“Too many companies have a very diverse playbook with a lot of plays and they try to run all of them at the same time.”
– Jim Schweigert, Gro Alliance
maybe not in the industry – that are looking for partnerships with people that understand the business.”
All industry growth depends on attracting talent to the sector – its real asset. Youthful talent no longer seemed attracted to the business, but recent industry efforts to attract and foster young professionals are making a difference.
The top priority has been the shortage of plant breeders. Not only is it a matter of recruiting young scientists, it is also about getting them the right opportunities to learn. “The real challenge is that breeding programs are moving away from the universities. Universities, because of budgetary reasons, are cutting back and it becomes very difficult then to have an excellent platform for potential plant breeders to learn the art and that’s a big challenge,” says Latham.
It is also a matter of understanding the evolving skills a plant breeder needs. No longer an isolated guru among field plots, the Agriculture Research Service’s Peter Bretting explains: “these days plant breeders are the hub or the leaders of large research teams that include field operations, extensive lab operations, sophisticated information management technology. To be a plant breeder you have to have terrific managerial skills so it is far more sophisticated and varied than some might think.”
With that in mind, American Seed Research Foundation sponsors Operation Student Connection to bring university graduate students in plant breeding to the ASTA convention. This is just one of many programs underway. The National Council of Commercial Plant Breeders has an outreach program and they support students to attend meetings. Major seed companies are funding fellowships for plant breeders and the land-grant universities and are also tuition sharing with their staff.
There are also internal mentoring programs offered within companies and the highly successful FuSE (Future Seed Executives) program within the Seed Trade Association. Built
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by bright young people like this year’s Future Giant winner Jim Schweigert, the program has taken off. For Schweigert’s part, the mentorship has been invaluable, but part of bringing him back into the family seed business was generating a passion about what it does. “It was really about how the role of agriculture was changing society and how it was going to improve the lives of humanity and the future.”
Such noble goals to help the world eat better and have less hunger are a powerful point of intersection for the industry. “We’re using that window of opportunity to bring our opinion, the International Seed Federation opinion, across and also together with other ag input providers we are using that same opportunity to make sure that our voices are heard,” says Marcel Bruins, ISF Secretary General.
Still, it all comes back to research and while investment remains high in the private sector, the public sector faces long-term funding issues. “At best we are holding our own [federally] and on a state level, some of my colleagues indicate that it is really pretty grim at the moment,”says Bretting. The cost of doing business is higher and demand for resources like genebank information is growing exponentially. Web hits for the GRIN database went from 500,000 in 2004/05 to 2 million last year and are climbing. The number of individual germplasm samples requested has gone from an average of 120,000 to a predicted 200,000 in 2009.
“The demand for genetic resources for research and for breeding is very strong and growing. We wish we could match that with the capacity to handle it,” says a concerned Bretting. He notes public-private partnerships are on the top of everybody’s mind to find needed resources. However, take heart in two facts evident in this year’s Giant Views: Interest in the seed business is up, and the industry has gotten much better at banding together on common goals. It’s a great way to start a new decade. Robynne M. Anderson and Julie McNabb
Seed WORld
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