Ferry-Morse Seed Company

By the early 1900s, the company was doing over $2,000,000 per year in business, and supplying seeds to 160,000 retail outlets. Ferry built a new warehouse, and by 1890 was doing over a million and a half dollars in business annually.

Ferry began to operate facilities outside Detroit. Operations in Charlevoix, Michigan began when the train lines extended up to that area in 1892, and a large Charlevoix warehouse facility was built in 1905 along the lake near the new Chicago and West Michigan Railway line. A 200' pier ran out into Lake Charlevoix. Seeds were accumulated from local farms, brought to this warehouse by horse-drawn wagons, then bagged and shipped by rail or freight to Detroit. Charlevoix operations continued until 1927.

In 1905, Ferry sold one of their large corn fields to the Burroughs Adding Machine Company. That property is bordered by Second and Third Avenues on the east and west and by Burroughs and Amsterdam Avenues on the north and south, the city's northern limit at that time.

In the early 1900s, D.M. Ferry bought land in California to grow crops for seed. In 1921, they bought the commission packet business from Morse. By 1930, Ferry was growing most of its seed in California, and the two firms had complementary businesses. A merger made sense for both companies, and in 1930 they combined to form the Ferry-Morse Company. The combined firm became the largest seed distribution company in the world. In 1959, the headquarters of the business moved to western Kentucky.

In 1981, Ferry-Morse became part of France's Groupe Limagrain, the largest seed producer in the world.

In 2005, Groupe Limagrain sold Ferry-Morse to Jiffy International.

In 2012, Seed Holdings acquired Ferry-Morse from Jiffy. The business was merged into Plantation Products, a privately owned gardening company based in Massachusetts. Plantation Products later changed its name to Green Garden Products.