A Pipeline to the Future: Emerging from 2020 into Agriculture's Next Great Era

This week, I had the distinct honor of taking part in a series of events that represent one of my favorite periods across the annual Bayer calendar – our internal and external R&D Pipeline presentations.

The Pipeline announcement marks a celebration of a year (or, in most cases, years) of hard work, and inspires new conversation around where we – both at Bayer and across agriculture – should go next. As the leader of a future-facing organization committed to continuous evolution, I also always enjoy highlighting our team's innovative thinking and exceptional efforts.

Beyond the great strides we've made in the pursuit of new tools, techniques and insights that will help growers productively and sustainably meet the food security needs of our growing population, I'm particularly proud of how the Pipeline presentations demonstrate a year of resiliency. A variety of natural events, diseases and infestations – not to mention the backdrop of a global pandemic – threatened to disrupt both our own operations and those of the customers we serve. During the last 12 months, we've reinforced just how essential agriculture is, and how agile, creative and responsive we become in times of uncertainty.

Our pipeline remains deep and broad, and since December, we've managed to commercialize 10 crop protection formulations and advance three key biotech products to launch while providing farmers around the world with more than 430 newly commercialized hybrids and varieties of corn, soybeans, cotton and vegetables.

Despite 2020's challenges, our Pipeline events mark our impactful steps in the transition to a new era of agriculture – or what we like to call "The Beginning of What's Next."

Soy: Building Upon the Industry's Best Platform

Even as we proudly maintain our leadership position in soy, we continue to enhance our soybean pipeline. In fact, 2021 may be our most important year yet for soy, thanks to the progression and introduction of new traits and beneficial varieties that will provide growers access to a wider range of high-quality options.

Most notably, this past year we continued to advance our industry-best portfolio of stacked herbicide tolerant traits to give growers greater weed control flexibility while combating resistance. Our fourth herbicide generation is now in Phase 3, with the fifth generation closely behind in Phase 2. We also received a new five-year registration for our XtendiMax® herbicide from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in October. In terms of the crops themselves, we continue to celebrate the late 2020 EU unveiling of our XtendFlex soybean variety – which features three stacked traits and represents a more capable and tolerant replacement for Roundup Ready 2 Xtend.

A "Shorter" Path to Corn Innovation

Last year, we previewed the potential of a shorter stature hybrid to transform corn growth. Today, we're even more convinced that we can deliver shorter, stronger and more sustainable corn crops to more fields around the world.

In 2020, we initiated VITALA, our first short stature corn pilot in Mexico. The pilot has proven successful to date, with growers specifically noting the added ease of maintenance through more precise inputs.

Our U.S. hybrid pilot fields also endured an unexpected but valuable test from the strong winds of the August 2020 Corn Belt derecho. While the storm decimated many fields, our short stature corn hybrids largely remained upright and ultimately reached harvest. This unusual event validated the crops' durability against significant natural events and potential to resist the green snap and stalk lodging that far too often hinder corn growers' fields.

From Selecting the Best to Designing the Best…

Our continued corn and soy advancements symbolize the strength of our precision breeding program. Leveraging AI technology and data science, we can identify and prescribe the seed varieties that offer the greatest potential for success. We've already compiled the largest and most diverse collection of seeds and traits across multiple crops and expect our precision breeding platform to evolve even further during the next decade.

…and Protecting the Best

To maximize the genetic potential of these more diverse and capable seed varieties, we continue to scale our crop protection portfolio. Through extensive early safety testing and the use of differentiated, data-driven starting points, we've doubled the number of small molecule candidates in discovery and launched at least one new active ingredient every year since 2007. With 10 new active ingredients currently in our Pipeline, we will advance even more promising candidates in the coming years.

As you may remember, during last year's Showcase we introduced the industry's first new MOA for post-emergence weed control in nearly three decades. One year later, this MOA is in Phase 3 and demonstrates notable control of tough grasses historically resistant to glyphosate. Additionally, our biotech discovery program is pursuing an herbicide tolerance trait to pair with this MOA.

We also continue to build upon our core competencies in formulation and fermentation to introduce new and more sustainable crop protection solutions rooted in biologics. Later this year, we'll launch Serenade Soil Activ in the U.S. and Australia – an evolution of what's already agriculture's most widely used biological that will offer growers an easier-to-use and more capable safeguard against soil and bacterial pests. Additionally, we're thrilled to introduce the industry's first biotech trait specifically designed to counter piercing and sucking insects with our new ThryvOn technology.

So much has changed, both in agriculture and society, since our 2020 Showcase. And while our hard work is far from over, the last year has reinforced that we simply don't have the industry's largest pipeline – we have the most productive, comprehensive and purposeful one too, all backed by a dedicated team committed to exploring every possibility to more positively impact growers, the communities they serve and the environment.

While I'm optimistic that 2021 will be a brighter year, I'm fully confident that agriculture will continue to thrive regardless of what's ahead. This is only the Beginning of What's Next, and I'm already excited by the thought of what we'll have to share at this time next year.