On July 1, 1933, Elizabeth Ruth Ransom, “Betty”, opened the Ransom Seed Laboratory on Terminal Street in Los Angeles, California.  The lab offered seed testing services to the expanding southwestern seed trade.  Germain Seed Company and Aggeler & Musser Seed Company offered support for such a venture, and soon Bodger Seed Company added the multiple challenges of flower-seed testing.  “Our reception into the California and Arizona seed industry was most gratifying and we were soon off to a flying start with more than two hundred customers in the first year.”

Betty Ransom was born in 1907 in Clarkston, Washington.  She began her Botany studies in 1924 at Washington State Agriculture College in Pullman, Washington.  She worked in the college seed laboratory during her course of study there.  “As an undergraduate I discovered field trips in my taxonomy class with Dr. Harold St. John.  We went on many plant exploring expeditions up the Snake River, the Salmon River, the Grand Ronde Valley and inspiring little journeys around eastern Washington.  The plants I collected and studied were the subject of my undergraduate honors thesis on the plants of the Snake River and Hell’s canyon.”