Special Report
Bayer CropScience committed to agriculture’s future
The opening speaker for the 2010 Bayer Crop Science Ag Issues Forum in Anaheim was Bill Buckner, the Head of Business Operations, North America, for Bayer CropScience. Buckner stepped up on the stage, took off his suit jacket and put a t-shirt on over his shirt. The t-shirt read “Ask me why you are not hungry, naked, or itchy.” As Buckner explained to Brownfield, “It’s an outreach program that Crop Life America and Bayer Crop Science got started together to better educate not only our own employees but also a cross section of people about modern agriculture.”
Buckner does not believe the ag industry does a very good job of telling its story. “Our mission is being defined by others and we have lost our share of voice,” said Buckner. “I had the opportunity to be in Washington the past couple of days and talk to people on the Hill and have a meeting with EPA officials including Administrator Jackson. They don’t know a lot about agriculture and what we do. They are defining and creating policies that are far reaching. They don’t understand the impact of those policies on agriculture.”
Bayer CropScience is one of only five heavily invested technology companies left in global agriculture bringing new inputs into the marketplace. Buckner said, “It’s a tremendous amount of responsibility that we carry to ensure that everything we do is done for the benefit of maximizing yield on a given acre of ground which we know is shrinking on an annual basis. So, when we look at this we recognize that this isn’t all about Bayer Crop Science and what we can do. It is all about how we can continue to work with others in the industry to bring a common sense of understanding about what it is that we need to be doing together as an industry to move the dial forward and to insure that we have a safe and secure food supply.”
Conversation with Bill Buckner
Many thanks to Bill Buckner for making agriculture’s case in Washington, DC.