(8/17/12) -- Wednesday night the Ecke Ranch announced it has been acquired by the Dutch-based Agribio Group. Here, Paul Ecke III talks with Patch about what motivated the sale, and what’s next for him.
Patch: How long have plans been in motion to sell the Ecke Ranch?
Paul Ecke: I don’t know exactly but it seems about six months. In our industry there has been a lot of consolidation going on for some time. Over the last five years, most of the small breeder producers have been bought and that was one of the things I looked at. When I was growing up we were a big company and today we are on the small side through no fault of our own. What’s going on is consolidation, and that’s natural in all industries. Retailers such as Walmart, The Home Depot, Lowe’s and Costco are driving more and more business, so growers are getting bigger and demanding more from breeder producers. We had ideas to grow, but we had to have capital to grow. The last three or four years was not a good time to find capital.
Patch: Will you be involved with the new company?
Ecke: No, I will not be not going along, but they are taking all our employees both here and in Guatemala. They will be staying in Encinitas and leasing the greenhouses here for at least three years. For the Encinitas operation, not much has changed. They are buying the name as well. It will still be Ecke. From the outside, nothing is different. The leadership team is staying, and they will have more opportunities because they will be senior officers in the North American market. It makes it easier to go to retailers and customers when you have a bigger basket of products to sell.
I’m excited because hopefully they will be good stewards of our name, our products, and our people. Hopefully, they will go to another level because they have access to capital. This company sells over a billion cuttings a year, but they didn’t have a large U.S. presence and that’s what they got when they acquired us.
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Paul Ecke: Selling Ecke Ranch
