Monsanto is proud to announce the grand opening of the Mid South Cotton Breeding facility at their Delta & Pine Land location in Scott.

The company is very excited about the opening of the new buildings at their breeding facility.

“We’ve been in business at this site for almost a hundred years and we’ve had a cotton breeding program since 1915,” said David Horton, Site Manager. “We continued to grow for all those years but here with in the last two years we’ve begun to upgrade our facilities with new technologies.”

“Deltapine was purchased in 2007 by Monsanto,” said Doug Shoemaker, Regional Cotton Breeding Lead. “In the beginning of 2008, we started a thorough renovation of our research facility and we’ve just completed construction.

“The value of investment in equipment and facility upgrades by Monsanto is in excess of $12 million,” said Shoemaker.

“We’ve been breeding cotton over 90 years,” he said. “We’ve always just built as we needed. We had some old buildings that needed to be updated so the renovation was really three-fold.

“The first purpose was building renovation — bring all the buildings up to current codes and standards,” said Shoemaker. “The second one was equipment upgrades. We now have new cotton seed processing equipment, gins, cotton seed delinters, cleaners and seed treaters. Finally, it was to create a safe work place for all our employees.

“With us being in the research department, we are at the beginning of the product pipeline,” he said. “We’re actually the group that develops new cotton varieties that are sold to our customers. We feel that this enhances our ability to bring better products to the market faster.