BASF Collaboration

Drought conditions and other environmental stresses occur throughout the world. These challenges have the potential to impact yield regardless of where one farms. Monsanto’s collaboration with BASF is working to identify and commercialize novel yield and stress trait technologies which offer farmers hope in the face of these challenges. By pairing our prowess in breeding and biotechnology with BASF’s highly-efficient gene-discovery platform, our collaboration is expected to deliver valuable technologies to corn, cotton, soybean, and canola farmers around the world. Together, our work has the potential to deliver substantial value, as it effectively doubles the risk-adjusted net present value of Monsanto’s yield and stress trait technology pipeline.

Off to a Strong Start

Our early work already confirms that our collaboration with BASF can accelerate the discovery of novel technologies, generating more viable research projects than either company could have achieved on its own. To date the companies have seen tremendous differentiation in the projects each is delivering, with less than 10 percent overlap in priority gene leads emerging from each company’s discovery programs. Research at Monsanto and BASF facilities has enabled the collaboration to get off to a strong start. In just the first few months, the companies have exchanged thousands of data points and developed hundreds of new gene constructs — product concepts that will be field tested in the coming years.

Yield and Stress Trait Pipeline

Collaboration creates a new joint pipeline focused on increasing the volume of leads and certainty of commercial success in the category of “yield” traits for corn, soybeans, cotton, and canola.

R&D Yields Drought-Tolerant Corn Technology

Monsanto researchers like Mohammadreza Ghaffarzadeh are supporting the development of our first-generation drought-tolerant corn technology. This project, which is in Phase II of our pipeline, is the first of several drought-tolerant projects that we have under development. This year, we saw continued progress in the field trials supporting this project. The research demonstrates that our product consistently delivers yield improvements compared with controls in water-stressed environments. This research is a centerpiece of our technology collaboration with BASF. This collaboration is poised to expand our drought-tolerant platform, allowing us to discover and deliver third- and fourth-generation products.

Monsanto representatives Mohammadreza Ghaffarzadeh, Zhiling Zhang, and Ken Gruys monitor the performance of our first-generation drought-tolerant corn technology. Their work allows us to analyze the product in fieldtesting environments to ensure that farmers will benefit once the product is commercialized.