A licensing agreement announced Wednesday will make Lincoln the North American headquarters for wheat-breeding research by Bayer CropScience AG.
Bayer plans to bring 20 to 30 plant scientists to work at what is expected to be a 300-acre complex, where they will focus on better yields, disease resistance and other challenges.
Utech, the former Office of Technology Development at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, is the other partner to an agreement unveiled in Kearney during the Nebraska Ag Classic.
The partnership between the German company and the nonprofit corporation -- created last year to link public and private research -- also makes $2 million available for an endowed professorship at NU.
Steve Baenziger, veteran East Campus wheat breeder, will be the first to hold the Nebraska Wheat Growers Presidential Chair.
"It's a wonderful day for wheat, a wonderful day for the University of Nebraska, and we hope it will be an equally wonderful day for Bayer CropScience," Baenziger said.
What happens on Baenziger's watch and in conjunction with Bayer could put wheat on the list of transgenic crops for the first time. That's a matter of international significance.
"It's a goal of the whole industry is what I would say," he said.
The vast majority of the seed Nebraska farmers use to grow corn, soybeans and other prominent grain options already carries such genetically engineered traits as disease resistance and herbicide resistance.
"And in wheat it's zero, absolutely nothing. And the reason for that is that we don't have harmony among the great exporting nations to be able to do that," Baenziger said.
Rice is the other exception when it comes to genetic engineering. The reason for resistance, in both cases, has much to do with wheat and rice being primary food crops and a sense of public uneasiness at some export destinations with genetically modified products.
Sally Clayshulte, U.S. wheat-breeding operations manager for Bayer, joined Baenziger and others at a Wednesday teleconference with news media.
Clayshulte said the company intends to work on "nongenetically modified and genetically modified traits as they come along."
"This is a long-term project, a long-term collaboration, and this is just the very beginning," she said.
Larry Flohr of Chappell and the Nebraska Wheat Board said he didn't know a producer in Nebraska who doesn't get excited about the potential of increased yield, varieties that have better lodging resistance and other types of wheat progress.
But sought out later Wednesday by the Journal Star, Lodgepole wheat producer Doug Schmale didn't sound all that excited about the transgenic implications of the Kearney announcement.
"The reason there has always been a great deal of hesitancy in the industry about transgenic wheats," Schmale said, "is that the customer is not ready to accept them."
Nor is he convinced that moving wheat into biotechnology mode will restore it to the prominence it once had in Southeast Nebraska and elsewhere.
"We're not losing acres to corn necessarily because of the transgenic traits in corn. We're losing acres to corn because it's a more profitable crop to grow in a lot of regions," he said.
Despite Schmale's perspective, Bayer's corporate website notes that wheat still is grown on more acres worldwide than any other grain crop.
Baenziger said it's to be expected that more yield progress has been made with corn than wheat because there's more effort on it and more resources going into it.
"One of the things that's tremendous is that commercial investment is coming back into wheat," he said.
Bayer already has established a reputation for boosting the agronomic and economic potential of cotton, canola and other plants.
Garth Hodges, manager of wheat seeds and traits for Bayer, said the company "was looking for a home, looking for a place we could put our main station" for wheat research in the United States.
Although Kansas and North Dakota are among several more prominent wheat-growing states, Hodges said, Lincoln makes sense in several ways.
Among them, it's a university setting and there's a lot of diversity in growing conditions within one or two hours of Lincoln.
The pairing of the university and Bayer is non-exclusive, meaning they can work together on some projects and independently on others.
But Baenziger said the university needs a partner to move research into the marketplace.
"They're going to develop the traits," he said. "It's just too costly."
In a 2009 policy statement, the National Association of Wheat Growers and four other wheat industry organizations described biotech wheat as "essential to address the competitiveness problem facing wheat production and the wheat industry itself."
While he has reservations about biotechnology and the wheat association, Schmale had only praise for Baenziger.
"I think we in Nebraska are very fortunate to have somebody with the scientific skills and the integrity of somebody like Steve Baenziger," he said.
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