Our recent acquisition of Royster-Clark almost doubles our consistently successful Retail operations close to $2-billion in annual sales and enhances our geographic diversity. Retail offers farmers a complete range of seed, liquid and dry fertilizer products, along with primary crop protection services including herbicides, insecticides and fungicides. We now operate close to over 500 retail centres in the U.S. and South America.

We continue to grow our Retail business by increasing sales of private label seed, providing additional specialized services, increasing sales of certain types of crop protection products and through our continuing drive for performance from each of our Retail centers. It is primarily through these efforts that we have been able to deliver nine consecutive years of profit growth from our U.S. based Retail operations and have improved our average returns from our South American Retail operations over the past few years.

Our geographic diversity is a major strength. In the U.S., we conduct Retail operations through our two wholly-owned subsidiaries, Western Farm Service, Inc. (WFS) and Crop Production Services, Inc. (CPS). WFS outlets are located in five western states, primarily California and the U.S. Pacific Northwest region. CPS outlets are located in the Midwestern, Northeastern, and Southeastern U.S. Our South American Retail operations are conducted through our wholly-owned subsidiary, Agroservicios Pampeanos S.A. (ASP) and consist of 31 outlets in Argentina and four outlets in Chile. This geographic diversity helps reduce the chances of adverse weather or prices for a particular region or crop having a significant impact on our total Retail results. Our U.S. based Retail operations also own over 500,000 tonnes of fertilizer warehouse space, which allows us to take advantage of anticipated movements in nutrient prices between the key application seasons.

For more information on our Retail operations, please visit the following sites: