An update on AgriPro

An update on AgriPro

Farm and Ranch December 29, 2011 AgriPro, a division of Syngenta Cereals, has been increasing manpower at its Pacific Northwest wheat breeding facility near Cheney, Washington. Ed Driskill, PNW Business Manager for AgriPro, provided an update at a recent ag luncheon in Spokane. In an interview Driskill said;

Driskill: “Since 2008 there has been a lot of heavy investment from private companies and Syngenta is one of those. We have been understaffed at Cheney the last few years and it is just getting the program up to speed with technical help. And then Syngenta is working on some new things, a hybrid wheat and other things, to get staffed for that. We feel like finally now we have a full staff to help out the breeding and then some of these new things Syngenta is working on.”

On of those other things in addition to hybrid wheat is research to explore specific interactions between Syngenta chemistry and wheat varieties.

So, what is next in AgriPro’s variety pipeline?

Driskill: “We are really excited about SY Ovation. It is a soft white winter wheat. New this year. It will come out in 2012. Very good supply of it, but it is the first commercially available variety in the northwest using the double haploid technology. And as I said earlier, everybody is using double haploid technology. We are the furthest advanced in that, but it looks really good both from the disease standpoint, the quality standpoint and it packs a pretty good yield. So, we are excited about that.”

I’m Bob Hoff and that’s the Northwest Farm and Ranch Report on Northwest Aginfo Net.

Previous ReportA New Year and a Goodbye
Next ReportAg economist sees shift in market paradigm