The Associated Press State & Local Wire
March 9, 2006 Thursday
Hooper company makes biotech breakthrough
By ART HOVEY, Lincoln Journal Star
HOOPER Neb.
It's not the easiest place to find. Turn right off U.S. 275 in Dodge County onto the main
street of Hooper.
Go past the golf course on the opposite edge of town. Cross the Elkhorn River. Now,
watch for the cemetery and turn west on the gravel where the asphalt turns back north.
If you follow the directions, you'll arrive at a small seed-corn company that's off the
beaten path and on the edge of big corn news.
Hoegemeyer Hybrids, a family seed business founded in the 1930s, is about to start
producing PuraMaize, a naturally selected solution to a Brave New World problem.
The problem is pollen drifting out of genetically modified corn and into fields where it
crosses with and contaminates corn grown for customers who don't want the high-tech
stuff.
Tom Hoegemeyer's research has yielded plants that will use only their own pollen to
reproduce.
Processors making corn chips, for example, or meeting organic standards can count on
the purity promise of PuraMaize.
Mark Westgate, a crop production/physiology specialist at Iowa State University, calls
the Hoegemeyer breakthrough "the American way."
"It's quite a good find," Westgate said. "And it's to his credit to follow through on that
vision and turn it into a valuable product."
Back at Hoegemeyer headquarters, Tom Hoegemeyer, son Chris and nephew Stephan
Becerra answer questions about what's behind and what's ahead.
Becerra said Hoegemeyer retail success "funded our addiction to research."
In a world often portrayed as a struggle between those who artificially manipulate the
genetic structure and those who don't, the Hoegemeyer management team is quick to
set aside the notion that it's against biotechnology.
Genetically modified corn is a fixture in the company seed catalog. Tom Hoegemeyer
calls it "vital to agriculture and we're fully supportive of that. But we're coming from an
approach that the customer is always right."
Many of the customers for corn grown to organic standards or to non-GMO food and
feed standards live in Europe.
"We are feeling like there are people in other countries and other places that want to
choose what they get," he said.
There is also a high-tech flip side. In times when the gene structure of corn is being
altered to produce ingredients for pharmaceutical recipes, the risk that the technology
could escape into conventional corn could be negated by endowing the high-tech corn
with the same pollen-choosing trait.
That futuristic market "could be very, very interesting, very, very lucrative," said Iowa
State's Westgate.
Information from: Lincoln Journal Star, http://www.journalstar.com