Monsanto : Seed Health Is Our Business

Before a publishing house prints 100,000 copies of a new best-selling book, it does everything it can to make sure that the original manuscript from which those prints are made is perfect: that the narrative is cohesive and the grammar and spelling are correct.

Consider, then, the situation of a company like Monsanto. Our 'original manuscripts' are seeds that are eventually used to produce copies, and each new production needs to be perfect. The new seeds need to be healthy and ready to thrive. If they are not, seed-borne viruses, bacteria and fungi can damage the plants grown from those seeds. This can leave farmers' fields compromised for future production of the crops that bore these pathogens.

That's why it's so important to prevent these kinds of pathogens from working their way into our seed lines. And that's why they've got me and about 40 other people in Woodland, CA doing everything we can to provide Seed Health Quality Control. (Another more than 250 people at Woodland are involved in a separate, albeit related, operation-developing new disease-resistant vegetable seed lines. And other Monsanto locations around the world conduct other kinds of seed quality control testing-for such things as genetic purity assurance and germination rates and vigor.)

But our focus is pathogens, and the seeds we work with here are all vegetables, coming from all over the world: Brassicas like broccoli from Chile and Peru, tomatoes and peppers from Thailand and China and Florida, watermelons and other melons from India and California, cucumbers from Spain. Our goal is always to ensure seed health from the beginning of the development pipeline, but we test throughout the process from the breeding phase, through 'bulk-up,' in which vast numbers of those seeds are produced, to the commercial production phase, when even larger numbers are produced. In doing so, we're ensuring that we meet both Monsanto's standards and those of federal regulators and deliver the best seeds to our farmer customers.

In today's urban culture, few of us give much thought to plant diseases, but they have periodically played a critical role in human affairs. In the 19 century, for example, the Great Hunger, caused by a fungus in the potato crop, changed the course of both Irish and American history. 'Greening' disease is decimating Florida's orange groves today, and the banana crop is threatened by a fungus. Coffee, cassava, wheat-these and other crops also face pathogenic threats today. In many of these cases, the pathogens are not seed-borne; greening disease, for example, is caused by a bacteria spread by an insect. But some are, and in our Woodland operations-both the quality control work I oversee and the separate, related research aimed at producing disease-resistant seeds-we're working to protect against their spread.

Our work, I should note, is not about stopping the spread of disease through existing crops; it's about preventing diseases from breaking out in the new, improved vegetables that we develop for growers around the world. And the stakes, I should also note, are rarely as dramatic as some of the historical precedents I just cited, which involved societal staples like potatoes and oranges. For the vegetable crops we work with, producing quality, healthy seeds is more about enabling agriculture to make efficient use of environmental and purchased resources.

In the years it takes to breed a better-tasting melon, for example, or a more nutritious form of broccoli, growers use inputs including land and greenhouses, water, fertilizer, fuel, capital, and sweat equity. By catching any impurities early, we can minimize the waste of any of these resources. That makes both the seed development process and the growing of the crops from those seeds more sustainable both from a financial and an environmental point of view.

The building where we do this work is just four years old, and is the largest seed health quality control facility in the world. Within it are different laboratories devoted to different kinds of analyses-a virology lab, for example; bacteriology lab; and more. We use cutting-edge technologies to give our customers the best possible products, and collaborate with the broader seed industry to help control diseases wherever they might strike.

It's not often that we actually find pathogens in seeds. What we do when we find one-depends on the pathogen. For critical agents, we have a zero-tolerance policy; the seed and the batch from which it was drawn must be destroyed, even at a cost of millions of dollars. In other cases, treatment may be possible. Watermelon seeds affected by Gummy stem blight, for example, can be treated with a fungicide, applied to the outside of the seed, which controls the fungus and enables beautiful production of the watermelon.

Whatever we do, our decision is guided always by the goal of producing the highest quality seeds for our growers, consumers and our company. We not only want to meet the regulatory requirements; we want to ensure that our seeds are always the best on the market.

These standards have served us well for many years. I'm confident they'll continue to do so in the future.