Argentina: Monsanto will invest 10 million dollars to expand its corn seed plant in Rojas

Monsanto will invest about 10 million dollars in Argentina in 2019 to boost its corn business in the country. In the American nursery, they argue that the crop can grow up to 40 percent if producers adopt more technology.

The announcement was made by Federico Vartorelli, director of Monsanto research for all of South America, and will be focused on the facilities of the María Eugenia plant, in the Buenos Aires party of Rojas.

In this plant, which occupies an area of ​​22 hectares and generates around 3,500 direct and indirect jobs, the multinational firm will expand its facilities for the preparation of corn seed.

Productivity

Vartorelli said that one of the objectives of the research is to begin to close the great gap that still exists between the yields achieved in this region and the United States, which produces, on average, almost 13 quintals per hectare.
Brazil, for example, currently has the same average productivity of corn that was achieved in the northern hemisphere at the end of the 1960s, while Argentina is one step higher and is located, since the 90, in little more than seven quintals per hectare.

Pablo Talano, of the Monsanto Development team, said that Argentina “has not grown in corn productivity for ten years.”

The executive cited a recent study conducted by the University of Nebraska that shows that Argentine corn production has a growth potential of 41 percent, only narrowing the difference in productivity that exists between the most delayed agricultural and peak.

To narrow that gap, Monsanto launched programs to prop up the entry of Argentine producers into precision agriculture and, above all, what they call “data agriculture.”

Industrial capacity

The Buenos Aires plant for the preparation of corn seed has been receiving investments in recent years, after Monsanto failed in its attempt to install a similar plant in the Cordovan town of Malvinas Argentinas, due to the strong resistance of environmental organizations.

In Rojas -considered as one of the most important seed plants in the world- 3.6 million bags of seed are produced per year, enough to sow more than half of the Argentine surface occupied by the forage (the local market is of 5.5 million bags) and also for export.