Seed

Leadership Changes Happening at Sakata Seed America

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 22:20:36 GMT

On Jan. 26, Woodland, Calif.-based seed research and production company Sakata Seed America, a subsidiary of Japan-based Sakata Seed Corporation, announced several changes to its leadership team.

The changes included the departure of former president and CEO, Eduardo Flores; the promotion of Dave Armstrong to the role; and the promotion of Justin Davis to chief operating officer of vegetables. The company thanked Flores for his contributions and wished him success in his future endeavors.

Davis, in his new role that is effective Feb. 1, will report directly to Armstrong in his new role. Davis is a 20-year veteran of Sakata and currently serves as executive director of commercial operations, where he leads sales, marketing and supply chain for the vegetable business.

“Throughout his career with Sakata, Justin has demonstrated strong leadership capability and a deep commitment to Sakata’s values and culture,” Armstrong says. “Justin’s long experience with Sakata, combined with his leadership of our commercial operations, gives him a deep understanding of our business and our culture.”

In the new role, Davis will assume responsibility for the end-to-end operations of Sakata Seed America’s vegetable business, integrating research and development, supply chain and vegetable seed sales and marketing to support innovation.

Corteva's Bold Move: What Splitting Crop Protection and Seed Businesses Means for the Future

Wed, 01 Oct 2025 18:27:19 GMT

Global agriculture technology company Corteva announced plans on Wednesday to separate into two independent, publicly traded entities: “new” Corteva, which will continue to sell crop protection products – herbicides, fungicides, insecticides and biologicals – and SpinCo, which will focus on the seed genetics business.

SpinCo will include Pioneer, the company’s legacy seed brand established in 1926, as well as Brevant and regional seed brands, including Dairyland Seed.

Upon separation of the companies, Greg Page, current Corteva chairman, will lead new Corteva, while Chuck Magro, current Corteva CEO, will become CEO of SpinCo.

In announcing the decision by Corteva, Magro said the farmer-centric organization appreciates that its customers want and need choice across their input decisions.

“The best way, maybe I can even say, the only way for this company to preserve and expand that choice and keep putting innovative, effective, sustainable solutions into the hands of farmers around the world is to give both businesses the freedom to operate without having to look out for the other,” said Magro, during an online presentation primarily focused on company investors.

He added that the separation of the company into two entities will allow both businesses to maximize long-term value for farmers, customers, employees and shareholders.

Magro described SpinCo – with expected net sales of $9.9 billion in 2025 (56% of current Corteva sales) – as “a classic growth compounder” that will pursue opportunities in out-licensing, hybrid wheat, biofuels and gene editing.

“The continued success of our SpinCo business will be predicated upon sustained investment in advanced genetics and further capitalizing on our unique route to market,” Magro said.

As a pure-play crop genetics company, Magro predicts SpinCo could go beyond its corn and soybean core into other row crops, even expanding into other areas like fruits and vegetables.

“Spinco will also look to expand on new opportunities in wheat, cotton, rice and other products, where genetics can play a transformative role,” he said. “In other words, we could see SpinCo playing in a vastly expanded addressable market.”

Corteva Crop Protection Business Is Future-Focused

For new Corteva, Magro characterized the crop protection industry as competitive and tough, but that company leaders anticipate the market will return to growth in the near future.

“At new Corteva, success will be built upon an optimized supply chain, a new level of operational excellence and the ability to invest in the next generation of sustainable, differentiated innovation, including biologicals and other nature-based products,” he said.

Magro said as company leaders weighed the pros and cons of separating the two companies, they made the decision with the future in mind.

“This is not about today, and it’s not certainly about the last six years. This is about what we see coming,” he said. “We’re in a market that we need to look out 10-years plus. That’s just the research and development and the timeline it takes to bring technology into the marketplace. So this is a long-term decision that we are making.”

Corteva’s 2025 net sales for its crop protection business are estimated to be $7.8 billion (44% of the current company’s total).

During Magro’s remarks, he gave no indication of where the two companies will be based. Corteva’s global headquarters is currently based in Indianapolis, Ind., while Johnston, Iowa, is home to its seed business.

The transaction separating Corteva and SpinCo is expected to be completed in the second half of 2026.

Corteva was formed in 2018 as the agriculture-focused subsidiary of DowDuPont, following the merger of the two companies. Corteva was spun-off as its own entity in 2019.

Your next read: Fertilizer Decisions: Balance Costs, Yields and Sustainability

US Justice Department to Examine Rising Cost of Farm Inputs, Says Farm Secretary

Fri, 26 Sep 2025 19:18:47 GMT

The U.S. Department of Justice antitrust division will work with the Department of Agriculture to look closely at the rising cost of agricultural inputs like fertilizer and seeds under a memorandum of understanding signed on Thursday, said Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins.

The goal of the joint effort is to “protect American farmers and ranchers from the burdens imposed by high and volatile input costs, such as feed, fertilizer, fuel, seed, equipment and other essential goods,” Rollins said at the Ag Outlook Forum in Kansas City, Missouri.

The DOJ will scrutinize competitive conditions in the agricultural marketplace, including antitrust enforcement that promotes free market competition, Rollins said.

Rollins previously said the USDA is examining high fertilizer costs and exploring options for farmer relief. The U.S. farm economy is saddled this year with low crop prices and trade disputes.

(Reporting by Leah Douglas in Washington, Editing by Franklin Paul and Nia Williams)

Corteva Agriscience looks for bigger role in produce

Fri, 13 Nov 2020 06:06:23 GMT

Spun off from DowDupont on June 1, Corteva Agriscience now aims to play a bigger role in the fresh produce industry by putting a greater focus on the consumer and looking for opportunities in the vegetable seed business.

The merger of Dow and DuPont won regulatory approval in 2017, with the stipulation that the combined $130 billion company divest some of its crop protection business. Corteva Agriscience has a portfolio that includes both seeds and crop protection, split about 56% for seeds and traits and 44% for crop protection, according to the company.

Rajan Gajaria, executive vice president of business platforms for Corteva Agriscience, Wilmington, Del., said Corteva— with legacy parents in Dow and DuPont boasting a combined 350 years in business — is a $15 billion company with a very new mindset.

“It’s not every day that you get to start a $15 billion business from scratch and say, What do we want this company to be?” he said.

The company’s purpose statement speaks to enriching the lives of both producers and consumers. That focus on the consumer is one of the areas where Corteva will be different than its “legacy” parents, he said.

Where conventional wisdom might think of the agriculture economy as “farm to fork,” Gajaria said Corteva is thinking of it as a circular economy that starts with the fork.

What the consumer thinks about their health and food has implications for the farm, and he said Corteva plays a role in completing that loop from between consumers and producers.

He said Corteva can be a part of creating an “ecosystem” around food that builds trust.

“The trust that the consumers need in the food they’re eating needs to be moved up several notches, and we have a role to play in it,” he said. “We want to get to a point where we can start establishing trust with consumers with the products that we bring to the marketplace, in collaboration with others.”

Vegetable business

Corteva is planning to become more of a presence in the vegetable seed business, he said.

“That’s a gap in our portfolio, and we are looking to see what we can do in terms of acquisitions as we move forward,” he said.

In addition to acquiring a vegetable seed business, he said Corteva is open to the use of the CRISPR gene editing tool to develop improvements such as longer shelf life or pest or disease resistance, he said.

“We have that gene-editing capability, which could help us with the fruit and vegetable business as we move forward,” he said. Post-harvest technology also is an area where Corteva may look to invest in or collaborate with other partners, Gajaria said.

Gajaria said the company has a lot of crop protection products in the pipeline for fruit and vegetables.

The company’s current products will put it in position to be the number one crop protection chemistry supplier in California, he said, and new products will build on that.

Looking ahead, Gajaria expects Corteva to be on the leading edge of chemistry innovation, stating that Corteva will be launching about 25% of new active ingredients introduced industry-wide in the next five years.

On the digital side of the business, the company is soon launching a software program that helps growers make agronomic decisions based on expected yield outcomes.

Gajaria said that sustainability is a focus for Corteva.

“At the end of the day, the farmer is owning his or her own farm, and they value the quality of the land more than anything because that’s what is their asset,” he said.

“We are building a go-forward sustainability program grounded in conversations we have had with food industry stakeholders and will continue to enable our farmers to grow quality food crops,” Gajaria said.

“Our plan, which will be available in Q1 2020, will include quantitative metrics that our downstream partners can utilize to show how their ingredient production supports their sustainability goals.”

One product that plays into the sustainability theme is Optinyte, a nitrogen stabilizer that prevents leaching of nitrogen from the soil before it is used.

Mainly used for field corn, Gajaria said could be a valuable product for fruit and vegetable crops in California.

“We are looking at formulations technology that can be tailored to those crops as we continue to grow our sustainability footprint,” he said.

DuPont Pioneer Sued by Migrant Workers in Michigan

Fri, 23 Sep 2022 21:30:19 GMT

A major seed company is being sued by 32 migrant farm workers and seven of their children over the workers’ claims that they were underpaid and experienced unsafe conditions and poor housing while removing tassels from corn in southwestern Michigan.

The workers are mostly from Texas and were hired in 2012 to work in Cass County. Detasseling is hot, labor-intensive work that occurs while the corn still is in the ground.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Grand Rapids, accuses Johnston, Iowa-based DuPont Pioneer and two recruiters of violating federal wage and migrant labor laws. The allegations include poor housing, unsafe transportation to the fields and inadequate water.

The suit said that the defendants housed the workers and their families “in mobile trailers and a renovated farm building, which failed to comply with state and federal health and safety requirements.”

It said the defendants also violated their rights by “providing false and misleading information at the time of recruitment regarding the terms and conditions of employment; failing to provide potable water, toilets and hand-washing facilities for plaintiffs while they worked in the fields; and failing to pay plaintiffs for all the hours of work performed.”

DuPont Pioneer was formerly called Pioneer Hi-Bred and is part of Wilmington, Delaware-based DuPont Co.

The seed company said the claims were untrue.

It said it “denies that the housing facilities failed to comply with state and federal health and safety requirements, given that the facilities were inspected and approved by the Michigan Department of Agriculture.”

The company also denied that it “provided false and misleading information to plaintiffs concerning the terms, conditions or existence of agricultural employment when recruiting and offering plaintiffs employment.”

On the availability of drinking water on the job, the company denied the claim but acknowledged “that on some occasions cups were not immediately available.”

A court filing last week said all parties “remain open” to a settlement. Attorneys for both sides said they “believe that all discovery proceedings can be completed by June 30, 2015.”

Wheat Breeding Advances

Fri, 13 Nov 2020 05:58:40 GMT

Researchers tackle the tough wheat genome

Wheat truly feeds our world. It accounts for 20% of the calories we consume, and 35% of the Earth’s population depends on it for their very survival.

Yet the crop has remained relatively elusive to scientists, partially due to its complexity at the genetic level. The wheat genome has about 17 billion paired DNA bases, which makes it even more complex than the human genome. Because around 80% of the genome contains repetitive sequences, it has been difficult to interpret readouts and determine whether a particular sequence is unique.

However, a recent breakthrough has allowed an international team of scientists to complete a “shotgun sequencing,” breaking up the wheat genome into smaller, more workable segments.

Shahryar Kianian, professor of plant sciences at North Dakota State University and one of the collaborators, says the project has been in progress for several years. Generating the necessary information was a fast, relatively inexpensive process, he says—but assembling and arranging this information required quite a bit of brainpower and computer processing.

“Essentially, we put together the world’s largest jigsaw puzzle,” he says.

Why go through all the trouble? Researchers hope the study will lead to multiple positive outcomes. For example, the sequencing project greatly multiplied the number of genetic markers for plant breeders to use, Kianian says. They could be used to more effectively breed and adapt wheat to parts of Asia and sub-Saharan Africa to improve drought tolerance, or create varieties that are more resistant to disease.

“Fifteen years ago, we had about a thousand markers,” Kianian says. “This breakthrough put us in the millions. Now, if you are targeting UG-99 resistance, for instance, you can transfer genes more easily and more cleanly.”

Not there yet. There is still much work to be done. Bikram Gill, distinguished professor of plant pathology and director of the Wheat Genetics Resource Center (WGRC) at Kansas State University, says the next step is to develop a “gold standard sequence” for wheat. Scientists will anchor the complete sequence to a genetic map of agronomic traits important to the wheat industry.

Researchers at WGRC and elsewhere are also studying wheat’s polyploid properties, which could lead to breakthroughs in other food crops such as cabbage and broccoli.

“Polyploidy is both a curse and a blessing,” Gill explains. “It provided the evolutionary novelty that made wheat the world’s most important crop, but at the same time it made the genome more complex and a hard nut to crack.”

For now, the gene sequencing of wheat has allowed researchers to identify, categorize and record individual genes and gene cluster locations. Gill considers it a rough map, but loaded with points of interest for future studies. Like his collaborators, Gill says his focus is still on the true prize—the gold standard sequencing.

“With funding from the USDA and the National Science Foundation, center scientists have made sequenceready physical maps,” he says. “But lack of funding is hurting the U.S. effort for gold standard sequencing of the wheat genome.”

Top Wheat Producing States in 2011
(millions of bushels)

1 Kansas 276.5
2 North Dakota 199.9
3 Montana 175.0
4 Washington 167.9
5 Idaho 116.0
6 South Dakota 104.8
7 Colorado 81.8
8 Oregon 74.5
9 Minnesota 70.5
10 Oklahoma 70.4

You can e-mail Ben Potter at bpotter@farmjournal.com .

What Makes Healthy Soil?

Fri, 13 Nov 2020 05:58:44 GMT

Take the first step toward more stress- and drought-resistant soils by adopting the Systems Approach to soil management

Nearly 75 years ago, USDA soil scientist Charles E. Kellogg wrote: “Essentially, all life depends upon the soil.” Expressing a similar sentiment, President Franklin D. Roosevelt said: “The nation that destroys its soil destroys itself.”

Think about it: No matter how much management, labor and fertilizer you apply, and regardless of the quality of seed you plant, it’s the soil that underpins how much food and fiber you produce.

During the hard-hitting drought this past summer, it wasn’t uncommon for one field to vary from 170 bu. to 240 bu. per acre while a nearby field of the same soil type struggled to make 100 bu. Some fields yielded zero because they folded under stress.

Farm Journal Field Agronomist Ken Ferrie saw it, too. “Some of the low yield may have been due to planting date or hybrid selection,” he says. “But some of the difference was due to poor soil health.

“In adverse conditions, healthy soil will hang on longer,” Ferrie says. “But unhealthy soil may burn up before the crop gets started.

“Farmers have always looked at the individual components of soil health, such as fertility, tillage and water management. But to really improve soil, we have to look at all the components together, in a Systems Approach to soil management.”

Farm Journal’s new series of in-depth articles about soil health will help you do that.

The first step is defining your objective. “I like to define soil health as sustained productivity,” Ferrie says.

“But we could also call it ‘maintaining profit,’ not just for ourselves but for our kids and grandkids.”

Soils were not created equal in terms of yield capacity, Ferrie notes. “Soils differ in their ability to produce a crop,” he explains. “Your lightest soil, even in the best of health, may not keep up yieldwise with a darker soil in poor health. It’s like comparing a 17-year-old to an 80-year old. Eventhough both are healthy, the teenager is more athletic.

“Even if he’s overweight, the 17-year-old may still outrun and outjump a fit 80-year old. With soils, too, some are naturally more athletic. But by making all our soils as healthy as possible, we maximize each one’s productive capacity.”

Let’s start by describing unhealthy soil, the kind you want to—have to, if at all possible—improve. You know the symptoms: poor tilth (crusting and compaction, fields struggling to get a crop up); disease problems, especially seed rot and early pythium; poor infiltration (water runs off the unhealthy soil, while it soaks into the healthy soil—often in fields that are side by side); ponding, resulting from poor drainage; low water-holding capacity (soil dries out while healthier fields stay green); unbalanced fertility, caused by pH issues; and clay knobs where the topsoil has been eroded.

What soil health is. Now let’s examine the characteristics of healthy soil. With the first one, depth of topsoil, you are limited by what nature—and, in many cases, years of erosion—have provided. “But you can still maximize the health and productivity of whatever soil you have,” Ferrie says.

You already are managing fertility, striving for balanced nutrients and proper pH. If you haven’t been blessed with naturally well-drained soil, you probably have installed some drainage to remove high water tables before they damage a crop. Good drainage also lets you make field passes in a timely fashion, without causing compaction.

Healthy soil has sufficient waterholding capacity for its soil type to help crops survive dry seasons such as 2012 (which accounts for some of the yield differences we mentioned earlier).

You understand soil tilth and are trying to improve it because tilth affects water infiltration. But this aspect of soil health is a little trickier than balancing nutrients, Ferrie notes.

“Using tillage, we can eliminate sudden density changes, improve infiltration and increase usable water-holding capacity,” Ferrie says. “We can also decrease surface and subsurface hardness. However, doing the wrong tillage at the wrong time can destroy everything we’ve accomplished.”

Healthy soil contains strong and diverse microbial activity. “In a handful of soil, there are more microbes—bacteria, fungi and actinomycetes—than there are humans on the face of the Earth,” Ferrie points out.

The good things you do for your soil are actually aimed at supporting those microbial populations. “For example, we tend to think we are applying fertilizer to feed crop plants,” Ferrie says. “But those nutrients must be processed by microorganisms and then released to the plants.

“When we apply lime, we are applying it not for the corn crop, but for the microbes,” Ferrie adds. “Corn can live with a pH as low as 4.0. But soil microbes can’t.

“In fact,” Ferrie summarizes, “everything that we do to improve soil health is really aimed at building and maintaining this diverse population of soil microorganisms.”

Finally, healthy soil is free of toxins. That includes herbicide residues, allelopathic substances and acids.

The defining characteristic of healthy soil—the one that jumps out at you from the road or the combine monitor—is its ability to resist adverse weather events, such as drought.

“If you succeed at managing those factors, you’ll have healthy soil,” Ferrie says.

Chemical, physical and biological. One way to evaluate the management aspects of soil health is to think of them as chemical, physical and biological.

You already understand the chemical side. It’s the nutrient and pH analysis that you find on your soil test.

“Physical aspects like soil texture— the percentage of sand, silt and clay particles—make some soils more ‘athletic’ than others,” Ferrie says.

There’s a huge difference in the size of those particles. “Think of it like this,” Ferrie says. “If a sand particle is a 747 airliner, a silt particle is a Cessna and a clay particle is a hummingbird.”

Another physical aspect is aggregate stability. “Healthy soil has particles bound together, in a crumblike structure, or soil aggregate,” Ferrie says. “Different sized aggregates create macropores, which hold water that can be extracted and used by plants. Smaller pores, called micropores, also hold water, but it is bound tightly to soil particles and unavailable to plants.

“In healthy soil, if you immerse an aggregate in water, it will hold together. If the aggregate falls apart, sand remains in the upper layer, while silt and clay shift downward in the soil profile. This changes macropores into micropores, inhibiting water percolation,” Ferrie explains.

“So aggregate stability translates directly into available water-holding capacity—the amount of usable water your soil can hold above the water table,” he summarizes.

“For practical purposes, the waterholding capacity determines how heavy a population you can plant—something you must understand to use variable-rate technology.”

Another physical property of soil is penetration resistance. You can think of it as compaction or soil strength. When soil is free of compaction and dense layers, it is easier for crop roots to penetrate. It’s also easier for water to move upward, via capillary action.

The biological aspect is organic matter—the portion of soil that was once living plants or animals. That’s one of the things that makes soil microorganisms so important. They mineralize organic matter into nutrients that crop plants can use.

Soils with higher levels of organic matter are able to retain more nutrients. This is called cation exchange capacity (CEC) and is expressed as a numerical value.

“We’re looking for a balance of chemical, physical and biological aspects,” Ferrie says. “It’s possible to have high soil fertility levels due to manure applications but poor soil biology and physical health. An organic farmer could have great physical and biological properties in his soil but poor chemical health. For healthy soil, you must manage all three components.”

Each component—chemical, physical and biological—can be tested, providing benchmarks to measure your progress in improving soil health.

Make your soil healthier. When you understand the various aspects of soil health, you can start improving it.

Tackle the ea siest steps first. These include balancing fertility and pH levels and using vertical tillage to remove compacted layers, Ferrie says. Improve drainage if you and your landlords can afford the investment.

After that, the options get tougher. “Reducing tillage is beneficial,” Ferrie says, “but it may delay planting, especially in northern areas. No-till may be difficult in poorly drained soils. Some can’t be no-tilled until you improve structure. Changing tillage systems requires its own Systems Approach, from planting through harvest.”

“Diversified crop rotations are better for soil health, but they don’t fit many operations that have specialized in a few crops for efficiency,” he says. “For new crops to be practical, they require markets, storage capacity and often livestock.”

Cover crops, in conjunction with no-till, have the highest potential to improve soil health. “Cover crops can provide diversity for soil microbes; improve soil aggregation, water filtration and storage; suppress weeds; reduce soil erosion; and recycle crop nutrients so they won’t escape and pollute water sources,” Ferrie says.

“But just like adding new cash crops to your rotation, cover crops require knowledge and good management to be successful—so do your homework first. Decide what cover crop to plant, based on the cash crop that will follow it next spring.

“Decide now when you’re going to kill the cover crop next spring—and who will kill it, you or your retailer,” Ferrie says.

Determine whether you will have to pay a carbon penalty because of the increased residue created by the cover crop—and, if so, how you are going to pay it. Whether or not there’s a carbon penalty will depend on which cover crop you plant and which cash crop follows it.

Short growing seasons add to the challenge. “Planting a cover crop without fully understanding all these things is failing to apply the Systems Approach,” Ferrie says.

Short-term versus long-term. The conundrum with soil health is maintaining profit as you make improvements. “The most profitable farms may not be the healthiest, and the healthiest farms may not be the most profitable,” Ferrie says. “But when you find that balance, you’ll have a farm that is healthy, profitable and sustainable for your generation and generations to come. Those are the fields our kids and grandkids will farm in the future. Let’s leave them a legacy of healthy, sustainable soils.

“That’s the goal we have to keep in mind as we invest our time, money and effort in improving soil health. It will be worth the effort.”

We’ll tell you how to measure the health of your soils, and how to start improving them, in future installments of this series.

Fast Facts

Characteristics of Healthy Soil:

Deep topsoil, based on soil type
Balanced nutrients and proper pH
Good drainage
Usable water-holding capacity to withstand drought
Good soil tilth
Resistant to adverse events
Strong and diverse microbial populations
Free of toxins

Characteristics of Unhealthy Soil:

Poor tilth
Crusting
Compaction
Disease
Poor infiltration
Poor drainage
Low water-holding capacity
Unbalanced fertility

Building on the Systems Approach, the Soil Health series will detail the chemical, physical and biological components of soil and how to give your crop a fighting chance. www.FarmJournal.com/soil_health

You can e-mail Darrell Smith at dsmith@farmjournal.com .

Corteva Showcases New Robotic Technology In The Field

Wed, 28 Jul 2021 17:36:35 GMT

Meet “Annie.” This robot being used by Corteva Agriscience is the result of a partnership with Boston Dynamics and Trimble.

The robot is one of Boston Dynamics’ Spot series, which can “walk” between the rows of crops in a field. Corteva is using the robot in field testing of new seed–with all of its data collection capabilities, the robot can be a tool in phenotyping. And the company aims to use it in research and development of new crop protection molecules. Trimble systems power the autonomous navigation.

“Annie’s proximal sensing capabilities and ability to execute specific actions at a certain plot or by individual plant will help us challenge assumptions about the way things are done,” Geoff Graham, leader of seed product development for Corteva Agriscience said in a company news release. “The ability to leverage an autonomous robot to navigate row crop fields, while carrying and pulling instruments to collect data or apply chemicals more efficiently, has tremendous potential as we push the boundaries of what we can deliver to farmers.”

The company’s name for Annie (short for Anatoly) was inspired by Pioneer founder Henry A Wallace’s Anatolian Shepherd dogs.

We're taking ag robotics to new heights collaborating with @BostonDynamics and @TrimbleCorpNews, the jointly developed solution combines the mobility of Annie, autonomous navigation capabilities & an innovative approach to helping farmers overcome ag’s most pressing challenges. pic.twitter.com/ptoRknkq8k
— Corteva Agriscience (@corteva) July 20, 2021