Why Are Cross Competitor Seed Trait Licensing Agreements So Common?

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Recently I have seen several different press releases on competitive companies deciding to share corn traits.  Most farmers look at these kinds of announcements and just flip the page to the next article without a second look.  Really you should take that second look and think about the impact on your farm in the future.

Agreements like the one recently between Dow and Monsanto confuse many farmers.  Why do competitors share new traits?  Why not just put them in your own varieties to sell more corn seed?

The value of these types of trait agreements was laid out very well in the press release:

Stacked trait products are particularly valuable for combating pest resistance and preserving trait durability. Weed resistance is also a challenge facing agriculture, and Enlist is a next-generation system that combines innovative traits providing tolerance to 2,4-D and FOPs, novel herbicides and stewardship, offering two modes of action for weed control to deliver performance that farmers need now. Monsanto is the first licensee of the Enlist trait in corn.

I spoke to Jeff Loessin, Portfolio Marketing Leader – Crop Protection, Dow AgroSciences, about why trait developers do not just keep new traits for their own corn varieties, why they are shared with competitors and a little about the specifics of their recent trait license deal with Monsanto.

If you cannot see the embedded audio player above, CLICK HERE

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