AgWired

The longest part of our tour was in the greenhouses. Our host here was Dawn McNamara.

She says they have 50,000 square feet of space here. About half of the greenhouse space is 20 years old and half was built around 2000. The newer green house areas have taller roofs so they can grow taller plants. We saw some corn that was about 16 ft. tall! It was very jack-in-the-beanstalk like.

They have 10 full time workers in this area. All the plants are color code labelled and bar coded. This allows them to very easily control the plants and the data coming from them. All their seed stock is bar coded too.

Our next stop on the tour today was where plants are being grown which will be transplanted to soil and pots.

These are kept in sterile, light-controlled rooms.

I’m not a scientist so you’ll have to contact a Syngenta representative if you want the exact term to describe what you’re seeing in these dishes. The label is “callus culture.” If you know what that means please post a comment.

The first stop on our tour was the area where plant analysis is being done. We couldn’t take pictures at this point so I’m using some from the ones provided to us. We actually received some pens in our media kits that contain a built-in memory stick. Pretty cool.

The plant analysis group has 24 members who are analyzing for things like dna and protein. It’s a high throughput facility. They literally deal with hundreds of thousands of plants at a time.

In order to get this done they’ve developed some robotic sample handlers that help get this job done. Our presenter in this area was Mary Fielder.

When it was time for us to conduct our tour here at Syngenta I was in group two. Our leader was Mike Willits who seemed to have a comprehensive knowledge of everything we would see.

We had two tours going on at the same time and timed out together perfectly without crossing paths. That’s some precise planning.

Our tour is now finished and we’re listening to Mary-Dell Chilton talk about the work she did prior to what we know as biotechnology today.

Mary is whom the building is named after. I look forward to talking with her.

I’ll be conducting interviews during and after lunch so look for a lot more to come.

Our second speaker this morning is Roger Kemble, who welcomed us earlier. Roger just finished up and now we’re in a Q&A session with him and Bruce Howison.

Roger focused on Syngenta Biotechnology, Inc. and global research. He says that in 2005 Syngenta invested $822 million in R&D and that they have 5,000 people on staff conducting this work. He says the 2 main tools they use for R&D are Biotechnology and Precision Breeding.

I don’t know if I’ll get their Powerpoint presentations but I’ll ask. There’s just too much to try to cover quickly.

One of the new products they’ve developed is the PureHeart watermelon. He called it a “personal” watermelon and it is tiny. I’ve purchased these before and think they’re great. You can find out about them from Dulcinea which is marketing them.

Displays aren’t just for trade shows.

An educational display like this one really helps when you’ve got people into your office for the first time. This display and the posters on easels around the room provide a good overview by themselves of the types of business Syngenta is involved in.

Our first speaker this morning was Bruce Howison, Head of Marketing.

Bruce gave us an overview of the Syngenta Seeds business. I was very interested to hear about work they’re doing on corn amylase for ethanol production. They’re expecting to launch this product in 2008. I’m going to learn more and conduct interviews on some of these subjects later, so we’ll get more information.

Once we got checked in this morning and settled down we were greeted by Roger Kemble, Head, Crop Genetics Research.

Roger set the stage for our day and reviewed the agenda which includes morning presentations on Syngenta’s business.

Afterward we’ll break up into groups for a facility tour. Then after lunch we’ll learn about Genomics and Drought Tolerance. Finally we’ll have time for one-on-one interviews.