64 I SEED WORLD EUROPE I SEEDWORLD.COM/EUROPE | OCTOBER 2026 What Agricultural Innovation Looks Like Up Close BY: PETAR MADJARAC, HEAD OF BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT, EMEA I have stood in fields on different continents and heard the same concern in many languages: agriculture is becoming harder to predict. Changing growing conditions, volatile weather and market forces are pushing farmers to make high- stakes decisions with less certainty. That was the lens I brought when I toured Bayer’s Crop Science headquarters in Monheim, Germany. Big R&D centres are impressive places, housing sophisti cated labs, equipment and technologies most farmers will never see, as well as people who spend their careers working on enormously complex problems. But agriculture has a way of humbling even very good sci ence. A farmer makes the best decisions possible, puts a crop in the ground and then spends the season dealing with whatever weather, disease, insects and weeds happen to arrive. What impressed me at Monheim was the combination of sophistication and pragmatism. Across Bayer’s seeds and traits innovation, crop protection and digital solutions, I kept seeing different versions of the same R&D problem: agriculture is inher ently variable, but the tools farmers rely on have to perform as predictably as possible within that variability. Breeders are trying to anticipate environments years before a variety reaches the field. Scientists are studying how molecules behave across plants and conditions to better protect them. Biological researchers are trying to turn biological activity into products that perform consistently. They are different approaches to one of agriculture’s hardest questions: how do you build greater reliability into a biological system that will never be completely predictable? PARTNER CONTENT SEED STARTS WITH A PREDICTION Plant breeding is an exercise in looking forward. A breeder makes decisions today about genetics that will eventually be planted into environments that don’t yet exist. “The biggest challenge that we have in plant breeding is really to predict the environment, and it’s the same challenge a farmer has, whether that’s a small holder farmer in India or a large commercial farmer in Mato Grosso, Brazil,” Johannes Daniël Rossouw, Senior VP and R&D Plant Breeding Lead, said. He had a personal example. On his family farm in South Africa, they had experienced a 50-year drought five years earlier. Then, just days before our conversation, they had a 100-year flood. That stuck with me. The uncertainty breeders are trying to account for is the same uncertainty farmers eventually have to manage. Breeders now have enormous amounts of data, sophisti cated predictive tools and technologies such as gene editing to make breeding faster and more targeted. But the conversation wasn’t really about gene editing on its own. It was about making better breeding decisions, sooner. “The adding of gene editing, it’s a tool that accelerates the normal plant breeding process, and it helps us address the needs of farmers much, much quicker so our products are climate resilient and can face different types of diseases, insect weather conditions, and potential yield to make sure that it’s really going to deliver on the promise we’ve made with selling that bag of seeds to a farmer,” Rossouw added. “The promise we’ve made” was the part that stayed with me.
View this content as a flipbook by clicking here.