Qrome™ Stacks Enhance Insect Control, Boost Yield
Ryan French, DuPont Pioneer Senior Corn Marketing Manager
for the United States and Canada. for the Corn Product Line at DuPont Pioneer.
Photo by John LaRose Jr.
BETTY VALLE GEGG-NAEGER
MidAmerica Farmer Grower
JOHNSTON, IOWA
A program on Qrome™, a new high yielding line of corn products by Pioneer, was presented recently at Pioneer Media Day by Ryan French, DuPont Pioneer Senior Corn Marketing Manager for the United States and Canada. for the Corn Product Line at DuPont Pioneer. The latest product line will be equipped with proven insect protection and strong agronomics to deliver maximum on-farm performance.
“We’re really excited to announce this new product line we’re bringing to our customers called Qrome™,” he began. “This technology will bring multiple modes of action both above ground and below ground to our growers in the United States and Canada. This is important, because this will offer the highest level of insect protection technology for growers and also be a very durable technology, bringing value over the long term.”
The foundation of the Qrome™ product line is event DP 4114 – a transgenic event that includes a molecular stack of proven Bt proteins from the Herculex® 1 and Herculex® RW traits, and is highly compatible with Pioneer® brand corn germplasm across a wide range of hybrid platforms.
“What’s exciting about Qrome™ compared to other technologies in the industry is that it uses a unique molecular stack that’s proprietary and was developed here at DuPont Pioneer,” French said. “It brings additional value in terms of yield performance, and it also expands genetic of options.
“When we use this technology we are able to bring two rootworm traits below ground across a wider array of our genetics. So it expands the pipeline and it brings additional yield performance compared to the legacy technologies we’re using. This molecular stack is not a new novel mode of action, it’s built on the existing Herculex trait that we’ve been working with for a number of years, as well as some very proven traits. We’re really excited to bring this forward.”
Moving into next year, the Qrome™ technology will be offered across a wider range of on-farm trials with customers across the Corn Belt so farmers can experience this technology on their farms. It’ll come with some stewardship requirements; but Pioneer is also doing a heavy amount of research, so moving forward past 2016 Pioneer will commercialize this and bring Qrome™ technology to a wide array of growers across the Corn Belt.
“In our research testing of the Qrome™ technology we’ve been able to expand from a limited amount of genetics that we’ve worked with in the past with legacy Herculex and expand that across a much wider array of our genetic platform,” French continued. “The ability to integrate multiple traits into a genetic platform is a very difficult task; however, Qrome™ technology brings the ability to integrate those traits in a much more efficient way.”
Pioneer breeders are very, very excited to work with this technology and bring it into genetics. In the past they had abandoned using the legacy technologies.
“As we move forward we are going to compare these technologies that are in Qrome™ to others in the market. We expect to see a much improved yield performance as we bring all those insect traits that our customers require to protect them from above ground pests, against rootworm but bring them in more genetic options and with improved yield performance,” French concluded. ∆
Betty Valle Gegg-Naeger: Senior Staff Writer, MidAmerica Farmer Grower