The Battle Royale for Supercorn

Marc Albertsen, the bespectacled, 62-year-old research director at Pioneer Hi-Bred, DuPont's (DD) seed development unit, was catching up on paperwork one morning in July 2007 when he got a call from an assistant, Sharon Cerwick. "Marc," Cerwick said, "you'd better come out here and see this."

Cerwick had been in the field, literally, inspecting rows of experimental corn planted next to Pioneer's headquarters in Johnston, Iowa. The corn had been genetically engineered by Albertsen and his colleagues in hopes of achieving a new trait: more efficient use of nitrogen. That's at the top of the corn growers' wish list because the cost of ammonium nitrate fertilizer has soared to $450 per ton, up 130 percent since 2002. Albertsen and other seed scientists have been trying to build nitrogen-efficient stalks for at least five years, but their supercorn is still 5 to 10 years away. "You're talking about our holy grail," says Pamela Johnson, a National Corn Growers Assn. (NCGA) board member with 1,200 acres in Floyd, Iowa.