EUROPEAN-SEED.COM I EUROPEAN SEED I 35 teams in crop protection and seeds expertise, and we excel in attracting external talent. The new Corteva Agriscience company will continue as a pure-play company, focusing solely on agriculture. Can you explain how this will benefit your customers? PF: We are bringing together the complementary portfolios and strengths of three separate businesses (DuPont Pioneer, DuPont Crop Protection, and Dow AgroSciences) to become one fully integrated whole – a single global leader focused solely on agriculture. To be a pure play agriculture company, we intend to bring a broader suite of products to the market, faster, so we can be even better partners to growers, meeting and exceeding their expectations for innovation and helping them to increase their productivity and profitability. The new division will be based on three pillars, namely seed, crop protection products and integrated solutions. I believe the seed and crop protection parts are well known. Could you expand a bit on the integrated solutions? PF: This is about innovation. I am talking about three pillars. The first is the combination of the crop protection portfolio (Dow AgroSciences and DuPont Crop Protection), which is broadening our offering in the market in herbicides, fungicides and insecti- cides and will be able to meet customer demand in more geogra- phies and in all key crops. The second is seeds. The strength of Dow AgroSciences in traits combined with the DuPont Pioneer lead germplasm is a huge opportunity. The third pillar is our integrated crop solutions: to combine seeds, crop protection and services where and when it makes sense. Our vision is to deliver customized products and services to meet farmers’ needs for each hectare. By combining our Dow and DuPont product lines, we are able to create more comprehensive solutions to help grow- ers meet rising demand sustainably, responsibly and safely. Let me bring here a few examples – happening now. One is sunflower. We offer customers a wide portfolio of sunflower hybrids and solutions, in all market segments, such as our high oleic hybrids that provide direct consumer and food manufacturers bene- fits, thanks to their healthy and high-performance oil. Corteva Agriscience is strongly committed to sunflower innovation as demonstrated by our recent investment in a cutting-edge sun- flower technology center in Seville, Spain. Additionally, we have recently introduced another innovation into the corn market: our m3™ silage brand, which uniquely positions us as a compet- itive actor on the silage market. The m3™ corn silage hybrids deliver greater milk production efficiency through higher yield and highly digestible starch, allowing dairy farmers to increase their productivity and profitability. What about mid-term innovations? PF: Corteva Agriscience is a global leader in the field of CRISPR- Cas for the development of agricultural products in a broad range of crops. CRISPR-CAS helps our scientists to develop innovative and sustainable solutions to farmers similar to those realized through conventional plant breeding techniques, but with even greater quality and accuracy, and with more efficient develop- ment timelines. Another innovation is ProPound™, which is a new advanced rapeseed meal with a protein content compara- ble to soybean meal, high levels of digestible amino acids and energy, and low levels of fiber. Through rigorous nutritional testing it has been shown that this new meal can be used suc- cessfully as a substitute for soy meal in swine, cattle and poultry feed. ProPound rapeseed is a product of conventional breed- ing. Propound canola is already commercial in Canada and new ProPound varieties will be launched in 2017, among others in a stack with the successful Omega-9 High Oleic oil trait to provide two benefits from the same plant. Propound has the potential to improve the EU’s protein self-sufficiency rate and to decrease dependency on imported soy. Pierre Flye Sainte Marie is the Corteva Agriscience, Agriculture Division of DowDuPont™, leader for Europe, Middle East, Africa (EMEA) Region. He moved into this role in September 1, 2017 and he is based in Switzerland.