had been established.
“We kept the name as it had come to mean integrity,” Zehr says.
They hired new employees, built additional buildings, and formed relationships with farmers and companies around the world as new technologies were adopted.
By 1984, Smith Seed was offering their services and seed sales outside of the Willamette Valley.
Zehr says this was a significant step in becoming the worldwide distributor they are today while continuing to service Oregon growers and seed distributors.
“We had customers nationally,” Zehr says. “Selling internationally became the logical next step and is now a big part of our business.”
Facility Expansion
Between their facilities in Oregon and Missouri, Smith Seed Services provides five high-speed, large-volume seed enhancement lines.
“Our systems and processes take full advantage of the mechanical capabilities of our state-of-the-art equipment to provide consistent, repetitive results,” Raymond Zehr says.
The installation of the first two seed coating lines in Halsey began in 2008, followed by the third in 2012 and fourth added two years later. Zehr says the multi-million dollar facility was built in the midst of the economic downturn at the time.
The Halsey location includes Smith Seed Services’ main offices, primary coating facilities, custom cleaning operations, local trucking fleet, and research farm.
The facility contains 450,000 sq. ft., or 8 acres, of space in 20 buildings. The coating process allows Smith Seed Services to deliver numerous seed treatments and enhancements, including bio-stimulants, micronutrients, water absorbents, and fungicides.
The company provides a coating capacity of more than 18 million lbs. per month.
Product Development
After Raymond Zehr and Joel Schrock became owning partners in the business in 2017, plans to add a research farm were started. Dr. Don Floyd was brought on board to begin the company’s breeding program.
Zehr says they wanted to be proactive in developing new products to serve their customers’ needs.
“We want to go ahead and aim for offering the top varieties,” Zehr says. “That’s where we want to be. We consistently are working toward that with constant improvement.”
Starting in 2018, they established their first selection nurseries at the research farm of annual ryegrasses, perennial ryegrasses, tall fescues, and fine fescues. The company offers more than 30 exclusive products.
Missouri Addition
Around the same time, the company was expanding its footprint by building a custom coating and packaging facility in Lamar, MO.
The new location, which first began operations in 2019, provided Smith Seed Services with high-speed, large volume coating, and retail packaging services.
Zehr says the Lamar plant is located so orders can efficiently reach customers in the Midwest and on the East Coast. The facility covers 200,000 sq. ft., or 4.5 acres.
“It’s where we wanted to be,” Zehr says. “We’re glad we built it there. It is a great central location for our customers to distribute their products. Our goal is to help other seed companies succeed and compete. And by constantly exploring new formulas, we can improve seed enhancement in numerous ways which our customers can then bring to market.”
Both the Lamar and Halsey facilities offer custom seed packaging services. The packaging lines with a capacity of more than 15 million lbs. per month combine robotics and technology to ensure consistency, accuracy, and quick turnaround times.
