Nearly 2 years ago Monsanto made a commitment to help farmers double average yields in corn, soybeans and other crops by year 2030. In order to do that, maximum yield on every acre becomes increasingly important, and a key component of achieving this is effective pest control — both insects and weeds. Farmers face scores of issues with weed control, and over the years Monsanto has provided them herbicides and other technologies to gain more control over weeds in their fields. But we’re not stopping there. We’re pushing into the future. At a press conference at the 2010 Commodity Classic, about 60 minutes before Monsanto announced the ribbon cutting of a $200M expansion at our Luling Roundup® manufacturing facility in Louisiana, Monsanto spokesmen Curt Uebele, Monsanto crop protection marketing manager, and Chism Craig, Monsanto technology development manager, discussed weed control advancements for 2010 and beyond. «Some of the testing we’ve done in 2009 has shown our Roundup brands are performing at about a 10 percent better performance level than some of the generic competition we’re faced with,» Uebele said. But in addition to this weed control performance benefit, Uebele said farmers who use Roundup brand herbicides also experience up to a 40 percent yield benefit over the generic competitors. This is due to the crop safety benefits Roundup brand herbicides provide versus some of the generic competitors that are formulated in the U.S. but built with Chinese products. In an effort to help farmers control some of the tougher weeds, Monsanto is launching a new herbicide for the 2010 growing season — MON 63410. «MON 63410 is a new product that’s designed to provide growers over-the-top residual control for tough-to-control weeds they’re faced with on their farms for cotton and soybeans,» Uebele said. «This product is a new innovation for growers to battle some of the tougher weeds they may be experiencing, like waterhemp or palmer amaranth.» The active ingredient in MON 63410 is acetochlor, a chemistry that’s been on the market for many years. «The part we worked on to refine [with MON 63410] is the encapsulation technology to provide excellent crop safety for an over the top application,» Uebele said. The encapsulation technology is what controls the release of the active ingredient into the plant. While the product is coming to market as MON 63410, it will not always be known by this name. «When we launched it this year, we launched with the product’s name that was the experimental number we’ve had in the trials,» Uebele said. «We wanted to get it to market as quickly as possible to give growers that solution just as fast as we could.» Monsanto’s marketing teams will be working on creating the product’s brand name while growers are using it this year, and the brand name will launch in the fall of 2010. But while that’s in the works, they’re also looking ahead. «We’re also experimenting with products for the future,» Uebele said. «One of those products is dicamba and how it can play a role for growers to manage tough weeds.» Monsanto doesn’t limit weed control options to herbicides. It also includes innovative weed control options to customers in the seed. «These products are not only going to provide additional weed control benefits, but also allow our customers to gain additional flexibility and efficiencies in their operations,» Craig said. Some of these products still in the R&D pipeline are dicamba-tolerant soybeans, and dicamba- and glufosinate-tolerant cotton and corn. But the product currently causing a stir in the marketplace is Genuity™ SmartStax™ corn — the most comprehensive weed and insect control corn trait product on the market today. In fact, readers of Ag Professional recently voted SmartStax the top new product of the year for 2009. «This is a truly amazing feat considering it’s in its first year of launch and the first year our customers can experience this new product,» Craig said. «I think farmers look at [Genuity™ SmartStax™] like they look at a lot of our traits — it’s risk management,» he continued. «When you’re able to manage multiple risks with one corn-trait product across more of your acres, I think that’s what excites them most — the ability to increase whole-farm yields while reducing the risk associated with that.»