Roundup Ready - Monsanto

includes training in irrigation, reduced-tillage
techniques, and business planning to generate
income from surplus production. After six
months, the families repay the loans by giving
in-kind start-up supplies to other families in
the community. Thus, the initial investment
multiplies every six months, as 175 more
families have access to in-kind loans.
TRAINING FARMERS TO BECOME
BUSINESSPEOPLE
The Mpumalanga province of South Africa,
suffers from an average unemployment rate
of 45 percent. It has the second-lowest
literacy rate in the country, despite close
proximity to nearby centers of economic
activity such as Johannesburg.
The Monsanto Fund has provided a $135,000
grant to an organization called TechnoServe
for an agribusiness training program in the
Moutse region of Mpumalanga area. The
program provided basic business, credit management,
and ag marketing training to 1,000
entrepreneurial farmers and their families.
Although the team ran into several challenges,
such as harder topsoil and fewer experienced
farmers than they expected, the participants
showed great enthusiasm to improve their
business and agricultural skills.
Monsanto Pledge Award Winner
Major Sustained Reduction
in Glyphosate Intermediate
Deepwell Waste Volumes
Over the past three years, a determined team at the
Monsanto Luling, Louisiana, Roundup herbicide manufacturing
plant has achieved a major goal. The Glyphosate
Intermediate (GI) Yield Team significantly reduced the
volume of waste discharged to an onsite deepwell. Since
2000, the team’s efforts have reduced the amount of
deepwell waste by 65 million pounds, saved $7 million,
and recovered 14 million pounds of usable GI product.
The reduction in waste and cost savings occurred through
improvements in two areas. The team was able to reduce
the amount of GI crystals lost by improving centrifuge
designs. It was able to minimize the amount of soluble
GI in the batch process with statistical process controls.
These two changes
reduced the amount of
GI sent out as waste by
29 percent. Then, the
team discovered that an
adjustment to the batch
recipe would cut costs
and reduce hydrochloric
acid waste by 25 percent.
The efforts of the Luling team are the outcome of a
persistent vision, focus, work, and the use of powerful
improvement methods such as Six Sigma, a set of
business and statistical tools that help people to understand,
improve, and control any business process. The
central idea behind Six Sigma is that if you can measure
how many defects you have in a process, you can
systematically figure out how to eliminate them and get
as close to zero defects as possible. Each year, Luling
will save an equivalent of 125 million pounds of deepwell
waste and $5 million in raw materials costs.
{ MONSANTO COMPANY 2004 PLEDGE REPORT: PAGES 46-47 }