Monsanto expands insect pest initiative

Monsanto kicked off the Corn Rootworm Knowledge Program in 2012 with $6 million, divided among 13 research projects. The company now has put up $3 million more to study solutions in pests in other crops.
 

The Insect Management Knowledge Program is co-chaired by Monsanto’s Sherri Brown, vice president of science strategy, and Steven Pueppke, associate vice president of research and graduate studies at the University of Michigan. It will provide up to $250,000 per project per year for up to three years.
 

In an interview with AgriNews, Brown said the company believes solutions necessitate inclusion of the public and private sector.
 

“There’s a lot of expertise in the academic space, and we believed it made a lot of sense to tap into that space so that we understand these pests even better,” she said. “As we enter the third year, we realize that there is a similar need outside corn rootworm in corn and other row crops. For us, it’s cotton, soybeans and corn. This year we set our priorities, and we decided that it made sense to have a broader involvement.”
 

As with the corn rootworm project, the new initiative consists of proposals submitted by scientists across academia, which are reviewed by an advisory committee. The window for submitting pre-proposals recently ended.
 

“I’m very enthusiastic by the response,” Brown said. “I don’t have the specifics, but there was a broad set of proposals coming in. As a scientist, there is a lot of important information that helps us understand how to manage these crops and continue to make new products for the future and how to support the products that are on the market today.
 

“We also understand that farmers realize information helps them do a great job on pests in their field. There’s a lot of knowledge and capability out there at universities and public institutions, and we want to make sure we were employing all that intellectual horsepower to understand these pests.”

The 11-member advisory council includes University of Illinois entomologist Mike Gray and farmer Len Corzine, who serves on the Illinois Corn Marketing Board.
 

Cuts in state agricultural extensions programs are among factors spurring the initiative. Although research and development budgets of ag companies such as Monsanto are large, Brown said it always is good to elicit help from a large pool of ag scientists.
 

“I’ve never known a time when there was enough public money to study all of the relevant questions,” she said. “It is badly needed in some of these areas. Certainly there are more questions to be answered than funding dollars to add to them. We want to tap into a broader set of experts.
 

“As an all-ag-based company, we want to help farmers manage pests in their fields this year and for years in the future. We have some great products on the market. But we know that pests will continue to evolve, and we want to get ahead of it. We are doing a lot of research in our own programs and labs. But we realize there is expertise out in the public space, and there are a lot of questions these university investigators are able to answer.”