The Challenges For Agriculture

Agriculture can help feed the world – if only the world will let it. This was the message delivered by a panel of industry insiders to the audience at the 2014 Mid America CropLife Association (MACA) meeting in early September. As Scott Kay, vice president for U.S. crop protection for BASF Corp., observed: “We have to change the conversation in agriculture.”

Safarian

Safarian

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As panelist Lisa Safarian, vice president for U.S. row crops business for Monsanto Co., pointed out, agriculture is being charged with the growth of the world in the coming decades. “The world’s population has doubled in one generation, and that’s something that has never happened before in the history of the world,” said Safarian. “And the United Nations estimates that this population will increase another 35% by 2050. So there will be an urgent need for agriculture to feed the world, but we will need to do so on less land than ever before.”

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To accomplish this, agriculture is arming itself with not only the latest tools to increase crop yields such as biotech crops and precision technology, but by adding new workers to its ranks. As Susanne Wasson, U.S. commercial leader – crop protection for Dow AgroSciences, told attendees: “We are currently bringing on the next generation of new employees into agriculture. We at Dow have worked on adding new people so that today, more than 40% of our workers have less than five years’ experience under their belts.”

And as BASF’s Kay said, agricultural companies are doing what they can to give these new workers the tools to succeed at their jobs of helping growers achieve more crop yields. “Everyone one of these workers has to realize that it took more than one decision by the grower to accomplish a 100 bushels of soybean per acre,” he said. “Shame on us if we don’t invest in these people as a company the same way to help them do this effectively.”

Finding the right people and new methods to increase yields are only half the battle, reminded Dow AgroSciences’ Wasson. The buying public must also accept these practices, which has sometimes been an uphill fight. “Our industry’s critics are largely driven by emotion, not facts,” she said. “The moms out there on the Internet are motivated by emotional conversations about the food their kids are eating, not how it helps growers.”

Monsanto’s Safarian agreed. “We as an industry have talked about things that don’t really engage consumers,” she said. “They really don’t care about things like higher yields and less crop protection products were used. All they know is genetically-modified crops are considered part of ‘Big Agriculture,’ and ‘Big Agriculture’ is bad.”

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According to BASF’s Kay, this is part of the reason why agriculture needs to change its message, particularly when it comes to the consumer. “We need to be more proactive to the criticism of our industry,” he said. “I don’t know if we are in tune with the consumer vs. coming off always being defensive.”

Instead, suggested Jim Lehman, vice president of sales for AMVAC Chemical Corp., agricultural companies should rely such informational resources as MACA and CropLife America to distribute positive messages to consumers. “I know several people in our business that are afraid to say they work in agriculture when asked by a stranger,” said Lehman. “But instead, we could say ‘we feed the world,’ and that would probably get a whole different conversation started that might connect with the average consumer.”

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