- 1830 : Jean-Baptiste Auguste Desprez starts producing and trading sugar beet seeds and founds the company Desprez in Wattines
- 1856 : for the first time, Florimond Desprez, Jean-Baptiste’s son, uses chemical sugar analysis and genealogical selection to improve the sugar beet
- 1875 : Wattines becomes an experimental government-owned station, as decreed by the French Ministry of Agriculture
- 1945 : breeding work starts up for barley
- 1946 : Cappelle bread wheat variety is registered
- 1971 : breeding work starts up for industrial chicory
- 1981 : breeding work starts up for triticale
- 1987 : first subsidiary is created outside of France: Deltasem in Morocco; Soissons soft wheat variety is registered
- 1988 : breeding work starts up for durum wheat
- 2002 : new industrial chicory and sugar beet laboratory is built in Cappelle-en-Pévèle and construction of the Houville-la-Branche breeding station
- 2005 : acquisition of the company SESVanderHave is completed
- 2009 : Création de SW Winter Oilseed AB, société de sélection, production et commercialisation de variétés de colza d’hiver, en partenariat avec SW Seed AB (Suède) et Elsoms (GB)
- 2010 : Florimond Desprez buys a stake in the German breeder Saatzucht Streng-Engelen; a new multi-species industrial site is built in Cappelle-en-Pévèle
- 2012 : a company is created in Hungary with Axéréal: Isterra; a subsidiary is set up in Argentina
- 2013 : a company is set up in Argentina with Bioceres: Trigall Genetics
- 2014 : the company Germicopa is acquired
- 2016 : Florimond Desprez acquired 49% of the shares in Danespo
