The CEO Dialogues | Chuck Magro, Corteva Agriscience

Yeah, well, nice to see you, Emily. Look, I've been involved in a lot of industries in my career, and I say agriculture is my favorite by far. I love the values, I love the purpose of the industry. I actually got started a long time ago. I grew up working as a hired hand on a dairy farm in Canada. That was my very first exposure. I was 13 years old, and for many summers I worked on a dairy farm and I fell in love with the lifestyle. In fact, that family became really my second family. I went on and did my higher education, my studies went into different industries, the oil and gas industry, the petrochemical industry, but then when I had a chance about 15 years ago to get back into agriculture, I jumped at it and I've been involved in the industry ever since, and I'll probably finish my career in it.

Yeah, I don't know if there's just one. What I love about this industry is it's been innovating for a very long time, and I think the acceleration of the innovation is what's needed. So I would agree we have some significant opportunities and some challenges. As an industry, we've got to figure out a way to continue to feed and fuel the world sustainably, and the solution will be innovation, it's going to be creativity, it's going to be new technology, new solutions. I think the industry is up for it. Now there are a couple of really interesting dimensions of this that I will call out: Biologicals, I think that finding nature-based or more biological solutions to complement what the industry's already invented, I think will be a growing and very important part of the future. So we're pretty excited about that as an opportunity to put new solutions, nature-based products and solutions, in the hands of farmers around the world. I'd say the other dimension on the seed breeding is gene editing. So when I think about gene editing, I get really excited because we haven't seen the tools that are coming through with gene editing. And really what it is, it's going to allow our plant breeders to precision breed crops fit for purpose, whether that's food security, disease resistance, drive productivity and yield – these are all within the reach of gene editing technology. So that's another really interesting dimension when it comes to the next generation of crop development. So Biologicals and gene editing are the big innovations we see on the horizon.

Yeah, look, I'm really pleased with the evolution of the industry in terms of bringing new products to the hands of farmers around the world. I think that what I can see is the pipelines – certainly our pipeline with the industry's pipeline – I think will bring a tremendous set of new products to farmers over the next 10 to 15 years. The one area that needs to keep up with the innovation will be the regulatory framework. So we need smart regulation. All the checks and balances need to be in place, but the system needs to be designed to bring these new products onto the farm. That's going to be key. I think the other dimension of the regulatory system is really the global framework and how it's integrated, so we can get these products into the hands of a farmer, for example in the US, but also in Latin America, Europe, Asia, Africa, with speed. Because the challenges that we've got that are facing us to really feed this world and also allow solutions when it comes to climate change and sustainability, we're going to have to take less time to bring those products into the hands of farmers. The only way to do that is to have the products ready to go and have a very smart, sophisticated, and integrated regulatory system. So a speeded-up regulatory system that's coherent and cohesive worldwide.

Thank you.