74 / SEEDWORLD.COM JANUARY 2018 INDUSTRY NEWS Delivering the people, industry, business and product news you need to know. Submissions are welcome. Email us at news@issuesink.com. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue announced the appointment of five members to serve on the United Sorghum Checkoff Program Board. The producers appointed to serve three-year terms are: Klint G. Stewart (Columbus, Neb.), Carlton Bridgeforth (Decatur, Ala.), Verity Ulibarri (Melrose, N.M.), Shayne C. Suppes (Scott City, Kan.), and Charles Ray Huddleston (Celina, Texas). “The United Sorghum Checkoff Program helps sorghum producers maintain and expand sorghum markets through their efforts with research, promotion, and information sharing,” said Perdue. “Their work is important as sorghum production is critical to the U.S. farm sector and the American economy as a whole.” A French court suspended the license for two pesti- cides made by Dow Chemical, citing uncertainty over environmental risks including their effects on bees. The preliminary ruling by an administrative court in the city of Nice overturned a decision by France’s health and environment agency ANSES in September to grant a permit for the Closer and Transform crop chemicals, which contain the insecticide sulfoxa- flor. ANSES’s authorisation of the products angered environmental protection groups, which say they are part of the neonicotinoid family of substances that are being phased out in France because of concern they could be a factor in declining bee populations. ANSES argued that while sulfoxaflor functioned in a similar way to neonicotinoids, it remains present in soils and plants for a much shorter time. A team of mostly Chinese scientists has announced a new technique, called pollen magnetofection, which they say overcomes the obstacles of traditional plant- transformation methods and clears the way to geneti- cally modify ‘almost all crops’. “At the moment, we are very limited as to which plants, and even types of plants – called cultivars – we are able to transform,” explains Rachel Burton, of the ARC Centre of Excellence in Plant Cell Walls at the University of Adelaide, who was not involved in the research. “For example, we work with barley a lot and are only able to make transgenic barley from about 10 cultivars. There are even more we can’t transform at all. This technology would change that.” DuPont and Sumitomo Chemical Company, Limited announced a global agreement to collaborate on the development, registration and commercialization of seed-applied technologies for use in key crops around the world. DuPont and Sumitomo Chemical formed this collaboration out of a shared objective to accelerate development and commercialization of novel seed- applied technologies to improve early plant growth and yields. The global agreement leverages the strengths of both companies, combining the conventional chemi- cal and biological pipeline from Sumitomo Chemical, with the advanced seed technology and development and commercialization capability of DuPont Crop Protection, a business unit of DowDuPont Agriculture Division. By combining the pipeline from Sumitomo Chemical with DuPont’s technology and capability, there is an opportunity to evaluate these technolo- gies together, at much earlier stages, to understand the complementary characteristics of various prod- uct combinations. This early-stage collaboration will enhance current and future commercial products for seed-applied technologies. BUSINESS NEWS S&W Seed Company announced that it has moved its global corporate offices from Hanford, California to Sacramento, California. Located in Old Sacramento, the office will consolidate S&W’s executive, sales and marketing, finance and administration teams. S&W will continue to maintain its locations in Five Points, California, which includes seed production and pro- cessing, Nampa, Idaho, which includes seed produc- tion and processing as well as its newly constructed research and development facilities for alfalfa, stevia and sorghum, and in Arlington, Wisconsin, which includes alfalfa research and development.