- 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
- 1919 : Breeding work starts up for bread wheat
- 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
- 1997 : Breeding work starts up for winter oilseed rape
- 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 : SW Winter Oilseed AB, a winter oilseed rape variety breeding, production and marketing company, is set up in partnership with SW Seed AB (Sweden) and Elsoms (GB)
- 2010 : An interest is acquired 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
