St Louis - selling positive farming stories to the US

Monsanto are one of the agri-businesses who follow USFRA with great interest.

Following years in the public relations doldrums, (in other words "Keeping their heads down") Monsanto have been on the front foot in the past year or so when it comes to PR within the US and have a live £3m campaign of their own running across the whole country. Check out this link for details - it's VERY professional.

http://www.monsanto.com/americasfarmers/Pages/default.aspx

While at Monsanto HQ in St Louis discussing their PR strategy, I was given a tour of the facilities. Really interesting to better understand the processes associated with gene identification and replication - certainly pushed my knowledge to the limits and that's with a BSc in Biochemistry from 1991.

One of the core pieces of equipment that is shown was the corn chipper. It's their way of sampling the DNA from a seed without affecting it's viability. 

The concept of chipping a sample from a seed sounds simple enough. (e.g. scrape a bit of the seed into a cup!)

Doing this on a scale involves detailed mechanical processes such as aligning the seed (so you don't damage the embryo) and cleaning the blade and pipes down which the sampled material travels so you don't get cross-contamination.

Given that this machine samples 8 seeds at a time, this is no mean feat.

OK, so I was impressed!

If you're impressed with this too, you'd love the DNA sequencing lab in which robots do most of the manual work processing the samples taken from the chipper and matching them with specific gene markers to identify the presence of specific genotypes. Multi-million $ labs and out of date within a few years of course as technology progresses.

The biotech laboratories in which they raise and trial the plants is almost exactly the same as the facilities at Rothamsted in the UK. Although in true American style, it's cheaper for them to buy coal-generated electricity to run this site than bother making the electric themselves from renewable sources.

Given that controlled atmosphere growing cells take masses of electricity to run, this was an 'interesting' perspective from a climate change point of view.

On that point, at the baseball game the other eve, there was an advertisement for the main coal-powered electricity power company advocating the "eco-credentials" of coal fired power stations! It's way behind the measures being taken across Europe.

By the way watch out for this car, if it's doing the rounds near you!

In case you can't read the sign on the door and boot (trunk!!), this is a "Monsanto - Global Security" car. It was the only one that I saw, so it could be busy. I wonder how many mpg it does?!