Making grass greener has been the core business of Germinal for the past 200 years. And if that seems a very agricultural pursuit, it is, but one whose roots these days run back to the laboratory.

In a world where farmers are under ever increasing pressure to reduce emissions while increasing yields, the family-owned business is at the cutting edge of science. The group’s range of grass seed helps reduce everything from ammonia emissions in cattle to the need for artificial fertilisers.

These seeds are the product of research at the group’s bases in Aberystwyth in Wales and Wiltshire in England, where one in five of its staff are now employed. It also has a research unit in New Zealand.

It’s all a far cry from its origins in the latter years of the Industrial Revolution.

Founded by Samuel McCausland, whose portrait looks down at his great-great-great grandson and current chairman William Gilbert as we talk, McCauslands, as it then was, started as a grocery import/export business in Belfast Port.

Ever open to new business opportunities, he and fellow Belfast merchants noticed a burgeoning industry in southwest Scotland producing grass seed. They tried to replicate the business in Ireland but, in Gilbert’s words, they failed miserably.

Chastened, they travelled to Scotland, ostensibly to negotiate supplies with one of the companies over there.

“What they actually did was two of them went into the office for a meeting with the business owner and the other four or five of them went into his warehouse, crawled all over the machinery, worked out exactly how the timing worked, how it was set up et cetera. And then they essentially stole the trade.

“So, it moved to Northern Ireland. From that period, the mid-19th century to just around the time of the second World War, Northern Ireland was the biggest ryegrass seed producer in the world, believe it or not”, exporting seed across Europe as well as to Africa, the Americas and even Australia and New Zealand.

But as the demand for quality grew in the aftermath of the second Worl