The majority of Florimond Desprez's 300 staff work in our varietal development laboratories.

Established on five main sites, representative of various agronomic and climatic conditions, our breeders make thousands of crosses, mainly under glass, and carry out field studies of hundreds of thousands of lines each year over more than 200 ha (500 acres).

As a help to breeders in their quest for progress, our molecular markers and technology laboratories carry out the necessary tests and validate the steps toward the desired objectives.

The lines that are selected in this way are then tested for several years on the 40 secondary trial sites in France ,and beyond by our partners abroad in order to establish whether they are suitable for the different production areas. At this point, the network represents several hundreds of thousands of trial plots.

Beside the work that is done on an internal level, our breeders and laboratory managers participate in various programmes that bring together people with complementary competence, geneticists, molecular and cellular biologists, physiologists, pathologists, biochemists… That kind of work makes it possible to achieve together improvements that would be inaccessible alone. These exchanges reach beyond the national boundaries, they lie within the framework of a borderless community of scientists