Print This PageGlobal Cotton Business
We enjoyed seeing a strong adoption of our Bollgard II technology by farmers in India, as 4.5 million cotton acres were planted with the technology, a 275 percent increase over the prior year. When we couple this result with continued usage of our original Bollgard technology, roughly 4 million farmers in India cultivated Bollgard and Bollgard II cotton on approximately 76 percent of India’s total cotton acres in 2008. As the popularity of Bollgard II continues, and we believe it will, we see intriguing growth potential for the 15 million to 20 million acres in India where farmers can utilize our latest-generation traits. We must note that these results were somewhat tempered by a decline in our Deltapine business, though we continue to work diligently to apply our breeding technology and double-stack traits to the brand’s diverse portfolio of cotton genetics.
Geeta Menon (above) inserts traits into Deltapine’s elite cotton genetics.
Cotton — Over the next several years, we expect to see a richer mix of our high-value cotton traits in India and Australia. In the United States we continue to upgrade the Deltapine brand from a base genetics to a stacked-trait platform. These steps should enable our cotton business to nearly double its gross profit from the 2007 base to 2012.
