Big money for biotechnology | Company officials say investments expand alongside acreage
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Biotechnology is going to keep driving canola forward, say biotech company leaders, who argue that even more investment will be coming now that farmers are likely to plant 20 million acres a year.
“With the size of the crop now, we really can warrant the scale of research and development that a lot of the companies are making investments around,” said Dave Dzisiak of Dow AgroSciences.
“If the crop would have been five or ten million acres, you wouldn’t be seeing this kind of science being applied into it.”
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Mark Kidnie of Monsanto agreed.
“When we built and made a lot of investments in canola … it was a 13 million acre business,” said Kidnie, who was part of a panel along with Dzisiak and Lloyd McCall of Bayer CropScience at the Canola Council of Canada’s annual convention in Washington.
“As it’s 19 million today and may grow, that gets the attention of companies such as Bayer, Dow and Monsanto in terms of the opportunity to invest in that crop when it gets bigger.”
Kidnie said canola is getting higher annual yield increases from “genetic gain” than either corn or soybeans because those crops were earlier beneficiaries of major investment.
Now canola is catching up and surpassing the 1.5 percent annual gains seen in the other crops.
McCall said rapid development of biotech methods has radically cut the price of analysis and variety development, so much more is possible much faster than just 10 years ago.
As well, the fruits of earlier research are beginning to come to market. McCall’s company’s canola with traits that reduce seed pod shattering are close to being released to farmers.
“Today we don’t have this in the marketplace, but it’s in advanced stages of testing and we’re evaluating it very thoroughly,” said McCall.
Most of Bayer’s biotech developments for canola are aimed at yield improvement, which is a focus shared by the other companies.
Kidnie said Monsanto is working to stack herbicide tolerance genes and that those kinds of crops will become more common. A dicamba tolerant type of canola should become available in 2020-22.
However, a newer generation of Roundup Ready canola will be released in the next few years with additional traits stacked atop the herbicide resistance, he said. The updated glyphosate resistance will allow higher rates of application and longer periods of application.
Kidnie said traits that allow canola to handle drought and use water better, contain inherent high-yielding genetics and have other agronomically strong characteristics should help Monsanto hit a goal of doubling canola yields by 2030.
Dow is looking forward to commercializing specialty canola with improved and novel fatty acids in coming years.
Dzisiak said canola has long benefited from its “healthy oil” qualities, but with soybeans and other crops being improved to carry some of those same qualities, canola development needs to push the healthy content further.
“We need to keep the innovation in canola moving forward to be able to maintain our advantage,” he said.
“We still don’t have the scale and size that a crop like soybeans does, and so we need to keep this investment moving forward.”
