Planting a healthy future: North Carolina's agricultural biotechnology industry seeks solutions for feeding the world and slaking its thirst for energy.

• Position: BIOTECHNOLOGY ROUND TABLE - Interview

Agricultural biotechnology is an important piece of North Carolina's economy, with more than 75 companies leveraging the state's expertise in agriculture and growing biotechnology base. The North Carolina Biotechnology Center, based in Research Triangle Park, has provided $13.3 million to support agricultural biotechnology projects, which promise to increase production, make food more nutritious and open doors to new plant-based medicines, fuels and other sustainable products. Discussing industry trends and challenges at a recent round table were Doug Drabble, director of BioNetwork life science initiatives for the North Carolina Community College System in Raleigh; Michael Luther, president of the David H. Murdock Research Institutes in Kannapolis; Adam Monroe, president of Novozymes North America Inc. in Franklinton; Gwyn Riddick, vice president of agricultural biotechnology for the Biotechnology Center; Bijay Singh, Technology Center leader for BASF Plant Science in Research Triangle Park; Norris Tolson, president and chief executive of the Biotechnology Center; and Simon Warner; director of technology evaluation for Syngenta Biotechnology Inc. in Research Triangle Park. BUSINESS NORTH CAROLINA Publisher Ben Kinney moderated the round table, held at the North Carolina Research Campus in Kannapolis. The Biotechnology Center was the lead sponsor of the event, co-sponsored by Novozymes, the state community college system, BASF and Syngenta. Following is a transcript, edited for brevity and clarity.

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What does the agricultural biotechnology industry look like in North Carolina today?

Riddick: Lee me start by just talking about agriculture in North Carolina. Agriculture is still North Carolina's largest industry, a $74 million piece of the economy. It's pretty clear to those of us who have been around agriculture that there is still enormous potential in front of us. Agriculture represents both a food supply and an energy supply, or at least a raw material for energy. Biotechnology produces bigger, better nutrition for the world's population, enabling us to produce new types of crops and find new uses for existing crops. We can use crops to actually grow medicine and to start producing industrial compounds that in the past have been petroleum-based. Having a plant-based, bio-based economy can help us to be much more sustainable.

Monroe: As the worlds population grows and as the economy grows, it's going to place a tremendous amount of pressure on commodities of all sorts. The efficiency with which we use those commodities is going to be really important. The U.S. has the most efficient, productive agriculture in the world. It also happens to have the largest biotech muscle in the world, with 70% of the world's biotech research anchored in the U.S. When you marry the two, what you can extract from agriculture now is going to be so, so important.

Can you give an example?

Monroe: The food is obviously very important, but the waste elements of the crop and what you do with all that cargo is going to present really tremendous opportunities for the biotech world. You can turn it into materials, you can turn it into fuels, you can turn it into a heck of a lot of things. You want to take all of that biotech know-how and leverage it into that ag space. Now we understand better that microorganisms, for instance, play a huge role in the soil and in the growth of a plant.

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What kind of impact are North Carolina agricultural biotechnology companies malting globally?

Singh: I think one of the things we have seen is that as the economy grows globally there is an increased demand for the protein-based diet, compared to the starch-based diet, just because of improvements in the population's economic status. With the protein-based diet, you need more energy to go into the production of proteins, and you need a lot more food production that goes into feeding chickens, cattle and so forth. The land mass is the same. The amount of water is the same. So how can we increase the production of these crops for the same land mass? As we hear all the time, there is more disease pressure and insect pressure with intensive farming.

Trying to produce these crops through biotechnology means we look at how we can produce things that can grow, and produce high amounts of these products, under these pressures. That is the theory of BASF's involvement. We try to tackle it not only from the ag-chemicals point of view but by using biotechnology. We have already produced a number of different crops and other products that are coming on the market in the coming years and will help us serve the growing needs of the world's population.

Warner: Syngenta plays in a number of fields. We sell crop-protection chemistry, which increases yields. That's the technology probably of the 1940s and. '50s. We also sell seeds and a lot of crops grown in North Carolina today. Biotechnology and accelerated breeding programs are new areas. Our company has a product coming on the market called Agrisure Artesian. It's a more...