Print This PageGrowing Innovation
Fueling Growth Across Our Pipeline and in the Field
While our high-throughput screening capabilities and extensive technology network have fueled the discovery of new projects into our pipeline, they have also allowed us to extend and enhance our families of product offerings.
Monsanto’s first-generation products focused on protecting crops from insects and weeds. Our R&D focus now is on seeds and traits that deliver increased yield and stress protection. The pressures of finite resources and a growing population are putting great strain on water and other resources. The ability to better manage water and nitrogen resources will be a huge area of investment — and opportunity — for the next decade.
The intensity of our research is reflected in the fact that we have more second- and third-generation products in development than any other company invested in agriculture biotechnology.
While our promising technologies progress steadily through the pipeline, results from field trials of our near-term technologies continue to demonstrate that our products will deliver real value to farmers and our business. This year, we tested more product concepts in the field than any other company and any other year in our history.
The near-term projects that promise to deliver the greatest value to our farmer customers and our business include those that we have designated as High Impact Technologies (HIT) — high-potential, high-value projects that are given priority to accelerate their movement through the pipeline. This year, we saw tremendous progress in our HIT projects.
Roundup Ready 2 Yield soybeans, our second-generation herbicide-tolerant soybean project, was approved by U.S. and Canadian regulators. These approvals brought this technology one step closer to delivering new value to farmers and our business, and they pave the way for the first stacked offerings in soybeans.
Vistive III soybeans combine breeding and technology to create oil with characteristics similar to olive oil, including a lower linolenic acid and saturate content. Our Southern Hemisphere field research continued to demonstrate that our lead event is meeting our oil composition targets and agronomic yield targets. We anticipate that the product’s health advantages could give it a strong presence on the 40 million U.S. soybean acres that are crushed for oil annually.
Drought-tolerant corn, one of the yield and stress projects included in Monsanto’s R&D collaboration with BASF, applies technology that has consistently delivered yield improvements compared with controls under water-stressed conditions. Drought tolerance will become increasingly critical as population pressure and climate change combine to make water an increasingly scarce resource in many parts of the world.
