Print This PageA Personal Technology Showcase Tour
The new seed chipping machine in the last stop of the showcase.
When visitors to the Monsanto Technology Showcase emerge from the darkened theater after the first part of their tour, they look a bit bewildered, blinking in the morning sun as their eyes adjust. And what a sight they see.
Monsanto’s plot at the 2008 Farm Progress Show in Boone, Iowa, is a beacon for farmers and curious visitors alike. The plot, also known as the discovery tour and the Golden Acre, features modern agricultural marvels, the latest advances in crop breeding and biotech, and a room full of really nice techy toys.
The first stop after the visitors are ushered out of the theater is the soybean plot, where rows of soybean plants that have been enhanced with pest and disease-resistant breeding are on display. One type of soybean plant has been bred to resist the Asian Soybean Rust virus, an especially damaging disease that has reduced yields up to 80 percent in South America.
“We believe advances in breeding can create an opportunity to overcome this virus should it be one that we have to face on U.S. soil,” Dion McBay, Monsanto’s Farm Progress marketing co-lead, said.
A massive yellow combine towers over the soybean rows at the next stop. The combine is one of the fleet of more than 50 test combines Monsanto has in the field. “These combines are capable of harvesting two plots at once, and can take out a plot in less than ten seconds,” McBay said.
The visitors are then escorted to a plot of soybeans that might be the most visually arresting of all the crop displays. Soybeans that have been genetically modified to resist the herbicide dicamba are planted right next to soybean plants that are not modified to resist any herbicide, and the difference is striking.
“We sprayed a whole quart of dicamba on those,” Shannon Hauf, Monsanto’s Farm Progress lead agronomist, said. “There is such a visible difference and it’s really one of the most exciting things to see this year.”
The main event for most visitors on the tour is Monsanto’s corn technology plot. “Typically our guests tell us that the opportunity to see our corn traits growing here in the field, as well as have a discussion with us about how those traits might fit on their farm, is one of the most exciting parts of their tour,” McBay said.
Monsanto introduced corn with the Roundup Ready trait in 1998, which provided in-seed tolerance to glyphosate herbicides like Roundup. In the ten years since introduction, Monsanto has introduced corn stacked with the herbicide-tolerant traits and other traits that protect and enhance the corn such as YieldGard Corn Borer. One of the new corn seed technologies represented at the show this year is YieldGard VT Triple Pro, which provides above-ground pest resistance while also providing the existing rootworm protection and Roundup Ready traits in a single plant.
The plot also features small areas of Bollgard II and RoundupReady Flex cotton, as well as an area of Roundup Ready canola in bloom.
After touring the outdoor acre, the visitors enter what is known as the toy room, where three different pieces of seed genetics technology are on display. The first is the seed chipper, which helps to make the seed breeding process infinitely easier by shaving off a tiny section of a seed and then testing that section for desirable genetic traits. If desired traits are found in a seed, then it is used in the breeding process to create more seeds of its kind. The chipper was a central piece of equipment in the development of the Roundup Ready 2 Yield soybean seed.
“This particular chipper can chip up to a seed per second,” Stan Dotson, program director for molecular breeding, said. “Monsanto has a whole fleet of these chippers, and we’ve been running them day and night to keep this technology running so we could deliver the Roundup Ready 2 Yield product by 2009.”
The second and third pieces of equipment were designed to complement the seed chipper.
The genetic fingerprinting automation equipment identifies desirable seeds from the chipper at a rate of 384 genetic fingerprints per tray, and each tray is processed within seconds.
“We can learn what traits are contained in that seed, what the dealer potential might be and we can also learn something about its agronomic performance,” Dotson said. The information from the seeds is then fed into a huge computer system that takes up three stories in a building in St. Louis, Missouri. The system churns through the information and makes the mentioned predictions.
The last piece of equipment featured in the toy room sorts the chipped and fingerprinted seeds into packets according to what specific traits breeders request. The seeds can be sorted, packaged and shipped overnight to be in the ground the next day.
The discovery tour ends in a tent where visitors have the chance to ask Monsanto employees questions about the tour—or any other Monsanto-related topic. The question employees in the Q-and-A room hear the most has been regarding the eventual development and release of nitrogen efficiency corn, which Monsanto is currently researching in phase one and might include in next year’s Farm Progress show.
