Monsanto Moves Closer to Launch of First Drought-Tolerant Corn Product

7 January 2009

Five years of field trials have shown yield improvements delivered by the drought-tolerant corn. Source: Monsanto. Click to enlarge.

Monsanto Company’s first-generation drought-tolerant corn product has moved to the fourth and final phase of development before an anticipated market launch early in the next decade, according to Monsanto’s annual update of its Research and Development (R&D) pipeline. Monsanto has submitted the product to the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) for regulatory clearance.

Drought-tolerant corn is designed to provide farmers yield stability during periods when water supply is scarce by mitigating the effects of drought—or water stress—within a corn plant.

Field trials for drought-tolerant corn conducted last year in the Western Great Plains have met or exceeded the 6% to 10% target yield enhancement—about 7 to 10 bushels per acre—over the average yield of 70-130 bushels per acre in some of the key drought-prone areas in the United States. The USDA estimates the average corn yield in the US for the 2007/08 season to be 151.8 bushels per acre.

We are now intensively selecting the best trait-germplasm combinations to deliver excellent drought-stress performance, and value, to our customers upon launch. This product and other yield improvements we are developing will reset the bar for on-farm productivity.

—Steve Padgette, biotechnology lead for Monsanto

Snapshot of Monsanto R&D pipeline. Click to enlarge.

Drought-tolerant corn technology is one of the products currently under development as part of Monsanto’s R&D and commercialization collaboration in plant biotechnology with German-based BASF. (Earlier post.) The two companies are jointly contributing $1.5 billion over the life of the collaboration, which is aimed at developing higher-yielding crops and crops more tolerant to adverse environmental conditions such as drought.

This product is the first result of BASF and Monsanto’s plant biotech collaboration. Our joint product pipeline has many high performing drought tolerant genes, which make us confident that we can live up to our commitment of delivering successive generations of ever more drought-tolerant crops.

—Hans Kast, President and Chief Executive Officer of BASF Plant Science

Higher-yielding—or Intrinsic Yield—soybean technology being developed by the companies also moved another step closer to commercialization. The product, which promises higher yields through the insertion of a key gene, moved into Phase 3 and will now undergo expanded field trials, regulatory studies and trait integration into elite soybean germplasm.

Once commercially available, the higher-yielding soybeans will build upon the company’s Roundup Ready 2 Yield platform and provide farmers with an additional boost to the incremental yield advantage from that product-line.

Monsanto also updated the status of other products in its R&D pipeline, including:

• SmartStax corn. SmartStax contains multiple different modes of action for insect-resistance management, is more effective against above- and below-ground insects, and offers the company’s most comprehensive weed-control system. The product moved to Phase 4, the final step prior to the anticipated 2010 commercial launch. In June 2008, Monsanto submitted a request to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to set refuge requirements for SmartStax at 5% in the northern Corn Belt and 20% in southern states where cotton is planted, which are lower than those for existing technologies. Monsanto noted that the EPA has already granted reduced refuge requirements for the product’s second-generation YieldGard corn borer technology, which is a key step in the process for receiving approval for SmartStax refuge reduction.

• Second-generation, insect-protected Roundup Ready 2 Yield soybeans. This second-generation insect-control product is tailored to South America and includes an additional mode of action for potential reduced refuge requirements. This project is currently in Phase 1.

• Roundup Ready, insect-protected sugarcane. Now in the Proof-of-Concept Phase, this Phase 1 project will leverage Monsanto’s recent investment in sugarcane. (Earlier post.)

• Dicamba- and Glufosinate-tolerant cotton. As the first three-way stack of herbicide-tolerant technologies in the pipeline, dicamba-tolerant cotton moved to Phase 2. It adds two new modes of action—Dicamba and Glufosinate tolerance—to the Roundup Ready Flex system, and is expected to provide farmers with the greatest flexibility in weed management and the most effective weed-control system available.

In June 2008, Monsanto announced a plan to double yields in its three core crops—corn, cotton and soybeans—by 2030 compared to a base year of 2000 as part of a three-point pledge called the Sustainable Yield Initiative. The company also committed to reducing by a third the aggregate amount of key inputs such as water, land and energy, required to produce each unit.