You're Only a Day Away

Even though I’m sitting in the controlled environment of a hotel room in West Des Moines, I can still smell the fresh-tilled earth of Monsanto’s plot mingled with the recognizably fresh scent of healthy crops. The day was picture-perfect: sunshine and denim blue skies stretched over the Farm Progress site in Boone, where countless men and women were hurriedly adding the finishing touches to tent displays. Tractors and farm equipment continuously rattled down the gravel roads and by the time the sun started going down a fine haze of dust hung in the air.

It was an amazing day.

Since I know next to nothing about agriculture, aside from what I’ve pieced together during the past three weeks at Monsanto, I decided the best place to start my Farm Progress experience was at the Monsanto technology showcase tour. I tagged along with a few of my team members who were filming two of the showcase’s organizers while they talked about the different crops and displays on the plot.

I don’t know if I’ve ever learned so much in such a short time.

There are dozens and dozens of new products and crop types. We started in the soybean section, where three different types of pest and disease-resistant crops have been planted. The plants looked beautiful, even to my untrained eye—full dark green leaves with not a blemish complete with perfect fuzzy pods hanging from the plant. The most striking part of the soybean section is the little plot of land where dicamba-resistant soybeans have been planted next to susceptible plants. The difference is incredible—the susceptible plants are yellow and withered while the resistant plants right next to them look pristine, as you can see below.

Dion McBay talks about dicamba-resistant soybeans (on the right).

If you’re wondering what dicamba-resistant means, don’t worry. I asked, under the pretense that I was doing “research” for this blog, but I didn’t know either. Dicamba is a herbicide commonly used by growers, used for the same weed-removing purposes as the glyphosate found in Roundup. Shannon Hauf, the site’s organizer, told me that they sprayed more than one quart of dicamba on the soybean plants—and the resistant ones came out completely unscathed.

The corn traits are also incredible to see first-hand; to someone who hasn’t spent much time around crops it really is amazing to see how hardy (and tall) corn can be, especially the new drought-resistant types that are featured in the showcase. A tent was erected over some of the corn crop to simulate draught conditions, and it is more than obvious how much better the corn bred and modified for draught-resistance is. Even though the tent did come down on top of the corn crop in a huge storm in late July, the corn doesn’t reflect the damage in the least (for more on the storm and to see the damage, see Shannon’s blog, Golden Acre).

I’ve also never seen cotton plants before, and it is truly a weird and cool experience to see the plant that your clothes are made out of up close.

I spent about four hours on the plot (most people who go through spend about an hour walking through a guided tour) and by lunchtime I was thoroughly saturated with information. The afternoon was a blur of e-mail, meetings and phone calls, but I luckily found a few moments to break away and wander down some side streets close to the Monsanto area.

Dekalb and Asgrow have an amazing tent and display, and I saw some smaller vendors and companies setting up their tents for tomorrow.

Tomorrow… after all I’ve seen today it’s hard to believe that I’ll be getting up and doing it again in a few short hours. But the forecast for opening day is more blue skies (which I’m sure the more than 350,000 expected visitors to the show will appreciate), and there is so much more to experience and learn that I hope I can get it all packed into just three days.

We’ll see if I’m still this optimistic at 4:45 a.m. tomorrow. Somehow, I think I will be.