Dutch seedsman from Enkhuizen, in the Netherlands. He died on July 6th 2025, aged 90.
Groot came from a family that had been producing vegetable and flower seed in Enkhuizen since 1867, through their company Sluis and Groot. The town's close contacts with local farmers helped it avoid the famine that followed the second world war.
In 1965, on a sales trip to the highlands of Java, Groot saw a field of "Glory of Enkhuizen" cabbages—a variety his family company had produced in 1899—growing poorly in the semitropical climate. The sight of farmers unable to sell their misshapen harvest set him brooding for 16 years.
When Sluis and Groot was sold to Sandoz in 1981, he branched out on his own, founding East-West Seed to improve the seeds, crops, trade and nutrition of tropical regions. Staple grains had already been hybridised with great success, but vegetables had been ignored.
He set up his first base in the Philippines in 1982. His first hybridised seed was for ampalaya (bitter gourd), a variety called "Jade Star" that could resist downy mildew. Almost all the trial crops failed initially, but over decades farmers were won over. Tomatoes began to flourish in the Indonesian lowlands where they could not grow before; productivity per plant of bird's-eye chilli increased by 30-40%; farm incomes doubled or tripled.
Groot set prices as low as he could. In 2017 the company sold 24m "value-packs", enough for a small plot, for the equivalent of a dollar each. He also established a programme in which successful farmers trained their neighbours.
In 2019 he was awarded the World Food Prize, described as a nutritional equivalent of the Nobel.
If you can't say anything good about someone, sit right here by me.