Growing the future with Cargill’s crop innovation scientists
Read Time: 6 minutes
The future of food starts with a seed.
As the challenges of climate change continue to shape how we’ll feed a growing population, the solutions can sit — literally — in the palm of your hand. How can we turn that seed into a plant that can withstand drought? Resist disease? Produce what we need it to?
Those are the questions Cargill’s crop innovation scientists are working on every day. Whether they’re improving plant genetics, defending crops from disease, or pioneering new functional traits, their work ensures farmers can grow healthier, more resilient plants to feed the world.
Meet Dany Heang, Lisa Sullivan and Atena Oladzad-Nejad, three scientists with a shared passion for agriculture and innovation.
7:45 a.m. – Breeding a better future
Dany has spent 25 years in plant science, and as a plant geneticist and breeder, his job is to improve crops to meet customer needs.
“I tell my two kids, ‘I make healthier plants for you.’”
After a cup of coffee, his day starts with evaluating stevia plants. Their genetics affect traits like sweetness levels, disease resistance and overall yield. Selective breeding helps ensure the next generation of crops will be even better.
The key tool on his bench? A light microscope.
“It helps me see the pollen and gauge its health and whether we can use it for cross-pollination,” he says.
Breeding a plant isn’t a quick process: It can take 6-10 years for a fully successful variety to move through development from the lab and through trials in the greenhouse and field. But advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), DNA sequencing and computing systems are helping speed things up.
While technology plays a crucial role, nothing replaces hands-on “communication.”
“My job is to communicate with the plants,” Dany says. “The most rewarding part for me of being in the greenhouse is being closer to the plants so I can communicate with them better.”
9:37 a.m. – Diagnosing plant diseases
It’s no surprise Lisa is hitting “play” on the most recent episode of her favorite true crime series. After all, her work is solving mysteries, too, albeit of the plant variety.
“My job is to help plants stay healthy. So, when a plant does get sick, I help find out what is making it sick,” she says.
A dissecting microscope helps Lisa get onto the level of what’s affecting a plant and determine its cause. Especially with newer crops, there’s not necessarily much information to start the investigation with.
“Does it look like a bacteria? A fungus? What color, how does it grow? What do the spores look like? It's a whole determination process,” she says.
Lisa’s work spans from the lab to the greenhouse and growth chamber, out into the field where plants are growing in real world conditions. No matter where she’s at, there’s a deep appreciation for how she gets to build on naturally occurring processes.
“We're using what nature's already developed and we're using that as an advantage to help increase our food production and stabilize our food supply,” Lisa says. “It's just using science to better understand what's naturally there and then we use that to improve our product.”
10:46 a.m. – Finding patterns in genetics
While Dany and Lisa focus on breeding and disease resistance, Atena is working at the intersection of genetics and data science.
As a trait discovery scientist, she uses bioinformatics and genomics to identify the genes responsible for desirable traits. It’s collaborative work, collecting data from greenhouses, growth chambers and chemistry labs to create full trait profiles for different plant varieties.
At Cargill’s Crop Innovation Center in Colorado where she works, automation has helped unlock the potential of Atena and her colleagues’ work.
“I see the massive improvement compared with the time that I was in the graduate schools where we were doing everything manually and how everything was time consuming and prone to error,” she says. “Now the automation and the accuracy of these robotic systems, I would say really have revolutionized our ability to conduct large-scale genetic studies very efficiently.”
Whatever the scale, watching plants with traits she has helped develop perform in the greenhouse and growth chambers is a special experience.
“Seeing genetic results come to life as healthy and thriving plants, that’s the best part of my job,” Atena says.
1:17 p.m. – Understanding plant resilience
All three scientists face a common challenge: the impacts of climate change, particularly unpredictable weather.
“We can breed plants for drought resistance or for flood resistance, but what happens when they need to survive both?” Dany asks. “A plant we breed may be better against drought or against flood. Sometimes they [affect the same plant over time in one place]. And that will be a challenge for us to combine these two together.”
Atena’s team is tackling this by using climate modeling in growth chambers to simulate different environmental conditions.
“Using this controlled environment, we are able to observe and predict how plants will respond to different levels of light, humidity, and temperature fluctuation” she says.
3:32 p.m. – From the field to the grocery store
While much of this work happens behind the scenes, all three scientists feel a deep connection to the food they help produce.
“When I was [in college], I saw a graph showing how by 2050, the world population will reach 9 billion — and our current breeding methods wouldn’t be able to keep up with food demand. That’s when I knew I wanted to work in agriculture,” Atena says.
For Lisa, her appreciation for plant science goes beyond research.
It’s understanding of how many different roles there are and how much work goes into producing an end product that goes to the grocery store, to our table,” she says. “How many different people go into producing crops, which could be fed to animals or is the food we directly consume.
Dany sums it up simply: “No plants, no life.”
5:14 p.m. – What it’s all for
As the lab coats come off and Lisa, Dany and Atena walk out the door, there’s shared appreciation for the opportunity to provide one of life’s biggest essentials. Their work ensures farmers have access to stronger, healthier crops — and that people around the world have access to safe, nutritious food.
“We enable farmers to do what they do best,” Lisa says. “The work that we do helps them to have the right seeds that are going to grow into a crop that's successful for their area.”
“Being in a company like Cargill that works to provide food worldwide made all my learnings more real,” Atena says. “I'm not just focusing in my lab or on the experiment in the greenhouse, but I'm seeing it through a worldwide view: this is how we feed the world.”
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