Bayer CropScience and Performance Plants Inc. sign license agreement on drought-tolerant cotton

Strengthening cotton-research

Monheim – Bayer CropScience AG and Performance Plants Inc. (Kingston, Canada) have entered into an exclusive licensing agreement for the development and commercialization of drought-tolerant cotton using Performance Plants’ Yield Protection Technology® (YPT). The agreement follows several years of successful field trials by Performance Plants, which have shown YPT to be highly effective in preserving yields under conditions of drought stress. In five years of field trials, YPT canola has produced consistent seed yield increases of up to 26 percent.

Dr. Linda Trolinder, Global Cotton R&D Manager at BioScience, a business operations unit of Bayer CropScience, welcomes this business relationship with Performance Plants. “At Bayer CropScience, we strive to be the global innovation leader in cotton and continually seek to deliver valuable new solutions for farmers through our high quality, high-yielding FiberMax®, Stoneville® and Surpass® cottonseed varieties. We anticipate that Perfomance Plants’ innovative YPT will contribute to further strengthening our leadership position in the global cotton market, especially with regard to ensuring higher yields in difficult climatic conditions.”

“Our results and those of other partners we work with continue to show the yield-protecting benefits of our drought-tolerance technology. We are pleased that Bayer CropScience will now extend these results to cotton, a crop whose yield is frequently limited by insufficient rainfall. This agreement is further validation of the commercial potential of our traits,” said Peter Matthewman, President and Chief Executive Officer of Performance Plants.

About Bayer CropScience
Bayer is a global enterprise with core competencies in the fields of health care, nutrition and high-tech materials. Bayer CropScience AG, a subsidiary of Bayer AG with annual sales of about EUR 6.4 billion (2008), is one of the world’s leading innovative crop science companies in the areas of crop protection, non-agricultural pest control, seeds and plant biotechnology. The company offers an outstanding range of products and extensive service backup for modern, sustainable agriculture and for non-agricultural applications. Bayer CropScience has a global workforce of more than 18,000 and is represented in more than 120 countries. This and further news is available at: www.press.bayercropscience.com.

About Performance Plants Inc.
Established in 1995, Performance Plants Inc. is an elite agriculture biotechnology company and a global leader in agricultural and biofuel technology. The privately held company is based in Kingston, ON, Canada with additional North American development facilities in Waterloo, NY, USA and Saskatoon, SK, Canada. Performance Plants specializes in gene discovery and commercial crop development for the rapidly-expanding food and biofuel markets. Its proprietary technologies are applicable to a broad range of agricultural crops and have been shown to improve yields and enhance tolerance to drought and heat stress. For more information, please visit: www.performanceplants.com

Find more information at www.bayercropscience.com.


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