Mystic — Days before activist groups around Connecticut hold a rally against Monsanto Co. that will have them marching past the former DeKalb Genetics Corp. plant here, employees of the company defended the genetic manipulation of seeds and offered a rare glimpse of the intensive research required to develop new products.

"We're proud of what we do," said Brendan Hinchey, event production lead for the Tranformation Team at the Monsanto Mystic Research site off Maritime Drive where about 50 employees work exclusively on developing new corn seeds.

But Monsanto employees are also aware that their research is controversial, and that such groups as GMO Free CT are planning a rally at noon Saturday in support of required labeling for genetically modified foods.

Tyson Matthew Pruitt, senior manager of media relations for St. Louis-based Monsanto, said the company's invitation to The Day to visit the Mystic research site last week was part of a change of corporate philosophy in hopes of doing a better job of "engaging with consumers." 

T. Michael Spencer of Mystic, a Connecticut College graduate and project lead at the research site, said he believes the public has several misconceptions about the company.

"We're an agriculture company," said Spencer, a cell and molecular biologist who has been associated with Monsanto and its previous incarnations in the region for 27 years. "We see a huge opportunity to develop technologies to meet the world's food needs."

According to a 2009 report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the world's population is expected to increase more than 2 billion to 9.1 billion by mid-century. To meet increasing food needs, the report suggested, most of the crop-yield growth must be tied to improving technologies since any potential increase in arable lands is limited.

"Farmers will need new technologies to produce more from less land, with fewer hands," the report said.

Among the issues facing researchers, Spencer said, is how to develop plants that are drought- and insect-resistant, tolerate higher temperatures brought on by global warming and stand up to pesticides. Among the misconceptions the public has about Monsanto seeds, he added, is the idea that they contain the herbicide Roundup when in fact they are created to better tolerate applications of the chemical, a Monsanto formulation that he insisted is less harmful to the environment than other weed killers.

The company that has evolved into Monsanto Mystic Research has a long history in the area, dating to the early 1980s when Pfizer Inc. formed a joint venture with the former DeKalb Ag Research based in Illinois. The resulting company, DeKalb-Pfizer Genetics, became one of the key firms nationwide in advancing new corn hybrids, but Pfizer eventually bowed out of the partnership and Monsanto bought DeKalb outright in 1998, though the legacy company's logo depicting an ear of corn with wings still graces the barn-like front entrance of the Mystic site today.

The current 79,000-square-foot facility, built more than two decades ago, sits on 16 acres near the Denison Pequotsepos Nature Center next to the bucolic Denison Homestead. It contains 28,000 square feet of greenhouse space where thousands of genetically modified corn plants sit in pots under tightly controlled conditions that keep temperatures between 60 degrees and the mid-70s.

"Our goal is to create Iowa in July," Spencer said.

Lights are turned on 16 hours a day, while the greenhouses go dark for eight hours each night. The tight environmental controls mean Monsanto, which employs 22,000 worldwide, can get three to four growing seasons of the experimental corn crops every year. This is not sweet corn for direct human consumption, but maize fed to animals such as pigs and cattle.

Corn is an easy crop to work with because the male and female plants are readily distinguishable, Spencer said. And the pollination process can be controlled by keeping a paper bag over each plant's reproductive areas and then having a greenhouse worker remove the prophylactic device to effect pollination at the proper time. The greenhouses are even stocked with beneficial insects.

Spencer said naturally forming bacteria are used in the on-site Monsanto labs to transfer new genes into plants. The hybrids are then grown in the greenhouses, tested to make sure the proper genetic traits are transferred and then the corn seeds are sent to isolated, contained field locations in areas where the plants are targeted for growing.

"It's an exciting place to work," said Hinchey, the event project lead. "It makes you feel good to be doing something so valuable."

It is only after receiving all approvals from federal regulatory authorities — the Food and Drug Administration, Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Agriculture — that seeds are effectively "deregulated," meaning they can be planted by farmers in an open field, Hinchey said.

"GMO crops take years of investments and testing prior to their introduction," Monsanto spokesman Pruitt said.

He pointed to a survey that showed it took an average of 13 years to gain all approvals for genetic modification — at a cost averaging $136 million for each plant.

"There's a lot of attrition," Spencer added. "You have more failures than you have winners. It's a numbers game."

The Mystic plant employs a range of specialists, including botanists, biologists, physiologists, data crunchers and patent experts who run the gamut in educational background from Ph.D.s to undergraduate degrees.

Increasingly, the Mystic facility has been adding automation to reduce the tedium of some processes, such as cutting small pieces of plants for genetic testing and placing them on a sample tray.

"A lot of people think of Monsanto as just GMOs," Spencer said. "There's a lot more to what we do."

One of the groundbreaking areas Monsanto has been exploring lately is the use of data science to analyze fields both before and after planting crops. This digitization of the physical world is being taken on by another Monsanto business unit called The Climate Corp. that is working to improve farm efficiencies.

Thomas Ruff, St. Louis-based director of experimental sciences for The Climate Corp., said new combines for harvesting are becoming more and more sophisticated, offering the possibility of analyzing fields in 10-by-10-meter blocks to be able to change the pattern of seed or fertilizer dispersal from area to area. This approach, he said, should allow farmers to save money by using seeds and fertilizer only where they will do the most good.

"We can increase yield, but not at the cost of harming the environment," Ruff said.

Harming the environment is what anti-GMO activists charge Monsanto is doing with its genetically modified seeds being developed in Mystic and other sites around the country. Their concerns were outlined in an open letter to the European Union published late last year in The Ecologist that claimed the use of so-called Roundup Ready crops have led to new herbicide-resistant "superweeds," resulting in a "pesticide treadmill" leading to ever-higher applications of chemicals in GMO-seeded fields.

"Studies have shown that the increased herbicide use of Roundup Ready crops is highly destructive to the natural environment," the letter stated. "For example, Roundup kills milkweeds, which are the key food source for the iconic Monarch butterfly and poses a threat to other important insects such as bees. It is also damaging to soil, killing beneficial organisms that keep it healthy and productive and making micronutrients unavailable to the plant."

Activists also question whether genetically modified crops are a wise investment for American farmers, saying yields are not consistently higher and charging that GMO seeds cost three to six times the price of conventional seeds. Genetically modified seeds cannot legally be saved for planting in the following year because companies like Monsanto claim them as patent-protected.

"GM crops have proved more costly to grow than conventional crops," the letter said. "Because of the disproportionate emphasis on GM crops, conventional seed varieties are no longer widely available leaving farmers with less choice and control over what they plant."

Bob Burns, a Ledyard organic farmer who has had a leading role in protests again Monsanto, said he has nothing against the local operation.

"I support 100 percent the research we need in these areas," Burns said. "I support the scientists who work there 100 percent. They're good people." 

But he does object to Monsanto's use of political muscle to market products and its use of corporate patents to shut down independent research on GMOs.

Word last week that the USDA would be allowing food producers to label their products "GMO free" was a baby step in the right direction, Burns added. But he still wants to see food produced with genetically modified seeds to be labeled as well.

Executives at Monsanto Mystic Research say they are aware of the upcoming protest and have followed a controversy in which activists have charged the company with attempted "greenwashing" by offering the nearby nature center a $5,000 gift last year. But they say the gift was just their way of supporting a neighbor and that they are simply doing their best to improve agricultural processes.

"As a planet, we've got to develop sustainable methods of producing food," Spencer said.

"A lot of the conversation is around food," Hinchey added. "There's an emotional impact that can make the discussion more difficult sometimes."

l.howard@theday.com

Twitter: @KingstonLeeHow