Fall Creek celebrates milestone
Fall Creek celebrates milestone
Fall Creek Farm & Nursery Inc., a world-leading blueberry genetics and nursery company, this month marks 10 years of operations in Spain. What began in 2016 as a two-hectare harvest using plug material from the U.S. has grown into the company's principal hub for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, now serving customers across 52 countries and producing 14 million finished plants annually. The Spain operation celebrated its 10th anniversary May 28 with an event at the company's Aznalcázar nursery, bringing together the operation's over 250 employees, including more than 30 who have been part of the Fall Creek family since the operation's founding year.
Fall Creek acquired its first Spanish farm in summer 2015, 16 hectares of agricultural land in Aznalcázar, Seville, a plot the founding team came to call “the watermelon field.” The operation conducted its inaugural harvest in 2016 across just two hectares, using plug material from the company’s U.S. nurseries. What followed was a decade of capability-building: propagation, tissue culture, applied research and breeding facilities added progressively across Aznalcázar and a purpose-built research farm in Villamanrique.
Today, Fall Creek Spain operates a tissue culture laboratory, propagation facilities, a full applied research and development program, and the EMEA central office: the infrastructure of a company that came to Andalusia to stay.
Fall Creek arrived in Spain at a moment when European and North African growers had limited legal access to high-performing blueberry genetics and the clean, certified plant material needed to scale production with confidence. The Spain operation changed that. Spain’s only facility capable of producing disciplined, clean, true-to-type blueberry plants at scale for the EMEA region, Fall Creek Spain gave growers access to world-class genetics on commercial terms that worked for them legally, reliably and at volume.
Unlike most international companies serving the EMEA market, which operate through Netherlands-based structures with regional markets as satellites, Fall Creek built its European presence differently: Spain is the hub. Aznalcázar and Villamanrique are not a regional outpost of a northern European headquarters, but the center from which the entire EMEA business is run, a structure that reflects the company’s long-standing commitment to the markets it serves most.
The Spain operation has served as the primary gateway for the Sekoya and Fall Creek Collection licensing platforms into European and North African markets, and as an early-adoption and proving site for new genetics entering the region. The applied research program at Villamanrique has been central to that work: Fall Creek Collection Apex FCM14-057, which has generated exceptional early demand since its commercial release, was identified as an outstanding performer through Spain's applied research, its potential proven in local growing conditions where it had gone undetected elsewhere."
The Spain team has also pioneered growing systems and plant production protocols that Fall Creek has since adopted across its global operations.
“Building this operation from the ground up, from the first crop in 2016 to where we stand today, has been one of the defining experiences of my career. Spain is not just a nursery. It has become a reference point for how Fall Creek operates globally: in innovation, in plant quality and in our commitment to growers,” said Antonio Álamo, EMEA regional director at Fall Creek.
