Des Moines Business Record
12-080-07
Sustainable ag concepts grow with corn demand
BY SARAH BZDEGA
Mike Huckabee's visit to Pioneer Hi-Bred International Inc.'s Johnston
headquarters last week was one of many presidential candidate visits this year
and a sign of the heightened attention being given to agricultural biotechnology
companies and their role in meeting a growing demand for food, feed, fiber and
fuel.
As the number of planted corn acres reached record levels this year, biotech
companies, universities, producers and the public have begun to question the
environmental, social and economic impacts of farming corn, which has created
more interest in sustainable agriculture.
"Within the last couple of years, there's suddenly been a great deal of interest in
research," said Robert Anex, associate professor of agricultural and
biosystems engineering at Iowa State University and associate director of
the Bioeconomy Institute. Few people paid attention to the university's work
before, but now Anex and his colleagues regularly are asked to speak at service
clubs, retirement homes and other sites.
David Fischhoff, technology strategy and development lead at Monsanto Co.,
said sustainable agriculture always has been a key part of the agricultural biotech
industry's work, but the public has become more vocal in talking about it lately.
"We've been working to find solutions for things like drought tolerance and
nitrogen efficiency for many years before we had the capability to solve the
problem," he said, "because they were important to growers in terms of
productivity."
Sustainable agriculture involves practices that support environmental health and
economic profitability, and enhance the quality of life for producers and society.
This includes using methods or products such as those that increase crop yields
or reduce the amount of fertilizer needed. Some sustainable agriculture
advocates promote returning to traditional farming practices or organic farming,
but others question whether farmers can produce the yields needed to satisfy a
growing demand for corn-based products without biotechnology.
Though agricultural biotech companies have been looking at corn products that
increase productivity and economic value for farmers and benefit the
environment and society for decades, more recently they have begun pouring
more money into research and development. E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Co.,
parent company of Pioneer, spent $100 million more on agriculture research this
year. More companies are also approaching universities such as ISU to do
research in this area.
"Five years ago, we certainly wouldn't have seen Iowa State agronomists get
research money from an oil company or a chemical company," Anex said. This
year ConocoPhillips pledged $22.5 million to establish a research program at ISU
dedicated to developing technologies that produce biorenewable fuels, and is
working with The Dow Chemical Co. on fertilizer and pesticide research, among
many other projects.
In the past decade, the agricultural market has seen the first phase of biotech
corn products that have genetic traits that control weeds or resist insects, such
as European corn borer, reducing the need for herbicides and pesticides. But
Fischhoff attributes the majority of the increase in average yields to breeding
better plants over time. He said biotechnology could play a bigger role in what
Monsanto believes will be a doubling in the average yield per acre by 2030, as
researchers look at issues such as drought tolerance and nitrogen efficiency that
involve multiple genes in a corn plant.
Pioneer and Monsanto have especially been focused on the issues of drought
tolerance and nitrogen efficiency as biotechnology tools have become more
advanced. Pioneer expects to introduce the first drought-tolerance trait in corn by
2012, followed by a corn plant with better nitrogen efficiency a couple of years
later. Monsanto is on a similar timeline. But because multiple genes affect both
traits - unlike insect control, which often relates to just one or two genes researchers believe new and better plants in both areas will continue to come out
for many years to follow.
"It's going to be a more quantitative or incremental effect over time," said Dave
Bubeck, research director at Pioneer, "so the first company that comes out with a
drought-resistance gene, it's not done. We look at this as a lifelong endeavor."
Both characteristics play a key role in sustainable agriculture. Drought tolerance
allows farmers to achieve greater and more predictable yields, and nitrogen
efficiency reduces the need for fertilizer, which is both costly and can harm
waterways if it runs off the fields.
Drought-tolerance researchers are looking into "what is the ideal moisture for a
plant to have to maximize its growth and productivity potential," Bubeck said. "It's
like asking a human, 'What's the perfect diet given your genetic makeup and
environment?'" The research takes into account a plant's root size and mass and
efficiency in water uptake.
Bubeck said biotech seed companies have been testing how different corn plant
varieties tolerate dryer conditions for decades, identifying species that do better.
Now they are looking into new opportunities. For example, they're mapping the
genes that affect drought tolerance in corn and finding ways to enhance those
genes through methods such as gene shuffling or adding genes from similar
plant species, like sorghum, that do well in drought conditions.
Fischhoff says the result will likely be a "portfolio of genes" that are geared
toward farmers in different regions.
Biotechnology research into nitrogen efficiency will be a similar process, with the
first product focused on reducing the amount of nitrogen farmers need for their
fields, but not eliminating the need entirely.
These are just two in a long list of products coming down Pioneer and
Monsanto's research pipelines. Researchers also are developing corn plants that
simply produce better yields without stress-resistant genes, the next generation
of weed control and insect resistant traits and higher-starch corn that can
increase eth-anol yields, as well as looking at other crops in addition to corn.
But biotechnology is only one piece of an effort to move toward sustainable
agriculture, said ISU's Anex.
"They're very complementary in that it's great to have plants that use less water
and less fertilizer or nutrients," he said, "but ultimately you can't beat Mother
Nature entirely."
One of the projects his team is involved in is studying the integrated corn supply
system and how it's affected by different factors, from corn varieties to harvesting
equipment, logistics and storage.
"We do know a lot, and what we know is, for instance, how much corn stover (the
stalks and leaves remaining after harvest) you can take off an acre of land, which
depends on the slope, soil type and local rainfall. We have models. We can
predict some of this stuff," Anex said. A Web-based tool, I-farmtools.org, lets
farmers find their farm fields in a program similar to Google Earth and from that it
identifies features like the field's soil type and slope. These features, along with
input-ted information such as the farmer's equipment and hired help, can help
estimate soil erosion, how much nitrogen is needed, if the farmer needs to hire
additional help during harvesting time, etc.
Anex and his colleagues also are looking into non-biotech ways to reduce runoff
and water needs, such as closing off a field's tile drain system or holding water in
the system to be available when crops need it. They also are researching the
impact of growing a small grain crop in the off-season that can be used for
cellulosic ethanol, while helping farmers hold nutrients and prevent erosion on
their fields.
"It's not as sexy as genetically modified plants pulling nitrogen out of the field," he
said, "but you still have to manage the system, and the thing my group does is
take the engineering approach," he said.
These research efforts are only the "tip of the iceberg," researchers say, but it
has been hard to keep up with recent demand for research in agriculture.
"It takes a number of years to set field trials and collect data and in many ways,
the industry is running ahead of our understanding," Anex said. "At the university
I think we're running as fast as we can to catch up and provide the answers
needed, but it's a little difficult for us. I think we're very fortunate in some ways
that we saw this coming and have been running experiments over the last three
to 10 years on cropping systems and nutrient recovery, but still the industry is
changing so quickly."
"From a biology standpoint, we need to become a lot more efficient," Bubeck
said. "Maybe we can take, six, 10 or 15 genes at the same time and be able to
figure out how they function and work and how to make that corn plant more
productive," rather than looking at just one or a handful of genes at a time.