Monsanto is Committed to Cotton!

Informative seminars and speakers were heard this afternoon at Beltwide. Specifically, The "Charter For Success" group heard firsthand from numerous Delta & Pine Land and Monsanto employees who share the vision of a promising future for cotton. The group had the opportunity to hear numerous presentations from Delta & Pine Land and Monsanto employees. One of which was Ted Crosbie, the Vice President for Global Plant Breeding, who spoke about molecular plant breeding. In a nutshell, he stated that the global germplasm pool that Monsanto uses enables them to have products with unique genetics. The global germplasm pool has reaped positive benefits in performance for corn and soybeans and cotton is no exception. Ted mentioned that Monsanto is building the future portfolio of beneficial characteristics for cotton so there is more to come! Did I mention that Ted Crosbie is a distinguished Monsanto Science Fellow? Needless to say this guy knows his stuff.

Another presentation came about the future of cotton from Mark Oppenhuizen, the Cotton Research Manager for Monsanto. Mark attested to the fact that Monsanto is committed to cotton and listed off numerous products in the cotton pipeline. Some mentioned were Dicamba tolerant cotton, gluphosinate tolerant cotton and drought tolerant cotton. Mark then spoke about the importance of water use efficiency and the positive role that drought tolerant cotton will play in that. Then, Tom Speed with technology development from Lubbock, Texas, targeted the West Texas audience in his presentation on Delta Pine Product Performance for West Texas. He mentioned five focus varieties for this area and talked about their key features which included yield performance, fiber quality, growing characteristics, responsiveness to Pix, gin turn out, seed size, and heat tolerance... to name a few. All of the characteristics of these five focus varieties were ideal for the West Texas area. The purpose of these seminars were to further verify to growers firsthand that Delta & Pine Land and Monsanto are truly committed to cotton!