Jim Blome heads one of the world’s largest seed companies, but he isn’t ready to spill the beans on Bayer CropScience’s future plans for expansion on its Research Triangle Park campus.
Blome, president and CEO of Bayer CropScience LP and head of Crop Protection North America, does admit that his company has a master development plan that includes “several more facilities” for RTP. He’s just not ready to say what all of them are, or when they’ll materialize.
Blome was joined by a bevy of shovel-wielding celebrants who dug into rain-soaked mud Monday to officially begin construction on Bayer’s $29.6 million “Greenhouse 1” (GH1) research facility.
‘A showcase for the new agricultural technology’
Gwyn Riddick, MBA, executive advisor, strategic development, agricultural biotechnology consultant with the North Carolina Biotechnology Center, was among those who spoke to the groundbreaking audience. A native of rural Randolph County, Riddick noted the contrast between Bayer’s new greenhouses and his family’s installation — the first greenhouse in Randolph County.
“This is a showcase for the new agricultural technology,” said Riddick of the GH1 plan.
The 29,500-square-foot building is slated to open around the end of 2015, the latest in a string of multi-million-dollar investments on the Alexander Drive campus, which serves as Bayer’s North American and global seeds headquarters.
“We have four sites in the Raleigh area,” Blome said in an interview after the groundbreaking. “We’re going to bring them all onto this site in the next few years. We want to create a lot of interaction among our scientists and other personnel, have them running into each other in our open-office environment and exposing themselves to other ideas.”
The company has about 700 employees in the Triangle so far.
Good for seeds, not so much for bugs, disease
GH1 will accommodate the company’s seed trait research and provide dedicated and isolated space for insect testing, consolidated space for nematode trait research, and the capability for groundbreaking plant disease research.
Leading the research effort is Catharine Feuillet, a French academic scientist lured to North Carolina by Bayer in July 2013 because she wanted to see her research “achieve something in the field.”
Feuillet has spent the past 20 years in wheat research, initially at the University of Zurich in Switzerland and more recently at the French National Institute for Agricultural Research – an agency similar to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
France to RTP: ‘happy I made this move’
“I’m truly happy I made this move,” she said. “I miss family and friends in France, of course, but I love it here. North Carolina is such a friendly place. It’s a great state. And I love the values Bayer holds. I’m excited to be part of this industry at this place, because only industry can make this kind of difference for the world.”
Asked what she’d consider a success 10 years from now, Feuillet didn’t hesitate. “A 10 percent increase in yield,” she said.
“We’ve plucked the easy stuff with biotech, inserting a gene of interest to get what we want,” she said. “From now on we’ll be working with a combination of things – chemistry, biologics, breeding, biotech, looking for the best combinations of approaches. Bayer shares this vision of integrated solutions.”
Both Greenhouse 1 in RTP and a new greenhouse in Memphis, Tennessee, are part of Bayer CropScience’s plans to make about $1 billion in capital expenditures in the United States between 2013 and 2016, mainly to ramp up research and development and to expand its crop protection product line. The expenditures are part of a $3.3 billion global investment program.
Editor’s note: Jim Shamp is director of public relations for the N.C. Biotechnology Center
(C) N.C. Biotechnology Center
