Cottonwood Co-op

Dekalb Asgrow: The biggest discount from Dekalb and Asgrow will be 10% early cash. You have to have an order or just a dollar amount in the system by 15 Oct to receive this discount. If you choose this option you will have till Dec 15^th to pay for the purchase. They will also have 9% early cash as well with an order in by 15 Nov and paid by the same date. The program after that is normal early cash with the first discount of 7% ending 15 Dec. There will be 3 more tiers each reducing 2% per month.

That is just a brief overview of the discounts I will have more information a little later in the fall season. If you have any questions please let me know. I look forward to seeing all of you over the next few months. As always thank you for your continued business.

There are quite a few new things happening in the seed industry right now. I have discussed a few of these things in the past few newsletters but I want to give you an update of where everything is sitting right now. The first new thing I would like to discuss is Genuity.

Genuity is a new brand created by Monsanto for their trait system. This system will use a set of logos to explain the traits that the bag of corn or soybeans is going to have in it. For example if the corn hybrid has insect tolerance then it will have a logo of an insect on the bag. The same goes for herbicide tolerance and that logo will be a plant. I will discuss these a little further as I move into the other topics.

The second new product will be Genuity Roundup Ready 2 soybeans. This is the second generation of Roundup trait placement in soybeans. The biggest thing with RR2 soybeans is that each RR2 variety has the potential to yield 7-11% more than the regular RR soybeans. The reason for this increase is due to the placement of the gene within the plant. So in the case of these soybeans when you see the Genuity logo there will be an up arrow as part of the logo for these due to the increase in yield. The supply for these will be about 20% of what I usually sell so if you buy 500 units of soybeans you may be able to try 100 units of RR2 soybeans this year.

The final technology that I want to talk about is SmartStax. We have discussed this technology in previous newsletters but it is now a reality. This is the stacked traits of Dow’s Herculex rootworm and corn borer along with Monsanto’s VT Pro corn borer gene and the VT rootworm gene along with Roundup and Liberty tolerance. The biggest buzz with this product coming to market is the fact that when planting SmartStax hybrids the refuge requirement is only 5%. So with a 15% reduction in refuge requirement for those products that will allow you to grow 15% more of your acres to a higher yielding non-refuge corn. The availability of SartStax will be about 20% to 25% of what you normally buy. So if you buy 200 bags of corn you could potentially order 40 bags of Genuity SmartStax corn. These supplies of RR2 soybeans and SmartStax corn will run out quickly so if you would like to try either of these products please let me know. I look forward to helping each of you out with any questions or concerns that you may have about these new technologies. As always I look forward to talking with everyone over the next couple of months and if you have any questions please feel free to stop in or give me a call.