At a meeting this week with the Monsanto Growers Advisory Council, National Association of Wheat Growers (NAWG) President Sherman Reese announced NAWG is talking to other agribusiness groups about the future of growing and selling biotech wheat.

Underpinning these discussions are the beliefs that:

• Biotechnology has a critical role to play in the future of the U.S. wheat industry, and producers will be direct beneficiaries. Therefore, producers need to take a more active role to bring about its introduction.

• The domestic market will be more welcoming of the first biotechnology trait than foreign markets.

• Wheat growers have a narrow window of time to make a successful introduction, or risk becoming an "orphan crop" and supplanted domestically by drought-tolerant corn, soybeans and other crops. Drought tolerant corn is expected on the market no later than 2011.

• The mainstream commodity channel will eventually be indifferent to biotechnology, and we will support that direction. Efforts to segregate should focus on non-biotech varieties for customers who demand it. This demand may be satisfied by organic wheat or by the evolution of a commercial non-biotech channel.