 Good afternoon and welcome to this webinar on the future of sustainable agrochemistry. My name is Ellen Mantis and I'm the Director of the Chemical Sciences Roundtable at the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. For those not familiar with the Roundtable, it provides a neutral forum to advance the understanding of issues of importance to the chemical sciences and engineering and promotes the exchange of information among government, industry and academic sectors. This year we are excited to have launched a series of webinars on emerging topics. This is the fourth and final one in our series for 2020. Presentations and recordings from our first webinar on inorganic biohybrids, our second webinar on the detection of novel synthetic opioids, and our third webinar on the chemical supply chain are all available on the CSR website. Today we will examine the current landscape of agrochemistry and discuss methods and technologies to sustain crop production into the future using chemistry. The format will consist of three short presentations. There will be time for one or two clarifying questions after each presentation, but all other questions will be addressed in our discussion time after the presentations conclude. Dr. Mark Jones will be our moderator for this webinar. He is a member of the CSR and is a senior research fellow at Dow where he serves on the research and development leadership team. Questions can be submitted via the Q&A button on Zoom located at the bottom control panel. Just for your information, the chat feature has been disabled for audience members. For those tuning in via live stream on the CSR website, please submit questions by email to csr at nas.edu. With that, I would like to introduce our first speaker, Dr. Peter X. Dr. X is the president of BASF Bioscience Research. He leads his company's Global Competence Center for Life Sciences where he drives innovative sustainable solutions for agricultural food and industrial applications for a better life and an improved environment. The floor is yours, Dr. X. All right. I think now you could probably hear me. Yeah. It was a great opportunity to talk here. And I think when I was asked to participate in this webinar, this was actually not a difficult decision for me. I've been in the agricultural segment for the past two decades and I'm very happy to share some of the insights that I've gained over the years to explain also how the farming community and farming has changed over the years, how the demands have changed, and how science really has then responded to make all these change possible. But let me start first. Let me start first. Move to the next slide, please. Okay. Yeah. Good. Thank you. But as BASF is not a household name, I just wanted to start with a couple of information facts on BASF, the company that I've worked with for many years. So BASF is, first of all, 120,000 people. And I think, notably, every 10th of us is actually working in R&D. With 70 billion in sales, we are by far the largest company, and we have a very diverse portfolio. One of the important segments that we are addressing with our portfolio is the agricultural sector. And our agricultural solution business is with 9 billion, a very important contributor to BASF's success. Now, BASF is very innovation-minded, so we spent 2.6 billion in R&D. And as you can see here also on this slide, is our agricultural solution segment, is by far the segment that has the highest R&D intensity. And I think this also speaks how really innovation-driven the agricultural segment, how innovation-driven the agricultural segment is. If you could please move to the next slide. I myself have not raised and been born and started in agriculture. I'm a chemistry by training, and I actually started out and thought I would be a professor in one year. I decided then differently and joined BASF 30 years ago. And I have to say, I'm more excited than ever to really work in the chemical industry and at BASF. And there's a pretty simple reason for this because I think when I think today about chemistry, I think about that we are critical to solve some of the most important problems. As you can see here of the slides, I think we're expecting by 2050, 10 billion people on this planet. There will be a significant part of these people will live in urban mega cities. There's a significant update of 35% in energy expected and also 30% of food. And all these challenges from a chemist perspective I think are opportunities. And this is where I am excited to work in chemistry because chemistry is a key and abler for this sector. If you could please move to the next slide. Now from my viewpoint that chemistry has really changed and sustainability is a key factor. And I think this is fully reflected in the purpose that we have defined as BASF. We create chemistry for a sustainable future. Now the word of sustainability is used a lot these days and sometimes it's abused and we wanted to make sure as BASF that really this is not lip service. And therefore we have really hardwired the topic of sustainable chemistry to our strategy. So we are working hard to develop new processes that decouple CO2 emission from our organic growth. We are also looking and investing in breakthrough technologies that enable a more circular economy and then last but not least really looking for innovations that drive and that are of sustainable advantage to our value chains. Now the question is when you say we create chemistry of a sustainable future the question is who is we and let's move to the next slide please. Now innovation is really done by people and I think this is something I absolutely want to highlight. So it's about getting these people getting engaged into a sustainable solution. And for us it means that we need really the brightest mind on board at BASF. So these minds then need to understand what really society and our customer needs. And I think then we can translate all of that into a new innovative solution. And this is I think where I my excitement comes in and also why I believe that it's really rewarding to be in this field. And I think this is exactly also when we think about agriculture now where we our teams in agriculture solution they're looking to really create the sustainable solution and really do this for what I would consider the biggest job on earth with this farming. If you please move to the next slide. Now indeed farming for my view bond is the biggest job on earth. And I think in recent years and this is also important to put this in context. It actually it is this this this big job is getting bigger. Farmers are today really faced with a lot of challenges and multiple demands coming in their direction. They are tasked to really create a sufficient affordable and healthy food for a growing population. I think this is the basics. But then there's much more because there's not just the food topic is they have to deal with climate change. They have also to deal with all the challenges from society to have more sustainable agricultural practice despite the fact that farmers really for often for generation have been stewards of their land. And they are facing a market volatility. So I think this is all needs to put in the equation when we talk about sustainable agrochemicals and agrochemistry. And I think today it's really not easy to be a farmer nonetheless. These people are credible passion about what they do when they simply love farming. Our question is for us. And this is really the topic of also today's webinar is how can we actually help farmers how can we make and help them to respond to these challenges. And at BSF our mission is at the end to make farmers more successful to provide them with sustainable innovations and crop protection in all the seeds and trades digital farming. And I think we really need to make sure that the sustainability as I said is directly hardwired. At BSF we have developed a system a robust framework which we call sustainable solution steering. And I think this is critical because this is sort of the compass that guides also our R&D. And I just want to introduce this compass with the next slide. Now we have basically taken measurable criteria and categorized our portfolio in four categories. Number one, most important are accelerators. These are products that really contribute directly to the sustainability of our customers. Then we have performers that are fully in line with the sustainability expectation. Then they are performers and these are products that do have deficiency in sustainability. And we address them. And lastly, there are challenges and these are the product that we want to really phase out of our of our portfolio. Now to drive now our portfolio actively we have set ourselves ambitious goal and you see that on the right side of the slide. Now most importantly for R&D we have directly used this concept for our R&D portfolio and also for our R&D approaches. I think this leads directly now in the topic how actually has this changed the way we are doing agrochemistry. And please move to the next slide with that. Now if you look historically, agrochemistry were developed and discovered in a I would say very sequential linear approach. You would first discover some chemistry, you would optimize the biology and then later on you would also do regulatory tests. But I think the mindset, the philosophy was you would first look really at field performance and then you would take the hurdles later on on the regulatory piece. I think this from my viewpoint has totally changed and as you see on the upper left side I think this is a very different approach today and what has changed with the approach that you really do develop these things in parallel. So we start with a comprehensive product profile first and then this comprehensive product profile that includes regulatory aspect as well as performance aspect. These are used then to define our R&D approaches that we take with an individual program. And I think this way we are sieving out much earlier chemistries that are not attractive and change them and can focus really on products that are inherently have a sustainable approach. And we use very extensively here regulatory indicator test in toxicology and environment and you see here on the slide you see Robert Lanzitel and he's one of the passionate scientists that expands our portfolio of these indicator tests so that we can early on really sieve out candidates that do not fit with regulatory requirements and make sure that we use these tests as we go along in this parallel approach. And we feel that these early indicator tests are real differentiator for us. Now let's move to the second topic and move to a second trend I think we see in agrochemicals and let's move to the middle of the slide here. Now what we experience in nature is that nature involves and therefore we see to pests to fungal pathogens and weeds that they really form resistance to existing products in the marketplace. And this will even happen without excessive use but it's just a part of the natural progression of biological system that they adopt to any kind of selection pressure. And this is something that we need to help farmers really to manage. Now therefore we focus on our approaches in agrochemicals to new biological mode of actions that have favorable regulatory profiles and in Scales that shown here is one of these chemistry it is a natural product it's produced by fermentation and then derivatized and the derivatization brings it a broader spectrum lower use rate and therefore also make it a much more attractive product for farmers. Now the molecular target of in Scales and this is critical here or as we say the insecticidal mode of action was elucidated by a very strong team which includes Bin Salgado and the elucidation actually was awarded was an award of the American Chemical Society and this unique chemistry of in Scales I think what is special with the mode of action is that the mode of action does not is not present in mammals or in birds or in fish and therefore it's intrinsically favorable from an environmental profile. So this is the second topic now the third trend that we see and I think this is an important one is digitalization and I would say nothing has changed as much really the way we do research these days than digitalization and I want to use our blockbuster Revisol as an example. Now Revisol is a azole fungicide it's a well-known class that inhibits the fungal sterile biosynthesis now this chemistry also has unwanted effect and I think the key topic here was to uncouple the unwanted effect from the performance and this is where exactly digitalization has kicked in. Now in case of a Revisol we have really used all the tools so we used molecular modeling the indicator test that I just mentioned we we also used the machine learning tools and all of that brings together to solve the riddle to uncouple here these effect. Now the molecular modeling helped with the target performance the TOX test weeded out unwanted compounds and then with the high throughput screening and machine learning we have refined our models and basically this led then to Revisol and I think this is a huge interdisciplinary piece and I would say for most people actually working this field this is also part of the fun that it's so interdisciplinary and it's absolutely required to develop these sustainable solution. Now from that standpoint I think I've described a little bit what changes we have seen in agrochemistry now the deeper understanding really of the molecular biology has been key here molecular modeling tools and digitalization but I think there's another dimension that comes with integrated solution and in the next slide if you could forward please I want to talk about the integrated solutions that we see and then this deeper understanding really of the molecular level of croplands has also helped to develop an interplay between agrochemistry and traits. This I want to demonstrate with a chemistry that we have developed which is a herbicide the so-called PPO herbicides which inhibit the protoporphorogen oxidase and these herbicides they are well known and we understand a lot about the molecular target these days and this understanding actually has now enabled not only to optimize the chemistry but also design traits that work with the chemistry and I think this this allowed us to make specific changes then to the amino acid sequence of the target protein and basically make the target protein in the plant then resistant to these herbicides and you see that very nicely here on the picture that you can broaden the spectrum of herbicides make them more selective and more broadly applicable and I think this has direct interaction also then for the pharma why has a direct interaction for the pharma because yes there might be very different perspectives in society about herbicides and herbicide traits and but at the end one has to say there is a clear contribution to sustainability now weeds do compete with plants about water and nutrition and therefore it's very important for farmers that they can manage these different to control weed because it directly translate into increased yield and better land use but there's another dimension actually of these kind of solutions that we offer because it also allows no no till practice no till farming practices and that actually reduces land erosion and also increase the capture of CO2 in the soil so I think there are multiple benefits that hopefully I could convince you with these kind of technologies now these kind of solutions they are just one example I think there are new ones coming beat combination of insecticides and insect rates or fungicides and fungal traits or the combination of chemistry and biology and biologicals as we have it like in our votivo product or we also learn from nature and use things like pheromones to confuse pests and reduce their reproduction so I would say really the advancement signs at the end are leading to an increase in the option space for farmers so there are additional possibilities and I think these additional possibilities of benefit to the farming community and for production and there's one last topic I wanted to cover and this is another one coming to digitalization and how digitalization is changing farmer farming and let us move please with that to the next slide and I want to talk a little bit about our Xavio platform and with our Xavio scouting digital platform we are actually offer these days growers the possibility to monitor in season disease to look at pests and scout for weeds and also look for leaf damages now this information now helps the farmers to make decisions to think about what agrochemicals to use also to optimize the timing now in addition we develop together jointly with Bosch our partner and we actually announced today that we have started a joint venture here that we are developing smart sprayers so that they are specifically in the right places applying the products that we bring to the market and we are right now testing prototypes and we'll go to the market as early as next year now with the Xavio healthy field platform we are coming to a different dimension it's not just about offering decision it's not just about helping and giving advice to farmers it's really about decision-making so here we offer to farmers an outcome of disease field free a disease free field and that means that we actually help farmers directly to manage the field and get an outcome and obviously here there's a big interest also now outside to reduce the chemicals input that we used then for these farming situations now this is a great new tool and it would rightfully be awarded with a crop science award in 2020 as the best innovation in digital farming now as you can see the farming with all these options is getting more complex but I think we want SPSF to really provide farmers a comprehensive view we want to provide them decision with a seed with a trade with the agrochemicals and also with digital tools all along now if you move please to my last slide now for my perspective I would say science is really and new technologies are often farmers new possibilities I think there are additional options sometimes they might be perceived as complicated and difficult and often the society is asking for simple solutions but if you look at the challenges that actually farming is facing today in a lot of cases there are no simple solutions and it's not a question of an either or decision is from my viewpoint really an end and end decision it's about helping farmers to make the right among the many available options that they have and from my perspective really growers and also the society benefits from all these options and I believe that it helps them to balance the risk it helps to at the end optimize the inputs for better yield to create economic success and very importantly also environmental sustainability now as a business the SF is developing these agrochemicals together with seeds trades digital solution to exactly provide this balance and we see it as our past to bring to farmers innovation and help them to make the right choices and balancing the demand of society catering also to all the needs of the value chain and maintain their own livelihood and profitability now from my viewpoint as I said you know the biggest job on earth is getting bigger but I personally see that actually innovation is driving and enabling sustainable solution and I think there are many reasons to be optimistic when I think at least about the future thank you very much and on the last slide just a reminder we will have a discussion later on but I'm very happy if you want to connect with you and with this I turn it back thank you very much a thank you very much Peter very interesting talk and we do have a I think a couple of questions that kind of hit on one particular aspect of your BASF look at the world and and that is around how you use lifecycle analysis to to figure out your trade off so obviously you create a burden when you manufacture any chemical how do you then balance that with the various environmental metrics that people care about you know energy use CO2 emissions water use eutrophication any of the other things how do you how do you try to figure out where that balance is in an LCA world I think you've muted yourself again to or you've been muted yeah I think this is this this balance is a tricky topic so the sustainable solutions I think these criteria help us really to create transparency and I think this transparent transparency piece is a very important piece so this is what we I think bring also into society and then into the discussion with stakeholders so it's not just about us making at the end decision but for us I think making transparency and I think then also farmers they have to decide based on the transparency that we create and indeed there is as I said this is not an simple equation that has a clear outcome but I would say the transparency piece is what is very important very good well thank you very much let's move on to our next speaker George Friswold is a professor of agriculture and resource economics at the University of Arizona George received his undergraduate and doctoral degrees from the University of California Berkeley he held teaching in research positions at the Johns Hopkins University the US Department of Agriculture and India's National Institute of Rural Development in the 1995 96 time frame Dr. Friswold served as senior economist for the President's Council of Economic Advisors his research interests include the economics of agricultural biotechnology pesticide use and pesticide regulation publishing extensively on management of weed and insect pest resistance he is currently an associate editor for the journal pest management science and without further ado floors yours George thank you very much my unmuted yes I'm unmuted let's see yes okay to give you some historical background a lot of colleagues in land grant universities of a certain age with farm backgrounds and they all have not so nostalgic stories of going out and hand weeding when they were kids in their grandparents fields or and you could see from this graph this is showing the the diffusion of herbicides and major US crops since 1952 in the immediate post-World War II era herbicides really were used all that much and hand weeding was how weeds were controlled you could see that from 1952 to about 1982 and 30 years herbicides is a the method of controlling weeds became ubiquitous especially in cotton corn and soybean systems and you could see the ramp up from 1964 of of herbicide use you see a tick down in 19 should be about the slides got off kilter 1983 when they had a the PIC program which took huge amounts of crop acreage out of production you could see about 1996 when herbicide tolerant crop varieties specifically glyphosate tolerant varieties became available and glyphosate started to substitute for the older chemistries and there was a down tick in herbicide use and then in terms of pounds of AI active ingredient it started to ramp up more recently so the introduction of herbicide tolerant crop varieties and raised two sorts of sustainable sustainability issues one was it the body of evidence body of research suggests that herbicide tolerant crops actually promoted the adoption of conservation tillage conservation tillage uses allows more residues to stay on on the soil and reduces soil erosion so soil erosion has longer term sustainability effects in terms of reducing the productivity of soils but also there's more immediate term environmental consequences of having sediment running off farm fields and into water bodies so the the switch to herbicide tolerant cultivars really promoted the adoption in the movement toward conservation tillage and no till so that's on the sustainability plus side an area of concern was has been the evolution of herbicide resistance in weed species especially as there was less diversity in the types of chemicals that were being used and here's some this literature view of the complementarity of herbicide tolerant seed varieties with conservation tillage for your background information okay so with the rapid and pervasive adoption of glyphosate use you could see that the number of glyphosate resistant weeds worldwide started to ramp up pretty dramatically since the mid 90s when glyphosate resistant crop varieties became available now herbicide resistance isn't all a story of glyphosate resistance this is data from the the site that dr. Ian heat maintains for the weed science society from America you could see that there's weed species with resistance to more than one side of action has also been ramping up over time so weeds are evolving resistance to all different modes of action now where this becomes a sustainability issue here's a chart of the introduction time of new herbicide sites of action and you can see there was you know a fairly steady increase over time and that's really stopped since 1990 so over the past 30 years we haven't really had you know a big breakthrough in in sites of action that have been commercialized and widely adopted companies are always conducting R&D they're always trying to develop new modes of action but the the chemicals the compounds we have now are the resources that that we have to to use and over time crop output per unit of quality adjusted input has been declining so there starts there starts to be evidence now that resistance issues are starting to manifest themselves in measures of agricultural productivity in the US okay so economists have long thought of the efficacy of agricultural chemicals as an exhaustible resource certain compounds certain sites of action are effective but through repeated use over time they become less so so a way this has been characterized is something almost like you know minerals in the ground or petroleum reserves where there's a cycle of depletion and discovery just like there's petroleum or mineral reserves that in a particular site particular location get depleted there's always searching there's always discovering and so the extent to which the efficacy of chemicals is that truly exhaustible depends on whether discoveries are forthcoming and over the last three decades commercial discoveries have not been forthcoming another economic issue dealing with resistance is that resistance is a common pool resource management problem or at least it can be the idea here being that for an individual farmer a challenger and a question they pose is why should I take steps to delay resistance often steps that might reduce my farm income in the short run if all my neighbors are going to use the compounds and resistance is going to happen anyway and so a question for farmers intertemporary is okay what can I personally do to actually delay resistance and will my actions actually be for not if my neighbors don't so then it starts to become a collective action problem not necessarily a long-term profit maximizing issue for farmers resistance management could also be seen as what economists called the weakest link public good a weakest link public good is a good that its provision depends on the effort and the effectiveness of the least capable actor or the person with the least incentive the classic example would be let's say an island nation that's divided up in the different communities in each community is responsible for building a seawall to keep out floods well the effectiveness on the small island nation of the seawall is going to depend on which community builds the lowest wall if if everybody in the community except one you know one group builds seawalls and one group doesn't build a seawall then the water is just going to flood in and so resistance management has certain aspects of that where you could have a lot of farmers doing what's needed in terms of resistance management but there's a critical mass of farmers who don't do that which is enough to undermine overall resistance management efforts okay so if we look at actual farmer adoption of resistance management practices in in dealing with with weeds and dealing with insect pests the most difficult species to manage is homo sapiens so getting actual you know human beings to change their behavior is always tricky now good news looking at studies of um farmer adoption of resistance management practices is that most farmers are adopting most practices that experts think are needed to delay resistance most of the time well that can sound good but if you were told that most of the people packing parachutes were adopting most of the recommended practices for packing parachutes most of the time you might be a little hesitant about going skydiving and empirically we found that most farmers doing most things most of the time has been insufficient to delay resistance in many cases now a key you know biological and economic question are what are critical adoption thresholds how what percentage of farmers what percentage of the landscape needs to be adopting resistance management practices to make them effective if you only need half the farmers or farmers managing half the acreage to adopt resistance management practices for it to be effective overall then really resistance management is a traditional extension problem of providing let's say the more progressive or you know forward thinking farmers with the information and they'll adopt the practices and that will benefit everybody but what if you need let's say 90 of the land area adopting the resistance management practices what if you need 95 of the area to be adopting those practices then resistance management is much more like pester disease eradication and then collective action might be more necessary and so another key economic question an agronomic question is when is private action sufficient so under what circumstances if farmers are managing weeds on their own fields are resistance management strategies effective and profitable regardless of what their neighbors do and in what circumstances would individual farmer action would be undermined by neighbor inaction so when is private action sufficient and when is collective action necessary and it's important to identify both because if you can identify cases where you know here here's a program of weed management for for farmers in a particular area and if individual farmers do that they have an economic incentive to do that on their own then you don't have these issues of how do you manage collective behavior or organization but in cases where private action is insufficient then collective action needs to be considered okay so moving forward sustainably in terms of weed management diversity is key there's two types of diversity there's diversity in herbicide strategies so using diverse modes of action and rotating modes of action so within the use of chemistries the idea is to avoid over reliance on any one compound there's also diversity of tactics overall so what is the right mix of chemical and nonchemical tactics that work so there's kind of diversity within chemical use and diversity between using chemical and nonchemical tactics now there's a lot I think of promising technology innovations Peter talked about this already about nonchemical information there's advances in information technology precision ag AI drone robotics so what what is all that technology mean for the chemical industry and the use of chemicals in the role of chemicals in agricultural production well I think there's both substitutable and complementary aspects to it so these new innovations these new you know information texts and mechanical innovations are going to provide for more precise and effective chemical applications so the quantities apply the timing of the plies are going to get more precise over time so the actual physical amount of a compound the number of times a compound is applied may change but it's still going to be used it's still going to be critical for weed control and these types of innovations are complementary with with ag chemical use and again there's other technologies where you're going to have improved nonchemical control there's you know a lot of work being done on on using robotics and more advanced mechanical means of of controlling weeds and so these are cases where new innovations could actually substitute for chemicals but I think it's it's not going to be either or I think innovation in the future is going to proceed along both complementary and and substitutability paths okay now we're starting to see in in industry a changing business model where what is being sold as pest management services versus agricultural chemicals per se and again peter talked about decision making helping farmers making decisions and this is the direction I think you see more and more industries more and more firms in the chemical industry going to whereas they're they're providing pest management services there's a whole package where chemicals are part of it but really the objective is is having fields free of weeds one of the things this means is that agricultural chemical use is going to be more information and skill intensive when the glyphosate resistant crops first came out one of the things that was attractive to farmers and farmers were surveyed about you know why why are you adopting these crops one of the things they would commonly say is it's easy to use the timing makes things flexible that they could do certain they had a certain very simplified application regime that wasn't particularly uh information intensive well that that's proving to be somewhat problematic and I think what's what we're going back to is a system that it's going to require a lot more information about climate a lot more information about weather a lot more information about biological systems so ag chemical use is going to be become more skill and information intensive another thing that's happening in business is there's a lot more greater consumer concern and this is feeding into a food processor attention now and in terms of how crops are grown a lot of food processing companies a lot of textile manufacturing companies have sustainability offices sustainability visions and they're starting to monitor more closely the environmental footprints the environmental profiles of crop production and one of the things the advances of this information technology is that one on one level it allows farmers to monitor their fields more and monitor the situation of their agricultural operations but it also allows other folks to monitor farmers more so you know the food processes who purchase the crops consumers are also going to have more information about how things are grown and so I think agricultural chemicals you know in the foreseeable future are still going to be a critical part of agricultural production but I'd close with the medical analogy is that when you're sick the first thing you do is you don't go to the pharmacist for a prescription you go to your general practitioner now there's some cases where you know a pharmaceutical isn't necessary but in some cases it is and so you go to the medical practitioner the practitioner isn't selling pharmaceuticals for say the general practitioners is to provide you know you with health just as I think these companies are going to be providing pest management services so the business model is going to be more like the general practitioner model where the concern is what's my overall health so you don't necessarily start with a pharmacist but you you know you often end up there you know you go there and the doctor says here here's you know you have an infection here's antibiotics and everything's are cleared up so I would just close by saying that I think you know the ag chemistry industry is you know is proceeding along it's going to be a lot more high information high skill type of sector than it's ever been before that's it thank you very much George I don't I think you were very clear I don't see any clarifying questions it was very interesting talk I'm sure there'll be lots of interesting stuff during the discussion and just a reminder to folks to put those questions in the Q&A window and so moving right along our next speaker is Tejas Tejas is a discovery research scientist in Corteva agro science he obtained a BA in chemistry and molecular biology and biochemistry from Rutgers University in 2011 at Rutgers he performed undergraduate research with professor Daniel Seidel in the area of hydrogen bonding catalysis and kinetic resolution he went on to complete his doctoral studies in professor Neil Garg's laboratory at UCLA his dissertation focused on using heterocyclic arines arines to our asymptotic building blocks in the exploration of nickel catalyzed activation of the mid cn bonds in 2016 he joined discovery chemistry group at Dow agro sciences which is now Corteva agro science so without further ado Tejas the floor is yours thank you mark for the kind introduction I just want to say thank you to the chemical science round the table for the for the invitation to give a talk at this webinar and thank you for my other speakers also George and Peter they gave me a great introduction to my talk now today entitled in innovations in sustainable agrochemistry and so before I get into the sustainability part of my talk I wanted to ask the question what does farming look like in 2020 and so I think all of us or many of us know are we think about we think about tractors we think about harvesting here's a picture of harvesting wheat here we think about you know a lot of manual labor around the world and then peter all mentioned this as farming is one of the largest employers of the world of people in the world however farming has changed in the last couple decades and so this might look a lot to you this is the inside of a tractor john dear tractor and it looks a little odd because there's a bunch of screens and there's a joystick like you're in a gaming uh like a gaming console and so which farming has has definitely changed in towards the integration of technology the integration of data as peter and george have mentioned and so not into not into the nearest in future you'll see drones I think george mentioned this later in the slides and like the amazon model delivering things and hopefully we'll see delivering of agrochemicals and so farming has already changed significantly in the last couple decades and I you know hopefully today I can tell you about some of the things that farming is even going to do further into the sustainability area and so today like to touch on a few things and I've kind of categorized four boxes here discovery process and product development application technologies and product stewardship and so I won't have time to talk about all of these but I'll talk about today discovery and process and product development but I wanted to show all four of these areas because sustainability is not about the act it's just about the active ingredient sustainability is about all four of these areas of research put together to make a sustainable product and so just because you have a sustainable AI does not mean your process to actually make the AI is sustainable or the or the actual application of the AI is sustainable and lastly the product stewardship that george mentioned is sustainable and so all four of these need to come together to actually have a sustainable product and so today I'll since I made discovery that a chemist by training I'll talk to you today about the discovery and process and product development and so just to give a flavor of what what does discovery look like for those people who don't know it's very similar to pharmaceutical development or pharmaceutical research and so you really start with the three or three areas of active generation or hit generation natural products bioactive hypothesis or a competitor inspired and so since we're talking about sustainability today I'll highlight a little about the natural product areas we work in at Corteva once we get a hit out of these three areas they go through a cycle of active gen lead gen lead up and a stage molecule you can think of it as like a phased clinical trial and hopefully at the end we get we get a product out of that and so those three areas three therapeutic areas like today since I call crop protection medicinal chemistry for plants you can see you can see these three areas here wheat control disease management mostly fungi and then insect management for various insects around the world and so I've just shown here three structures first one here is rinse core it's a rinse core herbicide it has one is a green chemistry award in 2018 I'll talk a little bit about that little later at about one of our newest soon to be launched fungicides natural product inspired there and lastly spinosad which is our natural product insecticide we hear at Corteva which also won us a 1999 green chemistry award and so you might be thinking agrochemistry this is pretty easy you get to test on the organism why is it so difficult to get a get a product out of a small molecule product out and so you might be familiar with ad me and if you're in the pharmaceutical realm absorption distribution metabolism excretion in this case in the agrochemistry world it's degradation and very similarly we have to follow these properties to get as a product however there's other there's other challenges in the agrochemistry world and so let's say you have a plant let's say you have some sun or hopefully sun and not rain and you spray your compound on your plant and you get this little nice little water droplets all over your ground on the plant and you think well it's in the plant now it's going to control the weed if it's going to if it's going to go to the target site it's going to go there and you're done however there's many many challenges just because you spray a plant does not mean your molecule extra reach a target site you can't force inject every single plant with your active ingredient and so there's challenges like leaf structure flow ability plant metabolism and root uptake and those are just the ones from the plant there's also environmental challenges right there's there's volatility there's UV stability wash off water leaching soil metabolism and so on and so all of these do give us a challenge in the agrochemistry industry on top of that if you if you then if you look at the spray nozzles in formulation now you look at issues of droplet size you look at water solubility and making sure the compound still stays in the solution or in the formulation and all of these are another challenge for us in the agrochemistry and again all of these also also affect the sustainability of the product and so there's many variables before and after spraying of the compound there's different properties associated with different research areas and so those research areas i'm talking about are the fungicide weed minute fungicide herbicide versus insecticide each one of these areas has a different property they need to actually get it into the plant or on the soil and so depending on the actual product you would have different properties associated with those things and so again we have to tune those properties for the need and so how do we actually now design a sustainable active ingredient and so peter set this up pretty well he said that before we are on a linear scale we were looking for potency potency potency and field translation and then we went after the regulatory or the sustainability portion i'm calling sustainability the whole package and so in this case the potency needs to be balanced with that environmental effect and so these things like aquatic talks mammalian talks beneficial insects we're looking at soil degradation water ground leaching all of these are part of a environmental or regulatory package that we have to go through and we have to make sure that we check all these boxes and so some of the tools we use to evaluate these assays or these criteria we do a lot of high throughput early screening and so this is probably the last decade where high automation and high throughput has come alive where now we can do high throughput assays for different aquatic talks testing or mammalian talks testing we do a significant amount of motive action determination and this is really due to we don't want to send a mo we don't want a product that has a motive action that is not sustainable or that is detrimental to animals or the environment and so if there is already resistance in the market we don't want to put another another molecule out there that already has resistance that's a waste of the farmer's time that's a waste of our time and so that is important to us to making sure that we actually are advocating for our farmers and are also consumers and this leads me to our next one biochemical assay assays for resistance types and so there's different types of resistance out there between metabolic resistance it could be site resistance and that differential is very important to understand and so peter mentioned the asals out there earlier there's a number of resistance in the asal series but if you can find a differentiation in that asals that's very important to showcase and you get a different class of motive action and so the last two here i think there one is has been around for a number of years in silica models we've you know anywhere from pharmaceuticals to ag chemistry everyone uses in silica models and computational chemistry to push forward and how do we find a sustainable and potent product however i want just briefly mention here machine learning and this is a up-and-coming area in the area of pharmaceuticals but also agrochemistry where can we find new chemical space that is sustainable in terms of discovery but also process chemistry and and formulations also and so aqua teba we have been tasked with this challenge for many years now and we have six green chemistry awards over the past a little over two decades now that is more green chemistry awards than all the agro industry combined and so some of you might be familiar with these green chemistry awards from from silk industry like merc and you might be thinking well those are green chemistry pathways or synthetic pathways that are really efficient so those are not those are for those you're not aware there's actually a subcategories in the green chemistry award and those are green half as i mentioned there's also a designer design of greener reaction conditions award and there's also a design of greener chemicals award and so five out of six of the of our awards are actually on the design of greener chemicals award and so we at corteva have put a stake in the ground saying we do not want to commercialize products that are not sustainable and so this is just a this is a a tribute to what we've done in the past and we won't continue that trend or tradition we've done at corteva and you can see here we have two products here as shown here but also one can chemistry awards but also one of our newest products that just launched this year and a trek it's a natural product based fungicide and we are one of the leaders in the agrochemistry engine for natural products we have a whole natural product team dedicated to exploring new natural products discovering new natural products and we believe this is a fundamental pillar for the sustainability of agrochemistry and so just one quick example of what i mentioned about machine learning and natural products back in 1999 we released a spinoza set or we won the green chemistry award for spinoza i'd say and we've done we did an extensive amount of scr research in this area and we found this compound here five six dihydro spinoza and a and it really it gave us a improved photostability and residual control to make sure the product is is is sustainable however when we actually took that same molecule went through an artificial neural net we actually discovered a new molecule here this ethoxy three ethoxy spinoza j and so our chemist and scientists at Corteva at the time or that i'm going to time i should say combined these two these two attributes and they were able to develop a new product called spinner ram which actually has a dihydro five six olefin and also an ethyl group here and this now is a new product which also won a green chemistry award for a greener insecticide and so this is just one example of how we combined machine learning how we combine natural products and to really push forward in the future of of agrochemistry and so i just want to finish this section by saying that there's still ongoing challenges in this area it's not all solved just because we're in looking into drones and looking into machine learning and silica models and high throughput and automation it doesn't mean everything's solved and so this is just a call out to the general community and saying there's still a dearth a dearth of protein crystal structures related to plants fungi and insects out there you can imagine a lot of the protein data banks out there are a lot of proteins about human human enzymes and human proteins and so these are we do use these as homology models but there is a lack of information biochemical formation out there on plants and fungi and insects and so this is related now to the limited funding for academic research out there i think this is something that needs to improve in the overall industry and the community in the science community that a lot of times we we fund a lot of our larger anti-cancer and anti antimicrobial studies but we don't fund our food supply we don't fund our food research and lastly here just i mentioned the basic research for organic chemistry and chemical biology and so as a natural product chemist in grad school i would have to say that you know i will that when you see all these natural products out there and there's always this is anti-cancer this is anti-microbial you rarely see natural products that have been isolated then tested on on agrochemical species that are chemical important species or fungi and so this is just a call out to the community and saying you know there's more out there than just screening your natural products and your small molecules against the pharmaceutical world you can also screen them against agrochemical areas and so with that i'll shift gears a little bit to a different type of sustainability and that's process chemistry and so sustainability with a manufacturing process in mind and so as many you might know on the call here that the production volumes of agrochemical are large and so there are you know over 10 000 metric tons for most of these agrochemicals and that's because they're used all around the world and so because of that we have to be sustainable and how we produce these agrochemicals and so shown on the right here we see the the ideal synthetic process map here we see low cost safe sustainable simple robust supply chain and patent protected and all of these put together are important and to making sure that that AI it actually can be produced to sustain sustainability sustainable and so we use tools like high experimentation and the design of experiments and those tools really get us to check off some of these boxes of exploring different routes and being cost effective and so i just want to mention a lot of these star materials need to be also available on a hundred metric tons and there's not many things around the world that are available at a hundred metric tons and you can use to develop a small molecule and so that's something that we in the industry I look at every day to find new ways of accessing large amounts of material but in a safe manner and so it's not all about always the cost of cost manufacturing because that's not what the farmer cares about farmers have a budget and it's usually by hectare and so the hectare is a basically one hectare is a baseball field for those who don't know or for those of us in for those of you in Europe it's about about a rugby field and so if you're talking about a molecule to spray on corn or soy that that molecule out you know needs to be sold for somewhere between five and ten dollars a hectare and so if you think about that and you extrapolate from this graph here you're looking at something that's very dirt cheap you have to you know synthesize a molecule that's very that's very cheap and very very efficacious and so we can't charge the farmer an arm and a leg to spread their field or to buy a compound to spread their field and this is this is actually it goes back to the cost of manufacturing and so a quick example here from Corteva one of our recent molecules at a belt out of the mention before it's synthesized our newest route we have for process development is synthesized from these three starting materials here which account for about 41% of the carbon count in this entire molecule and so we can buy the pure for our raw material for a dollar a kilo and it's a renewable feedstock which makes this even this makes us makes us a very good sustainable route for this molecule so one of the key steps in this route is this is this reduction here we have this dial and the first generation route we had was this TFA triethylsilane TMA DCM route here to get us this chiral alcohol however realize that you know triethylsilane is not cheap it is not renewable it's not sustainable and so we were able to do a number of high throughput screens here and we're able to actually find this PMHS reagent that actually is a byproduct of the silicone industry and delivers a hydride to displace sorry to reduce the second alcohol from this molecule and keeping the ER the same and so this is just one example of things we're doing at Corteva and how we want to make sure that our routes are are sustainable and we are you know using high throughput screening and automation to get this done and so the other part about part of of product and process and product development is the formulations and so this is something that people don't really talk about often but the AI is one thing in the package the formulation is the other half of the more than half the package a lot of times and so formulations need to be successful needs to be sustainable and so things at Corteva we've developed low drift technology that makes our products stick to the plant and not not drift and around during spring we also make sure that all of our co-formulants are safe and healthy safe and risk-free around people and so this is something we look for in all of our co-formulants and so also we look for farmer convenience and local local focus so a farmer from Brazil has a different way of spraying soybeans than a farmer from Iowa and so we need to make sure that our formulations are actually fitting what they want and so it could it could it be a granular formulation versus a liquid formulation what does that look like do they want to pre-mix they're now going to pre-mix things like that also matter for sustainability in terms of packaging and so all these put together really are important to our formulation group and they they they strived to make sure whatever product they actually put on the market is farmer focused and so there again still is ongoing challenges in the area of process and product development I mentioned you know we've had some successes with you know low-cost catalytic reactions but there's still if you look at the academic literature or even the industrial literature there's a large amount of these fancy catalysts fancy ligands out there and there's no way that an agrochemistry performs agrochemistry process process chemistry lab can these be amenable and so you know again call out to the academic community maybe or the industry it's really can we look can we look for green low-cost catalytic reactions also mentioned here the chiral reactions there's a push for chiral ai's coming from discovery and so can we actually produce these in a low-cost manner you know we have amino acids and other chiral pool molecules you can use but those are only can only last for so long and give us first only so many compounds and so if there are other ways we can find other ways we can make chiral agrochemical products and lastly talking about formulations there's a limited amount of formulations science education and research in the in the academic setting to my knowledge there's no uh phd in formulation science really and so there's kind of a lot of on-the-job training that needs to be done and so this is something that i didn't appreciate until i started you know hanging around more formulation scientists and so that's something that would be an interesting area to tackle from the science community and so with that i hope i i've told you a little about the discovery and process and product development area sustainability i apologize i can't i was not able to talk about application technology and product stewardship hopefully on their time but there's one thing that drives all of this change and it's the people and and people really drive all of these sustainability changes and that's really talking about the next generation of farmers conscious consumers conscious consumers these fruitful collaborations in science and also diversity of scientists farmers and consumers and so what i'm talking about is really uh the farmers adopting new technologies if they don't do adopting technologies then there's no there's no need for us to develop those things and then the consumers are requesting sustainably grown food nowadays and so we need to adapt to what they want the consumer wants and lastly i think this picture shows it speaks a thousand words here diversity is the pillar of sustainability whether it be in the lab whether it be on the farm farming is a global a global tradition and so we need our our scientists needs to our scientists need to resemble the customers we're actually affecting and so i'll just mention lastly here collaborations do lead to success and so these are just some of the collaborations that we have done in past at corteva and so these span for motive action all the way to machine learning and regulatory and so on and that has been a real pillar for us to succeed and so i'll finish with sustainability as a whole system approach it's not just the it's not just the manufacturing it's not just the application it's all of it put together you know machine learning and automation is coming a long way it's helping us succeed in many of these areas natural products has been a huge huge effort for us in in corteva and we we see it as the future one of the future pillars of sustainability and lastly manufacturing formulations and green chemistry are key creaturines of these of a sustainable symbol product thank you very much we're running a little bit over so let's why don't we have a lot of questions queued up why don't we go ahead and get started but i will start with with one for you uh you were the first person to mention green chemistry though you didn't specifically hone in on the green chemistry principles uh how important are the green chemistry principles in the thought process and going into designing new new agrochemicals so is your question i guess talking about the green chemistry principles of manufacturing or are you talking about green chemistry principles of uh i was talking mainly i think about the you know the anastas and warner green chemistry 12 principles of green chemistry kind of look yeah so i think it's very important for us to design our molecules to fit the fit those green chemistry principles i know our our process chemistry group is looking at green solvents looking at lowering transition metal cost electricity metal amounts and things like that and so i think it's very important for the sustainable future of the products so okay so george kind of lit up people by i think two things he showed the uh the precipitous drop off in 1990 of no new act is for herbicide so one question is is that true of pesticides and fungicides as well and do you have a reason for that you spoke of a finite resource did we run out or are there still modes of action um i'd recommend you read some things by steven duke who's written about this but uh some quick answers are that um one was it glyphosate was so effective and so dominant that the returns to developing something new for a certain period of time were you were not uh that great so it looked like you know this is just taking over you know it's it's replacing things that we already had so the expected returns to developing things new um you know went down that's one explanation um another explanation is that we've had a lot of mergers and acquisitions and there's a debate in economics to what extent that is spurs innovation or decreases it but that's another change whether that's causative or not i'm not so sure um i think the other two speakers also highlighted another difference right there's this venn diagram of all these targets you now have to hit right in 1950 in 1960 is does this kill weeds does this kill insects now there's all these extra environmental uh considerations uh that have to to go into the whole r&d endeavor so i think it's a combination of factors but but um you know the the hurdles in terms of the attributes of the compounds is difficult and we've made a lot of discoveries so i think it's a combination of more hurdles to go through um easier things were found already um and that for a long time glyphosate dominated the market so much that it it kind of put other companies off and in terms of looking okay so i see peter just that peter just i just wanted to add a little bit um and build uh on george uh comment you know the way i look at it um at first of all totally new motivation is challenging i think this is challenging and pharma this is challenging in our industry but actually i see that there are within motivations quite let's say variation so i would say we have to take a little bit more differentiated picture today because we have in classes like azoles turbulence we have new classes arising that actually overcome of some of these challenges so i would say actually i'm a little bit more positive here i see that there is innovation coming and really um um ways of supporting farmers in overcoming um um these hurdles so a little bit more optimistic here so i'll direct this next question to you peter uh someone asked isn't biotech supposed to solve all the need for agrochemicals as indicated in my talk i think more options actually um are benefiting um farmers so it's not either or it's really end now so i really feel very strongly that the toolbox today it's richer and we have to use all the tools chemistry we have to use the tools that come from biotech and we have the to take the tools that come from digitalization emerging so in that aspect i would say the world is is getting richer and i think this is also for me the way how we can help pharma to really um find the balance and do sustainable farming okay uh tages i'll direct this next one to you you you're also muted you took a very um chemistry oriented thing but i happen to know as since we were used to be colleagues that spinoza or spinoza ram was actually found from biology and is still synthesized be a fermentation so when do you make the call as to how to make something whether it be bio or or chemistry so um spinoza and spinoza are both yet fermented um so is the one molecules showed in a track that's also fermented and then there's one last step um aesthetic step and so it's going to be a cost uh manufacturing question can we synthesize it on scale for the same cost that we would that would be fermented and so it's it's just a um a cost manufacturing difference there and so we have a great team of scientists that um our experts in fermentation and um genetic engineering for uh fungi and so we've done a great job of actually being able to produce these large quantities of natural products complex natural products on scale okay uh so i'm not sure who to direct this to so whoever chooses to raise their head first um that it was the actual question was it was surprising to learn how little innovation is taking place in the development new modes of herbicides what about adjuvants any promising developments here so someone define adjuvants first for the rest of the of us and then talk about the developments whoever wants to jump on that one anyone go ahead peter are you sure yeah i think so adjuvants are um i say the soap that helped to penetrate the plant it's a little bit uh uh maybe the the simplistic way of looking at um yeah i think formulation and and and i think was pointed out earlier is really important um to make a crop protection product um um really effective and then i think we have also talked about additional elements smart sprayers um drones of application so again um here new options coming in that actually enriches i think um will in the future offer farmers ways of doing and managing um their land in a sustainable fashion okay again a question i don't know who wants to jump on this one but the question is that a lot of focus is on the big field crops and yet there are many more things from a food perspective that we all care about we want fruits and vegetables as well is the model that we have today serving all of the markets that are needed or is there too much focus just on the field crops um i mean that's that's this has been a classic problem it's kind of like the orphan drug problem right you have certain pharmaceuticals that are treating very very rare diseases and you know you know there isn't necessarily a market for those so um you know there you know there are a lot of crops especially crops in Africa roots and tubers where they just don't have like the market sales that the big field crops do and i think this is a classic case of where public research um is really important because you know private just the private sector may not have a profit motive or a pop profit advantage in doing that but but it suggests that you know public plant breeding uh remain and you know public um r&d and those kinds of things is still important so let's spin this on the on the public r&d there were a couple of things mentioned a couple of times uh mentions were made of needing more research in certain areas if you were in charge if any of you were in charge of the world how would you make the situation better than it is today with respect to finding new materials uh speeding up the the pace of getting them into the market um any of the things that that research could do maybe i take a first uh the first step to this it's very very i think it's a challenging question that you're putting out here mark um from my perspective um when i look at the um development of agrochemistry as we have it yeah i would say clearly um having clear um and the predictable science-based regulatory framework is very important because i think as soon as you have clear um let's say clear targets and then you have a clear market definition i would say then you can adjust also um um your r&d and i think this is also this is um the way i think it should be and for for in that aspect i think this framework is very important that it's uh solid and science-based i think for industry um i think we fully recognize that regulation is good it's not our enemy it's our friend i would say it also drives innovation but i think it needs to be science-based and predictable anyone else want to weigh in i would say like oh well here i'll jump in for for things like resistance management sometimes it's it's not products it's it's practices like crop rotations things like that and again i think um there there's there's a lot of innovation that isn't necessarily patentable inventions and so you know the you having you know adequate support for you know public you know the public sector to be doing those kinds of things is is crucial and i think that that complements what what the private sector is doing you know and again just you know more investment in basic science education is is going to help i'll just add that you know a lot of times you know if if you're a chemist or a biologist going through um graduate school you you might apply for an NIH or NSF and there's a lot of funding out there for those kind of programs um but there's not not much very much application for the agrochemistry or agro world and so i think there's a uh a funding difference from a academic sense for the agro industry as a whole and so if that changes that could be a huge game changer for the industry for the farmers for food security and so many things downstream so let's ask about so we intrinsically in in agrochemistry you're making a molecule that you're going to put in the environment so what are the tools that we are using and do and how do the tools need to be made better for predicting modes of action or predictive toxicology moving forward anyone who wants to answer that so i think i mentioned a little bit in my slides i think with the rise of machine learning and AI and in silica models particularly we can do a lot more of predicting saying hey does that functional group going to cause us issues in this regulatory test is this functional group going to have issues in eco talks if there was things like that we can develop these really really extensive models and machine learning algorithms that can help us um distinguish early on if that molecule is even worth taking forward and so before we spend millions of millions of dollars on you know actual regulatory tests we can do a lot of in silica screening before that okay building on table as i think this is this is really i think a game changer in this industry that we have i think this understanding of the molecular mechanism and that we have these early these early indicated tests and i think i at least would observe that the number of failures actually in late stage development is minimal these days because you really can weed out most of this really in the early days yeah so i'll stick with you for a minute peter don't mute yourself too quickly this is more of a question i think that comes kind of from r&d management or are we willing what can we do as an industry to foster better formulation science in in academia better agrochemistry is there is there something that we're not doing that we should be doing you know i think personally that um um there are collaboration that i think every company has um with basic science i would honestly say that um um if people come was a very good degree understanding of um um um crop molecular biology or they come with a very good understanding of organic synthesis this is a very good starting point and the rest you really learn as you do it and i think this is also where i would say i don't see that necessarily there's a change needed on the academic side per se i would rather than agree with what george said is that it would be desirable clearly that also the topic of understanding of crops a mechanism that there is more let's say resources for fundamental um um for fundamental research available but honestly i'm i'm not so worried that on the education side there is really a change needed i see that people the people we get at bsf greatly you know great scientists and they all can i think learn the interdisciplinary play that is needed in in to develop these products not worried at all yeah okay well it's good to know you're relaxed peter um um a topic that's come up in several of the questions concerns uh collateral damage certainly we had the issues with bees lately how how do we as a as an industry or how or as a field prevent those things from happening the unintended consequences are we are we really getting better at that or do we still have a ways to go i would say yes and yes i think we're getting much better at it uh but there's a way to go and there's the irony of the more information you have the more effects you're measuring and so it could look like you're not you're you're gaining ground but i think another thing we're seeing is that people are coming to agriculture from other aspects like you know from health aspects from environmental aspects that don't necessarily have farming backgrounds but they realize that you know that understanding agriculture is really important but i think we've made a huge amount of progress in in monitoring and understanding this ecological relationships and again with improvements um in information technology and spatial things we're just going to get better at it but it may look like we're we're not advancing as much because you have better monitoring systems you're more likely to see problems when when you were completely ignorant of them before and i think a matter of fact is that actually there are no other chemicals on earth that are so well studied what is the environmental behavior because we you know they are used in the environment than agrochemical so i think in that respect i think they are the best studied chemical products that are there on the planet yeah so i i guess i'll spin this kind of you know for this point in time we were we as the human race have been confronted by a pandemic there's a potential for pandemic things like rust you know fungi on wheat or something happening in in the world how quickly can we respond because it it does seem as though the pace of bringing a new active to market is slow do do we have a reserve that if we had to spin it up we really could nobody wants to jump on that one no i think mark realistically first of all um you always will try to address it with existing products or new formulation these you can get in the market and yes in special situation you might get special use permits also in existence and i think we have seen that you know a decade ago so with asian soybean rust that really emerged very quickly and here i think the industry did respond very well in bringing products to the market to serve farmers to scope with these and now if you really have to start from scratch it will take longer than developing um um developing uh you know a vaccine and i think we every everybody is waiting for the vaccine already and i think it shows i think your question i think addresses that continuous innovation is truly needed um there is something this is also people will only realize how important it is um when you have outbreaks like asian soybean rust or disease that really progress and i think we try as an industry to watch and understand together with academic partners how certain past disease and weeds are developing so that we direct our r&d resources as early as early as possible um also into these fields okay i'm being reminded that we are up against our time uh why don't we go in reverse order of our speakers any final comments tejas uh thank you for the time and uh it was i think um sustainability is very important to corteva and the industry itself i think we have a long ways to go um but we're making a significant progress in the area okay thank you george but yes thank thanks for the invitation kind of following on that last question i think what covet shows is you know the importance of having a lot of international coordination and that's going to be important for plant diseases in the future okay and peter you get the last word my friend thank you very much i think it's an exciting field and i personally believe that uh sustainable agrochemistry um is a reality and something that i think the entire community is really striving for so you know be positive okay um i am unclear whether i'm to turn it back to ellen or whether just to say we're done so ellen are we done hi yes uh we're we're done but i just want to remind the audience that we will have an exciting 2021 and that we have two workshops coming up in 2021 one on diversity equity and inclusion and another on laboratory automation and we will have two additional webinars uh during 2021 so stay tuned and thank you very much for attending all right thank you all