Monsanto Breaks Ground For Mississippi Corn Research Center. More Bad News For The Delta.

This week, Monsanto broke ground on its fourth research facility in Mississippi. Significantly, this one – unlike those in Leland, Scott and Winterville – won’t be in the Delta. This new 300-acre corn research center will be sited at Flora in Madison County, just up U.S. 49 from Jackson.

The county has been one of the state’s growth areas in the last 20 years. It already was a thriving, expanding bedroom community for Jackson. But when Nissan started building a car plant there early in the last decade, developers couldn’t push down pine trees fast enough. More subdivisions, more schools, more four-lane roads. An upscale mall and high-rise hotels and office complexes sprang up.

As a Realtor might put it, Madison County has plenty of “curb appeal,” which likely weighed in Monsanto’s decision to pass over the Delta. It will be far simpler to recruit people if the job is in Madison County than in the Delta.

As a Delta native, it pains me to say that.

In the 1980s it would have seemed unthinkable for a major company marketing seed or chemicals in Mississippi to locate a research center anyplace but the Delta.

All this gives Madison County entrée into biotech. Granted, corn hybrid development isn’t as sexy as something like cancer research. But Monsanto is a dominant player in agribusiness and spends freely on R&D. That means hiring people with PhDs and installing exotic scientific equipment. Other biotech companies looking for new locations might give Madison County a second look, knowing that Monsanto settled there first.

Monsanto has both a vaunted and a controversial reputation.

Among other things, Monsanto developed crops that carry their own protection against certain species of insects. Its seed technology also includes plants that are resistant to the herbicide Roundup that, not coincidentally, Monsanto also developed. To call this landmark research seems almost like an understatement, and it took Monsanto a couple of decades to bring its first biotech products to fruition.

On the other hand, Monsanto has been widely criticized by farmers for the prices it charges for all this technology and the fact that they can’t save seed to carry over to the next crop year. The U.S. Departments of both Justice and Agriculture are holding a round of “workshops” on competitive practices in agribusiness, including the seed industry. Monsanto is a key point of focus, even if not said openly.

Beyond that, some of its products don’t work as well as they once did. In the South, for example, overuse of Roundup herbicide on what are called Roundup Ready crops has triggered resistance to Roundup in several tough weeds. Essentially, they are now as “Roundup Ready” as the crop, itself.

Once thought a thing of the past, hoeing crews are reappearing in cotton fields, chopping and even pulling up Roundup-resistant weeds. For farmers, this is an expensive, last-ditch remedy.

But for Madison County, all that is actually a positive point.

One of Monsanto’s big efforts is finding and developing new forms of herbicide resistance, then build it into new seed lines and market those products later this decade. When you’re working with crops, development times stretches over years, even decades. No doubt, Flora will play a role in that strategy for years to come.

For the Delta, all this is bad news, especially Washington County.

Even into the early 1990s, seven or eight major chemical companies operated R&D centers in a research triangle roughly outlined by Greenville, Hollandale and Scott. The area also encompassed the public research facilities operated at Stoneville by USDA and Mississippi State.

For several reasons, many of those facilities are gone now.

As chemical companies began merging in the 1990s, some of the resulting corporations found themselves with two Delta research centers, and they opted to close one of them. Monsanto, itself, indirectly contributed to the demise of some. When farmers started planting more Roundup Ready crops – cotton, soybeans and corn – they needed fewer of the herbicides manufactured by competing companies. With no demand for new herbicides, those companies ditched research programs and closed their Delta centers.

Several of my contacts in ag research – both in the public and the private sectors – say that it has become increasingly difficult to recruit people for Delta jobs when they do become available.

About 10 years ago a friend from Australia was sent here by his employer, a cotton seed company in Queensland, to set up a marketing and product development program. The company wanted to sell its seed lines here, plus breed new cotton varieties closely adapted to U.S. conditions.

The Aussie needed to hire a research director who also would be the company’s first U.S. cotton breeder. This would seem to be a plum position, but the hiring process bogged down.

He had hoped to locate the company’s research station near Greenville. “But people we’ve interviewed say they won’t move there,” he told me at the time.

Eventually, research plots were established in Greenville, but the plant breeders were headquartered more than 100 miles north in Memphis.

Madison County wasn’t considered then. Nobody in agricultural research would have thought about it. With Monsanto’s groundbreaking, they will now.

- Owen Taylor