Brazil corn seed companies offer almost 500 hybrids to growers

The Brazilian corn seed companies  offers almost 500 hybrids in the market for the 2012/13 crop. Conventional hybrids represent 55% of the total, while GMO represent 45%. It is an interesting fact since corn cultivated area with GMO is much bigger than the one with conventional hybrids.

From the total 479 cultivars, 93 were introduced this year, while the 103 offered last year dropped out.

From the 93 new cultivars, 5 are conventional and 34 are new cultivars introduce with a one GMO trait. When considering only GMO cultivars, we can find that 87 new cultivars were introduced in the market, while 42 dropped out. In the conventional segment, 6 news cultivars were introduced while 61 dropped out.

The information above was collected directly from seed companies and their promotional materials, as well as Seed Associations. Usually each GMO cultivar has a conventional version.

See in the graph below the distribution between single cross hybrids, three way, double hybrids and open pollinated varieties.

Early matured cultivars represent 71% of the total, while very early are only 22%. Cultivars in medium and normal (late) maturity represent 7%. Among GMO cultivars, 78% are simple hybrids, the others are three ways.

GMO cultivars

The GMO cultivars existing in the market are a result of 5 traits for worm control: TC 1507 (Herculex I ®); MON 810 (YieldGard®); MON 89034 (YieldGard VT PRO ®); Bt11 (Agrisure TL ®); MIR162 (TL VIP ®) and two traits for glyphosate herbicide: NK603 (Roundup Ready®) and GA 21 –TG. Besides these two, there is Liberty Link® for herbicide tolerance based on ammonium glufosinate for Herculex® I corn.

Follow the 168 Bt corn cultivars:

54 cultivars with  VT PRO®;
54 cultivars with Herculex I ® ;
35 cultivars with YieldGard®;
18 cultivars with  Agrisure TL ® and
4 cultivars with TL VIP®;
4 cultivars with Herculex I ® and YieldGard®.


There are 38 GMO cultivars for worm and herbicide glyphosate and glufosinate:

12 cultivars with VT PRO®, Herculex I ® and Roundup Ready®
10 cultivars with VT PRO® and Roundup Ready®
9 cultivars with Herculex I ® and Roundup Ready®
2 cultivars with YieldGard® and Roundup Ready®
2 cultivars with Herculex I ®, YieldGard® and Roundup Ready®
2 cultivars with  Agrisure TL ® , TL VIP® and GA21
1 cultivar with Agrisure TL ® and GA21
There are still 9 GMO cultivars resistant to glyphosate herbicide applied to post-emergency corn.



About MNagro:  MNagro is a consulting company created in March, 2007 to provide services specialized in the Brazilian agribusiness sector. Its expertise is concentrated on sales and marketing for the seed business and the vegetable market. Since it was created, MNagro has supported more than 60 different projects for local and foreign companies in several different areas.