Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Page 14 Page 15 Page 16 Page 17 Page 18 Page 19 Page 20 Page 21 Page 22 Page 23 Page 24 Page 25 Page 26 Page 27 Page 28 Page 29 Page 30 Page 31 Page 32 Page 33 Page 34 Page 35 Page 36 Page 37 Page 38 Page 39 Page 40 Page 41 Page 42 Page 43 Page 44 Page 45 Page 46 Page 47 Page 48 Page 49 Page 50 Page 51 Page 52 Page 53 Page 54 Page 55 Page 56 Page 57 Page 58 Page 59 Page 60 Page 61 Page 62 Page 63 Page 64 Page 65 Page 66 Page 67 Page 68 Page 69 Page 70 Page 71 Page 72 Page 73 Page 74 Page 75 Page 76 Page 77 Page 78 Page 79 Page 80 Page 81 Page 82 Page 83 Page 84JANUARY 2017 SEEDWORLD.COM / 65 in the past 10 years — the biggest increase in history. However, he said the world only needs about 1.8 percent more calories to feed itself each year. “The world today is producing 2.4 percent more grain, largely due to better genetics, better agronomy and better farming practices,” Basse said. “We are building grain stocks. We are back to that landscape we call 1980 to 2005. It’s a dif- ferent landscape than where we were in 2005 up to about 2013.” It’s not just grain that’s oversupplied; energy is, too. “Last week, you basically saw OPEC register its first production cut in eight years,” Basse noted. “Coordinated with the minor producers, it was the first production cut going back to 2001.” Add to that de-carbonization, an effort to decrease greenhouse gas emis- sions. “We believe that by 2025, one-third of U.S. cars will be of electric nature,” he said. “If you think about that happening and solar panels on your roof, feeding your house electricity, we start peaking out crude oil demand.” Moving on to other factors, he explained the world is seeing increased nationalism and pointed to recent events in Italy, the Brexit and the United States. Additionally, inflation is starting to bubble. Basse said this is good news, explaining that it’s the only way to grow your way out of debt over time. Basse said he expects to see improvements for hard assets by late 2017 and early 2018. In summary, he said the world is pro- ducing too much food again today. “The key question going forward is: ‘Will there be enough economic growth, outside the United States, to sustain the demand?’ We believe this bounce in inflation will cause grain prices to go sideways,” Basse said. “I’m not as bear- ish on grain this year as I was last year. But if we have another big harvest in the Northern Hemisphere come July, August, September, we will see prices move down again. But for today, we are cheap enough.” ASTA Talks Plant Breeding Innovation At the show, ASTA held a press confer- ence to spotlight the significance of plant breeding innovation, specifically CRISPR- Cas9, and the role it could play in the future of crop improvement. “So many of the things that impact our daily lives can be traced back to a seed,” said Mark Herrmann, ASTA chair, during the opening remarks. “That really drives to our ‘Better Seed, Better Life’ focus. Continued innovation in plant breeding is directly related to global food security, nutrition and a safe and sustainable envi- ronment.” But modern plant breeding is not a set place that industry has arrived at. “Plant breeding is an evolution,” shared Andy LaVigne, ASTA president and CEO, and it’s an area of focus both domestically and internationally for the association as it looks to evaluate and influence policy in the years ahead. Setting the foundation, he explained that plant breeding goes back 10,000 years to simply selecting plants with favorable characteristics all the way to the 1900s with cross breeding and hybridiza- tion and mutation genesis and cell culture. “Plant breeding builds upon itself,” he said. “We understand things more and more each year because we are better at mapping genomes and dealing with bioinformatics. And the next evolution of plant breed- ing is genome editing, he said, which works within the plant’s family. “Whether it’s the wild relative or the product that sold into the grain industry or the produce market, there are wildly diverse character- istics within plants,” LaVigne said. “It just depends on which ones we are harnessing to bring into the marketplace to address the opportunities for consumer demands. It allows us to reach the same endpoint as we could through traditional methods, but in a more precise manner.” This has led the association and its members to adopt the following policy when it comes to plant breeding innova- tion: “Plant breeding varieties developed through the latest breeding methods should not be differentially regulated if they are similar to or indistinguishable from varieties that could have been pro- duced from earlier breeding methods.” He stressed the importance of making sure that plant breeders have access to all the tools in the toolbox to bring new varieties to the market to address climate change and pest and disease pressures and other challenges to bring consumers what they want and demand. As part of the press conference, Jerry Flint of DuPont Pioneer, Corinne Marshall of Sakata Seeds America and Juliet Marshall of the University of Idaho spoke about the potential benefits of CRISPR- Cas9 as it relates to their business. Flint, who serves as DuPont Pioneer’s vice president of industry affairs and regu- latory, says that since the company intro- duced the first commercial hybrid in the 1920s, it has been involved in the co-devel- opment and introduction of Herculex with Dow AgroSciences, which brought insect control as a new tool for U.S. farmers. Flint said as they look at what’s hap- pening further out with climate change, population growth and nutritional changes that need to occur, they need to continue to “upgrade their toolbox in terms of what’s available to plant breeders so that they can provide the best tools in those programs to meet those growing needs.” Flint explained that one of those tools is CRISPR-Cas and that DuPont Pioneer is a leading company in its use for plant applications. He said they can use it for gene deletions, edits and in some cases search and replace. “One of the things that we do is look at the plant genetics that already exist and how can we deploy those in the plant vari- eties that we already have,” he said. From a real world application, Flint talked about the recently announced part- nership with the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) for maize lethal necrosis, a devastating disease in Africa that can cause significant