Because genetic engineering is so expensive and time-consuming, the company uses it only for traits it has to bring in from other species. For everything else, an accelerated version of traditional breeding makes more sense. Monsanto researchers have sequenced the genomes of its major crop lines so that, rather than waiting for an entire generation of plants to grow to maturity, breeders can take samples from seedlings—using, in many cases, a hole punch to collect them—and test them for genetic markers associated with desired traits such as drought tolerance or stronger stalks. Monsanto breeders also use computer simulations to try out millions of virtual pairings.
From top: Bellafina peppers grown from seed; a scientist takes soybean tissue samples and examines an ear of corn
The company has designed something it calls a seed chipper, a closet-size array of tubes and plungers that takes seeds—about one per second—and shaves off a tiny piece to test for genetic markers. It uses an optical scanning system to ensure that the embryo inside doesn’t get nicked. Plants are tested for traits before they’re even born. “You can run tens of millions of seeds through the lab that otherwise you’d have to go plant in the field,” says Sam Eathington, the company’s head of plant breeding. “You know, corn, you usually plant 30,000 an acre. So you can do the math, right? It’s a lot of land.”
Marker-assisted breeding has also helped Monsanto venture into the produce aisle. The company has begun selling seeds for its own brand-name fruits and vegetables, among them the Melorange, an extra-sweet cantaloupe, and the EverMild, a less lachrymose onion. The company’s breeding armamentarium has allowed it to get these qualities into produce quickly, without having to run the regulatory gauntlet and deal with the cultural baggage of a GMO. According to industry analysts, sales of the seeds have so far been disappointing. There are new products in the pipeline, though, among them a watermelon that, in the words of Kenneth Avery, head of Monsanto’s vegetable business, “almost crunches like an apple.”
Last October, Monsanto announced the $930 million Climate Corp. acquisition. In part an insurance company, Climate Corp. was started in 2006 in San Francisco by two Google (GOOG) engineers as a way to draw on historical weather data to create more accurate, localized forecasts. The founders, David Friedberg and Siraj Khaliq, quickly realized that the business most dependent on the weather was farming and began using their software and the climatological data they’d gathered to offer a new kind of crop insurance. Climate Corp. policies have no claims process: If the company’s models show that the weather over a farmer’s field has been bad enough to hurt yields—too much rain or too little, daytime heat stress or an early freeze—and if that farmer has bought coverage to cover those events, he automatically gets a check.
“The first time I heard about Monsanto being interested, I had to ask, ‘What’s a seed company talking to a software company about?’ ” says Vinod Khosla, a venture capitalist and early investor in Climate Corp. Monsanto particularly liked the way the high-tech insurer used data to help protect farmers not only from poor weather but also poor decisions. For $15 an acre, Climate Corp. offers a set of software “advisors” that can tell a farmer what, when, and how deep to plant, whether to irrigate, which fertilizer to apply and where perhaps to reapply. “For a grower producing a corn crop in the U.S., he’s making somewhere between 40 and 50 decisions,” CEO Grant says. “And a lot of those are cascaded: If you made bad choices early, you live with them.”
Other agriculture giants have begun selling similar products—
DuPont’s (DD)Pioneer seed division and
Deere (DE) have formed a partnership to do so. In and of itself, helping farmers make better decisions is not a controversial idea. And yet Monsanto’s attachment to the concept has generated suspicion. “The more data they control, well, the more they’re going to control the farmers,” says Hans Herren, a Swiss agronomist who heads the sustainable development think tank the Millennium Institute and won the prestigious World Food Prize in 1995. (Last year, Fraley and two other pioneers of plant biotechnology won the award.) “So the farmers will go from being entrepreneurs to basically laborers for Monsanto.”
Climate Corp.’s privacy policy emphasizes that the company does not own a farmer’s data. “Your Information remains yours even after you provide it to us,” it reads. Information, however, is different from understanding, and the broader critique of both Climate Corp. and Monsanto is that they’re taking knowledge that once resided in farmers’ brains and centralizing it—some of it in seeds, some of it in software. Spears, the Illinois farmer, doesn’t pretend to understand the considerations that drive the recommendations he gets from his Climate Corp. software, any more than he pretends to understand the avionics inside his drone. “There are these yield curves that tell you you’ll get more bushels if you plant between this time and this time, but I don’t know how they come up with them,” he says. “I’m not a scientist.”
Technology has already dumbed down everything from flying an airliner to filing one’s taxes, and in so doing made those tasks safer and more efficient. But food feels different to many people. “You know, when this data-intensive system recommends you buy a certain seed, it’s going to be a Monsanto seed,” says the author Michael Pollan, a prominent critic of industrial agriculture. “So I have a strong objection to letting any one company exert that much control over the food supply. It depends on the wisdom of one company, and in general I’d rather distribute that wisdom over a great many farmers.”
Friedberg, Climate Corp.’s 34-year-old co-founder and CEO, is aware of this concern. He’s a lifelong vegetarian who will talk with little prompting about the environmental cost of meat and the great benefit of adding quinoa to North American crop rotations. He hadn’t heard many good things about Monsanto before he started negotiating with the company. What he realized, though, is that the best way to think about Monsanto is as a technology company. Its technology “just happens to take the form of a seed,” Friedberg says. “As I got to learn about it I was like, ‘Wow, this company is as innovative and as impressive as Google.’ ”
A greenhouse in Jerseyville, Ill.
“Farmers make economic decisions that they believe to be best for their families,” he goes on. “They choose to buy Monsanto seeds because it makes them the most money. They may not like the licensing terms or the licensing agreement, because that’s not how they used to do business, but it’s the way that Monsanto can afford to invest a billion dollars a year in R&D on finding new genetic traits that can help farmers get more yield per acre.”
Friedberg exudes an implacable rationality—one of his favorite words is “flawed.” He says the fear and skepticism about Monsanto is based in large part on misinformation and has taken it upon himself to help change that. In late January he hosted a small dinner at his apartment, a triplex in the Pacific Heights section of San Francisco. He invited Fraley, Pollan, Khosla, and a few other activists and Silicon Valley executives and investors. Friedberg and his six guests had drinks around a fire pit on the roof, taking in sweeping views of the city and the bay, then sat down for a vegetarian dinner prepared by a former cook at Chez Panisse, the Berkeley restaurant and temple of organic, locavore cuisine.
By all accounts, the conversation was friendly. Some of the guests disagreed about the scalability of organic farming and the sustainability of current industrial farming practices, but there was also a consensus that there were instances—the creation of virus-resistant papayas, for example—where genetic engineering has brought clear benefits. “I mean, you know, there was a fair amount of back and forth between Robb [Fraley] and me, who disagree on many things,” says Pollan. “But it was cordial and interesting. And for me it’s a great privilege to get to talk to these people who make decisions that affect lots of people.”
Fraley’s recollection is similar. “Because I have spent so much time on the advocacy side and spent so much time wrestling with some of the critics, maybe one of the things I overlooked was how many people are in the middle,” he says. “And so that was exciting, and it was, for me, a small epiphany.”
The dinner went until 11:30, and afterward there was a round of e-mails, some with links to scientific papers people had mentioned. Pollan sent around a study showing that farms using organic methods, such as long crop rotations and limited chemical inputs, could outperform conventional industrialized ones. Friedberg read it; he thinks the research contains a number of “flawed assumptions.” Still, he’s planning to get Pollan over to the Climate Corp. offices and then out to Monsanto’s vegetable breeding site in nearby Woodland, Calif. As he puts it, “We’re going to try and keep the dialogue going.”
Bennett is a staff writer for Bloomberg Businessweek in New York.
No comments:
Post a Comment