Seed World

Françoise Corbineau, outgoing president of the International Society for Seed Science, sits down with us at the ISSS triennial conference in Monterey, Calif., to talk about why the organization is so important, and how it’s helping us understand seeds as the sophisticated biological systems that they are.

https://seedworld.com/cdn/wp-content/uploads/20240102100917/Francoise-Corbineau-Why-the-ISSS-is-So-Important.mp3

The post Here’s Why the ISSS is Helping Us Look at Seeds for What They Truly Are appeared first on Seed World.

Françoise Corbineau, outgoing president of the International Society for Seed Science, sits down with us at the ISSS triennial conference in Monterey, Calif., to talk about why the organization is so important, and how it’s helping us understand seeds as the sophisticated biological systems that they are.

https://seedworld.com/cdn/wp-content/uploads/20240102101542/Francoise-Corbineau-Why-the-ISSS-is-So-Important-1.mp3

The post Here’s Why the ISSS is Helping Us Look at Seeds for What They Truly Are appeared first on Seed World.

• How education of both you and your customers is crucial to good stewardship.
• How to understand grower needs to ensure good stewardship once seed leaves your facility.
• The latest operational standards for retail facilities.

Featured Speakers:
Peter Entz, Assistant Vice-President of Seed and Trade, Richardson International

Sarah Foster, President, 20/20 Seed Labs

Russel Hurst, Vice President, Sustainability and Stewardship, CropLife Canada

The post A Retailer’s Guide to Properly Stewarding Seed Treatments, A Germination Strategy Session Webinar & Podcast appeared first on Seed World.

Germination editor Marc Zienkiewicz catches up with veteran Canadian journalist, speaker and author Don Newman to get his take on the Canadian ag industry._x000D_

The post LISTEN: Talking Ag with Don Newman appeared first on Seed World.

Dave Carey, government affairs and policy director for the Canadian Seed Trade Association, speaks with Germination’s Marc Zienkiewicz about what the United States’ departure from the Trans-Pacific Partnership means for the Canadian seed industry._x000D_

The post LISTEN: What the U.S. Move on TPP Means for Canadian Seed appeared first on Seed World.

Today (Dec. 7), the American Seed Trade Association held a press conference to spotlight the importance of plant breeding innovation, specifically CRISPR-Cas9, and the role it could play in the future of crop improvement.

“So many of the things that impact our daily lives can be traced back to a seed,” said Mark Herrmann, ASTA chair, during the opening remarks. “That really drives to our ‘Better Seed, Better Life’ focus. Continued innovation in plant breeding is directly related to global food security, nutrition and a safe and sustainable environment.”

But modern plant breeding is not a set place that industry has arrived at. “Plant breeding is an evolution,” shared Andy LaVigne, ASTA president and CEO, and it’s an area of focus both domestically and internationally for the association as it looks to evaluate and influence policy in the years ahead.

Setting the foundation, he explained that plant breeding goes back 10,000 years to simply selecting plants with favorable characteristics all the way to the 1900s with cross breeding and hybridization and mutation genesis and cell culture.

“Plant breeding builds upon itself,” he said. “We understand things more and more each year because we are better at mapping genomes and dealing with bioinformatics.

And the next evolution of plant breeding is genome editing, he said, which works within the plant’s family. “Whether it’s the wild relative or the product that sold into the grain industry or the produce market, there are wildly diverse characteristics within plants,” LaVigne said. “It just depends on which ones we are harnessing to bring into the marketplace to address the opportunities for consumer demands. It allows us to reach the same endpoint as we could through traditional methods, but in a more precise manner.”

This has led the association and its members to adopt the following policy when it comes to plant breeding innovation: “Plant breeding varieties developed through the latest breeding methods should not be differentially regulated if they are similar to or indistinguishable from varieties that could have been produced from earlier breeding methods.”

You can hear a clip from LaVigne talking about ASTA’s policy and the scope of their work here.

He stressed the importance of making sure that plant breeders have access to all the tools in the toolbox to bring new varieties to the market to address climate change and pest and disease pressures and other challenges to bring consumers what they want and demand.

As part of the press conference, Jerry Flint of DuPont Pioneer, Corinne Marshall of Sakata Seeds America and Juliet Marshall of the University of Idaho spoke about the potential benefits of CRISPR-Cas9 as it relates to their business.

Flint, who serves as DuPont Pioneer’s vice president of industry affairs and regulatory, says that since the company introduced the first commercial hybrid in the 1920s, it has been involved in the co-development and introduction of Herculex with Dow AgroSciences, which brought insect control as a new tool for U.S. farmers.

Flint said as they look at what’s happening further out with climate change, population growth and nutritional changes that need to occur, they need to continue to “upgrade their toolbox in terms of what’s available to plant breeders so that they can provide the best tools in those programs to meet those growing needs.”

Flint explained that one of those tools is CRISPR-Cas and that DuPont Pioneer is a leading company in its use for plant applications. He said they can use it for gene deletions, edits and in some cases search and replace.

“One of the things that we do is look at the plant genetics that already exist and how can we deploy those in the plant varieties that we already have,” he said.

From a real world application, Flint talked about the recently announced partnership with the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) for maize lethal necrosis, a devastating disease in Africa that can cause significant yield loss for growers.

“This will allow us to look at solutions to problems that plant breeders have not been able to address in the past,” Flint said.

Corinne Marshall of Sakata Seeds, a global producer of vegetable and flower seed, added that viral disease transmitted by insects can be a huge problem.

Fungal pathogens in the soil such as Verticillium and fusarium are also quite problematic,” she said. “Downy mildew in spinach, bacterial leaf spot in peppers and tomatoes — those are just some of the many disease and pathogen problems that we are facing.”

Marshall share that the conventional solutions have been chemical control, which can be applied when needed and can address multiple issues. However, she said that it really restricts companies from the organic market and there are environmental risks associated with use, as well as additional costs.

“Other ways we’ve tried to better manage these issues is to build the resistance into varieties and not be restricted to playing the organic market,” Marshall said. “But the problem with that is we deal with very specific races and specific diseases and the cost can be quite expensive.”

Marshall gave Downy mildew in spinach as an example. “The demand for organic spinach exploded in the early 90s,” she said. “Since that time, we’ve been challenged with trying to come up with ways to deal with the problem, and we are basically chasing resistance and the races pop up annually.

“The future of organic spinach production is questionable. How long are we going to be able to keep up with the challenge of dealing with the resistance and come up with ways to handle that? Gene editing could provide the solution to having the stronger resistance to Downy mildew in spinach.”

She said it can be used to enhance nutrition in many vegetables, so it goes beyond just dealing with disease and pathogens. “This is a very exciting prospect,” Marshall said. “Lycosine and glucosimulates in broccoli, which can reduce chronic disease or slow disease such as cancer; Sulphurephane is a glucosimulate in broccoli and most us know that when we cook the broccoli, we lose the nutrient. So gene editing can actually help us solve that problem.”

Marshall also gave the examples of tomato and watermelon as crops that could benefit from gene editing. It’s more precise and more efficient, she said, noting that it would not change the way Sakata does things with regards to product development and the rigorous process that it takes to bring products to market.

But the benefits of the technology go beyond disease resistance and nutrition could include increasing nitrogen use efficiency, drought resistance, flavor, yield and seed quality.

It can also benefit crops that don’t have the profitability associated with corn and soybeans or high-value vegetables. And it can benefit universities and small companies because it doesn’t have the same regulatory cost associated with it.

Juliet Marshall, University of Idaho associate professor and small grains expert, said that gene editing could be use to create disease resistant varieties of wheat and barley. She focused on Fusarium head blight (FHB) and the resulting vomitoxin.

Currently there are no resistant varieties, only partial resistance. It’s a serious disease and poses a very difficult situation. This is where gene editing can come into play, she said.

Listen to Juliet Marshall explain how gene editing can work in wheat.

At the end, Marshall explained the importance of public institutions ability to use these techniques.

“The public sector often is where things start,” she said. “We can provide proof of concept, proof of where things really work. We can use transgenics to identify how things work.

“We can use gene editing, which is not genetically modified, to go in and produce a crop that would be resistant to the disease and to the accumulation of these toxins. So we are working to enhance those traits and those crops that are also not commercially viable.

The post ASTA Talks Plant Breeding Innovation appeared first on Seed World.

It has been a year since the Government of Ontario implemented regulations on the use of corn and sobyean seed treated with Neonicotinoid insecticides. How has industry responded? What has been the impact of the regulations on pollinators and on growers? What’s coming for the next growing season?

What is happening in the rest of Canada?

The post What’s the Buzz? An Assessment of Regulations on Insecticide Treated Seed, A Germination Strategy Session Webinar & Podcast appeared first on Seed World.

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Jay Bradshaw

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The post The Emotion of an Acquisition appeared first on Seed World.

For Paul Minehart, April 30, 2015 was the day consolidation in the agriculture industry really began.

“I got a call from Bloomberg News saying, ‘Monsanto has made an offer to buy Syngenta. Would you like to comment on that?'” said Minehart, head of corporate communications, North America for Syngenta.

Of course, consolidation in the industry began long before last year, but for Minehart and others at Syngenta — itself a result of the merger between Novartis Agribusiness and Zeneca Agrochemicals 16 years ago — the past 18 months have been a whirlwind.

First it was the news of Monsanto’s attempt to acquire the company, which made headlines in 2015 but didn’t pan out. But when it was announced nine months ago that Syngenta’s board had accepted ChemChina’s acquisition offer of $43 billion, the media and ag industry wasted no time in making it a huge topic of conversation.

Currently getting over regulatory hurdles, the deal is expected to close in the first quarter of 2017, after it was initially expected to pass by the end of this year.

Syngenta staff discussed the acquisition at the company’s North American Media Summit in North Carolina in late October. Unlike other mergers taking place in the industry right now — namely the Dow-DuPont and Bayer-Monsanto mergers — ChemChina’s acquisition of Syngenta is different, noted Jay Bradshaw, president of Syngenta Canada.

Hear Bradshaw talk about the unique nature of the acquisition of Syngenta by ChemChina:

ChemChina is a chemical giant. Its full name being China National Chemical Corporation, it is a state-owned enterprise established by reorganizing the subsidiary companies under China’s former Ministry of the Chemical Industry. It is ranked 234th on the Fortune Global 500. It has more than 140,000 employees with 52,000 outside China.

It operates production and R&D bases in 150 countries and regions across the world and boasts a full-fledged marketing network.

Listen to Bradshaw discuss his reaction when he heard the news of the acquisition of Syngenta by ChemChina:

Vern Hawkins, president of Syngenta Crop Protection, agrees that the acquisition will be a huge benefit to Syngenta. Hawkins began his career at Zeneca Agrochemicals 30 years ago, long before it merged with Novartis Agribusiness to become Syngenta.

“Syngenta will remain Syngenta,” he said. ChemChina does own crop protection product manufacturer Adama, but the parent company does not have an ag management team, so Syngenta’s team has the experience to run the Syngenta business, he says.

Hawkins notes the acquisition by ChemChina recently underwent a foreign investment security review approved a couple months back. This is a CFIUS review that ChemChina and Syngenta, which is Swiss owned, volunteered to undergo due to its large financial presence in the U.S.

“That’s a process not many global people know about, and certainly not many in the U.S. know about,” Hawkins said, noting it’s a confidential review process comprising a number of federal agencies.

Ponsi Trisvavet, president of Syngenta Seeds, said that as the process to develop and register new products gets longer and more expensive (according to Bradshaw, the cost has nearly tripled over the past 17 years or so), consolidation will only continue.

“As an industry you step back and think, ‘How long can we afford to invest in these innovations? Is there a way we can create something that would help optimize the spending?’ That’s the biggest driver in terms of investment in innovation. That drives consolidation. Once you start with one, the rest will come. That’s the nature of consolidation, and we will see more and more of it.”

Listen to Jay Bradshaw reflect on why the industry is seeing more consolidation right now:

The post The Emotion of an Acquisition appeared first on Seed World.

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