How Do We Grow a Sustainable Food Supply?

A few weeks ago I attended the Ag Issues Forum which Bayer CropScience hosted in Florida, USA, for agricultural media just ahead of Commodity Classic – the annual meeting for the corn, soybean, sorghum and wheat associations.

Ag Issues Forum focused on a sustainable supply chain and was packed with thought-provoking speakers. Today, I’ll give you a few highlights from the speakers:

Rich Kottmeyer, Global Agriculture & Food Production Leader for Accenture, described Accenture’s expectations for agriculture in the future. He predicted that by 2050 more than half of the world’s population will be in the middle class. He described a time (now) when the American farmer didn’t really know much about the consumer in India or China, but by 2025, he is growing specifically for them.

Rob Kaplan, Walmart Senior Manager of Sustainability, said “corn is king” for Walmart because so many of their products contain corn, so it’s important for them to always think about how sustainable corn is or can be. He said the Walmart mom spends about 3-5 seconds making her product decision, and Walmart’s goal is to make sure that every product on their shelf is as sustainable as they can get it, so shoppers have a baseline of sustainability performance.

David Epstein, USDA entomologist, spoke about honey bee populations, noting that bees as commercial pollinators are directly valued at $11.7 billion. He also said consensus is building that a complex set of stressors and pathogens is associated Colony Collapse Disorder. Researchers are increasingly using multifactorial approaches to studying causes of colony losses, including varroa mite infestations, nutritional stress and diseases. An interesting factoid: the average lifespan of an adult honey bee worker is only 35 days.

Dr. David Nicholson, Head of R&D for Bayer CropScience, spoke to the group about Bayer’s integrated pipeline that has a peak sales potential of at least 4 billion Euros through 2016. Nicholson said that their approach to R&D includes not only differentiated breeding, traits and traditional chemicals, but also biological products that deliver strong efficacy sustainably.

You may be thinking, they’re a big company, of course they have a pipeline - why do I care? My answer is because Bayer is one of the companies that will, among many things, help solve the building weed resistance problems not only in the US, but around the world. Weed resistance can cost farmers more than $100 an acre, and innovative solutions are needed now.  

A new product that Bayer plans to launch in the soybean market in 2015 in the US and Canada in collaboration with leading trait provider MS Technologies is Balance GT, which offers a double herbicide-tolerant trait stack and features tolerance to both glyphosate and isoxaflutole.

Click here to hear more from Rob Kaplan about Walmart’s sustainability program. And watch Headline News & Analysis for more coverage from the Ag Issues Forum.

Have a great week!