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DCP has celebrated its 10th Anniversary
January 2017 saw the celebration of a significant milestone in the life of DCP – the 10th anniversary of the founding of the company on 1 January 2007.
Since then the company turnover has trebled, and its remit has expanded way beyond the original vision of its founder Dr Alan Dewar.
The company’s first contract was with Syngenta Seeds, and involved some lengthy travels to India to investigate the viability of growing tropical sugar beet all over that vast country. The original premise was to grow sugar beet alongside sugar cane, but use the facilities of the cane-processing factories to source sugar from beet at times of the year when the cane was not being harvested, thus making more efficient use of the factory equipment.
This project was also investigated in northern Ethiopia in 2008. Unfortunately, despite some promising studies on profitability, the project was put on hold by the local sponsors when the world recession kicked in towards the end of 2008.
In addition to projects in exotic locations, DCP established a core business carrying out field trials for the agrochemical companies in the UK, conducting trials in sugar beet and eventually other broad acre arable crops, building on contacts made whilst Alan Dewar was employed at Broom’s Barn Research Centre prior to setting up the company in 2007.
Since those early days, DCP has carried out 334 field trials in 10 years, in arable crops such as wheat, winter and spring barley, oilseed rape, field beans and potatoes, horticultural crops such as peas, carrots, lettuce, cabbage and tomatoes, and amenity crops such as turf. The remit has also expanded to include fungicides, herbicides and nematicides in addition to the core expertise in insecticides.
Clients have included most of the world’s top ten agro-chemical companies: Syngenta, Bayer, BASF, Monsanto, Dow Agrosciences, Dupont, Nu Farm, UPL and Adama, plus several smaller companies trying to make inroads into the agro-chemical market.
However DCP is much more than a trials company – it is also is involved in other activities concerned with knowledge transfer (through AHDB and small agronomy groups in East Anglia), insecticide resistance surveys (through Rothamsted Research and ADAS) and publications (through membership of the editorial board of Outlooks on Pest Management).
Looking to the future, Director Dr Dewar expressed his desire to see the company continue to serve the agricultural community for many years to come.
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