UPL joins North Carolina Plant Sciences Initiative’s Innovation Hub

The North Carolina Plant Sciences Initiative welcomes UPL, a leading provider of sustainable agricultural solutions and services, as the 10th member of its Innovation Hub in NC State University’s Plant Sciences Building.

Companies use the hub to build relationships with the N.C. PSI scientists and students as they pursue solutions to some of the world’s most important agricultural challenges.

Other members include Oerth Bio, Envu, Nufarm, Agerpoint, Syngenta, Bayer, Novonesis, SAS and BASF.

With 14,000 product registrations and a presence in almost 140 countries, UPL is a major crop protection company and leader in global food systems. Chief Technology Officer Vicente Gongora shared the following information about the company, its decision to join the Innovation Hub and more.

How does your company address challenges in agriculture? 

The key for UPL is to understand the growers’ ″pain points,″ which are issues or problems growers face for which current solutions are not satisfactory. We have to identify new and existing technologies and partnerships in order to address these pain points to help growers to be more efficient and produce food in a more sustainable way.

Why did you choose to be a member of the Innovation Hub?

We believe that the purpose of the Innovation Hub and UPL’s purpose align by developing solutions that will meet or exceed the real-world needs and challenges of today’s growers. This can be accomplished by integrating more sustainable agricultural practices, for example by better integration of the use of natural biosolutions (bioprotection, biostimulants and bionutrition) with current crop protection products and measures.

Does your company partner with NC State in other endeavors?

We are always looking for ways to partner with NC State. As an example, in August, UPL brought  a group of key Brazilian cooperative representatives to visit the university for a training program.

In addition, in September UPL’s global fungicide team interacted with NC State to discuss the future of crop protection and disease control. It is UPL’s intention to continue to partner with NC State as much as possible in such programs.

What do you think about approaching grand agricultural challenges through interdisciplinary research and technology development?

These initiatives are very much part of our ″Open Ag″ approach, to be able to partner with entities such as NC State to identify and implement solutions that will meet or exceed the real-world needs of today’s growers.

This kind of approach also fits into our  ″House of Solutions″ approach, where our R&D team is focused on solutions to address growers needs.

UPL has a global footprint and can make technologies advanced in development available more quickly to growers around the globe. Research projects initiated collaboratively in UPL’s and NC State’s research facilities can be quickly accelerated into advanced development  by utilizing the research capabilities at UPL’s field research stations in the northern and southern hemisphere.

Looking at UPL’s and NC State’s joint capabilities, I am a great advocate of interdisciplinary research that will bring solutions to address growers’ pain points.