Dow Rolls Out PR Campaign as USDA Weighs Herbicide-Resistant Corn Seed

"Think about the challenge that the world is facing, quite honestly," Dan Kittle, the vice president of research and development for Dow AgroSciences LLC, says in the next frame. "Over the next 40 years, we have to produce as much food as the...

May 8, 2012 | Source: Green Wire | by Jeremy P. Jacobs

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The video shows corn being harvested against an orange sky as a pianist plays a somber tune.

“Think about the challenge that the world is facing, quite honestly,” Dan Kittle, the vice president of research and development for Dow AgroSciences LLC, says in the next frame. “Over the next 40 years, we have to produce as much food as the entire planet has produced in the previous 10,000 years of mankind.”

Images of farms follow, with farmers saying they need a better system to control threatening weeds.

It’s all a buildup for the appearance of Dow’s Enlist Weed Control System, which uses genetically modified corn seeds that are resistant to 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4-D), a widely used herbicide. The product, the narrator suggests, is critical to the U.S. food supply and the “Future of Farming,” the title of Dow’s six-minute YouTube video. 

“Food and farming is, in every meaning of the phrase, a way of life,” the narrator says. “It is a singular culture that supports a broader culture. The modern history of farming is written in the discoveries of effective and productive cropping systems, driven by weed control technologies.”

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