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Business Daily
Business Daily meets: Harry Stine
00:17:29
We speak to the American founder and CEO of the largest private seed company in the world
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- [00:00]
Ed Butler
This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the uk.
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Scott Hanson
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Harry Stein
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Scott Hanson
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Scott Hanson
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Ed Butler
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Ed Butler
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Ed Butler
Hello and welcome to Business Daily meets on the BBC World Service. I'm Ed Butler and today I'm with Harry Stein, the founder and CEO of the US firm Steinseed Co. It's the largest private seed firm in the world. Now 84, he's been in farming for eight decades.
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Harry Stein
I started working in a field right beside our office when I was 4 years old and today they would put my parents in jail for doing that.
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Ed Butler
Harry tells me how he's helped to transform farming into a high tech business.
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Harry Stein
In the United states. In the 1930s. For the entire decade, the average yield of corn was 24 bushels per acre. So if you would have told my father that your kid will be able to get 10 times the national average, that would seem crazy.
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Ed Butler
And how he overcame some big personal challenges to get where he is today.
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Harry Stein
I was a simple farmer who, despite being dyslexic and autistic, was able to do pretty well.
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Ed Butler
That's Harry Stein, founder of the Steinseed Company here on Business Daily from the BBC World Service. And just a warning, this program does contain strong, discriminatory and offensive language.
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Harry Stein
I couldn't reach the pedals. I had no idea what the gear shift was for. And I remember I was really just guiding it down the field as we were picking up bales. In those days we put bales on the ground and people would walk on each side and pick up a row and put them on a hay rack. And I remember very clearly when I was coming to the end of the rows, I thought, my goodness, what am I going to do now? Well, one of the people that were walking got up on the tractor and turned it around and headed it the other direction for me.
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Ed Butler
Harry's father, Bill Stein, had started the seed business, growing just a few dozen acres of oats and soybeans. He would often clean the seeds to get rid of the debris and sell them to his farming neighbours. At the time, intellectual property rights for soybean plants didn't exist.
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Harry Stein
At that point in time, there was no private breeding in crops like oats or soybeans, and it was simply public varieties. And we would grow a small acreage of a public variety and have a local person come in and clean it for us, and then we would sell it to our neighbors.
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Ed Butler
Although he was confident, helping out on the farm, school in the 1940s and 50s was not easy for Harry. Using language that was used about him at the time, which is generally regarded as highly offensive these days, he told me about some of the challenges he faced.
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Harry Stein
I was both dyslexic and autistic, but I didn't know that at the time. So I couldn't spell cat at the end of the first year in the first grade, but my mother wanted them to hold me back because of that. But in our little school, every teacher had two grades. So they started kindergarten in the spring of the year when I started school. So the next year, the first grade teacher, who had first and second, was going to have kindergarten in first grade. And she didn't want this little retarded kid in her class. So she wouldn't keep me back. She bumped me up to the next teacher. And then actually it was the spring of the third grade that in retrospect, I learned to reverse everything because the teacher came down the aisle and grabbed me out of my seat and hugged me. Well, the little kid had gotten a perfect score on an arithmetic test. So that was the point in time, in retrospect, that I learned to reverse everything.
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Ed Butler
After graduating from high school, Harry attended McPherson College in Kansas, where, among other things, he studied business and agriculture.
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Harry Stein
I went to a small school in Kansas, a church related school for college, and you could audit a course for $5 an hour at that time. And so I would take 20 some hours of courses every semester. And I think it's very important if you're going to be an entrepreneur to have a very wide knowledge of Many things. And so that was very advantageous for me to take so many courses during that period.
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Interviewer
Did you feel yourself to be an entrepreneur?
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Harry Stein
No. And even today I'm a farmer and we happen to specialize in seed. Different farms specialize in different things, but in our farm, we specialize in seed.
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Ed Butler
Harry joined his father's soybean venture. That's when he came across some unusual soybeans being grown just south of Adel. They had five seeds in one pod instead of the usual two or three. He wanted to find out more and asked an expert to identify the variety of the bean. This was when Harry recognized the potential profitability of breeding, developing, and growing newer, high yielding soybean varieties. And that led him to begin a soybean breeding program of his own.
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Harry Stein
Not knowing any better, I went up to Iowa State University one time because I had some soybean seed that was kind of interesting and unusual. And I went to the seed department and they had never didn't know what it was. So I went to the agronomy department and there was a technician there. And a technician is the guy that sweeps the floor and pulls the weeds. And so I asked him, how do you get new soybean varieties? So I tell Iowa State people that I got my education there in about 20 minutes from that guy. And then I took that same sample over to a Dr. Weber, who had been at Iowa State, and he identified it right away. So that was the. Almost the beginning of what we did in plant breeding.
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Interviewer
What exactly is the process here? I mean, when you're going back to the 70s, you have a soybean plant in your hand. How are you attempting to modify it? What exactly are you attempting to give to the plant to make it more resilient, to make it more fruitful?
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Harry Stein
Well, it's not complicated. It's very simple, actually. So you simply cross two different varieties together, and you do this on a very large scale. So I like to tell people, if you have basketball teams or soccer teams, and you pick people from a small village versus a large city, who's going to win? So numbers count in plant breeding. And so you make large numbers of populations, you make large numbers of selections, and you simply evaluate them effectively, which means running yield trials, which are very costly and time consuming and hard work and expensive. But that is the simple way to achieve higher yielding products.
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Interviewer
So yield trial. Basically, you're just planting a field and another field and another field and seeing what produces the greatest volume of crop.
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Harry Stein
Well, you don't plant fields. You plant trial plots and you plant large numbers of them all over the Midwest in our case, and look at the data very carefully and pick the best ones.
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Ed Butler
By the mid-1970s, Harry was running a company called Midwest Oilseeds, generating millions of dollars in royalties. And that's when he realized the importance of protecting his valuable plant genetics from competitors.
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Harry Stein
The U.S. patent Office did not accept patents on self pollinated crops until the early 90s, but we were one of the first companies that took advantage of that. And so today we have several thousand patents on different cultivars and we've used that to our advantage. But prior to that time, we used contractual obligations to restrict the use of our genetics. And some people said you couldn't do that, but we had a few lawsuits and people learned that we could indeed do that.
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Ed Butler
You're listening to Business Daily from the BBC World Service.
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Scott Hanson
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- [10:59]
Ed Butler
I'm Ed Butler and today I'm speaking to Harry Stein, the founder of Steinseed Company, a multi billion dol built on the back of soybean and corn genetics, which are then licensed to major agribusinesses. Since the 1960s, the company has been developing soybean seed varieties with desired genetic traits. The seeds are widely used in animal feed and produce vegetable oils. In the 1980s, the company grew by buying up smaller seed companies and by the 1990s with advanced advanced breeding techniques allowing the testing of 150,000 soybean varieties a year. It became the market leader in high yielding seed production.
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Harry Stein
In the case of soybeans, we receive fees, either directly or indirectly on the vast majority of soybeans planted in the United States and some other places around the world. One way or another, we receive fees on about 85% of the acreage in the United States.
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Interviewer
You hold more than 900 patents, right? In corn and soybean genetics. There are some who find that troubling. I mean, farmers are forbidden to save seeds. This means poorer farmers in some parts of the world who traditionally would save and share seeds from one harvest to the next, now have to be tied into buying in some places seeds developed by you or by the other big companies at a price that is set by those companies. It makes just running a small subsistence farm incredibly difficult and challenging for some farmers.
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Harry Stein
Yes, and we think there are some large multinational companies that actually charge more than is necessary and more than they should to these same farmers you're talking about.
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Interviewer
But not you?
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Harry Stein
Well, we have very low fees, relatively speaking. And as you can see, though, we've done fairly well with those low fees.
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Interviewer
You've done very well. I mean, would it be fair to describe you as a billionaire today, sir?
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Harry Stein
Well, I don't know. As you well know, Forbes publishes data, and I don't know for sure where they get that data, but they would say so, yes.
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Interviewer
So 60% of the market now is controlled by just four companies. I mean, that was what I was reading. Are you comfortable with the fact that that sort of grip on agriculture, globally, at least with some of these types of crops we've been describing, it's becoming a kind of monopoly, isn't it?
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Harry Stein
Well, but part of this is caused by the government itself. You see, the ridiculous registration that is necessary today for new genetics and new traits, limits the entry of smaller companies that could otherwise exist. So the government has caused this problem, and I agree it's a problem, but the way to fix it is to reduce the registration cost so that more than the big multinationals can be involved.
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Interviewer
Are you still claiming, though, on patents that you set up decades ago, or does it just move all the time?
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Harry Stein
Well, everything constantly is changing and I tell people you either need to get with it or you're going to get ran over.
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Interviewer
Describe, if you will, what you have brought to agriculture. I mean, this new science, and it became a new science under your wing, partly, didn't it, through the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s. How much have you changed agriculture for the better in your view?
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Harry Stein
Well, we like to think we've improved the yields of the crops. So incidentally, my father moved to our present farm in 1934 and in the United States in the 1930s. For the entire decade, not a good or bad year. For the entire decade, the average yield of corn was 24 bushels per acre. And today it's very easy to get over 200. So if you would have told my father that your kid will be able to get 10 times the national average, that would seem crazy. Double maybe. But 10 times is totally unreasonable. And this is all not due to genetics. This is a combination of genetics. The chemicals for herbicides, for insecticides, and the equipment to plant and harvest is greatly improved today versus 80 or 90 years ago.
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Interviewer
There are two faces. Some would say, though, wouldn't that to this shift towards genetically modified agriculture, on the one hand, it can perhaps reduce global hunger, improve drought resistance and so on. But there are some who say there are risks to the ecosystem, to consumers health. Robert Kennedy, the US Health Secretary, has been a vocal critic in the past of GM crops. I mean, how do you respond to that?
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Harry Stein
Well, you would think that after 30 or 40 years people would get over those ideas because you can see no evidence whatsoever of any harm that any of these modified crops have caused. My primary explanation is that those are people that lack logic and don't understand. And so unfortunately, they've had an effect. And that's part of the cost involved. What I just pointed out of getting registrations, particularly worldwide, it's as simple as that.
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Interviewer
Is it because if you have GMO crops, for instance, entering into a country, they do change the environment to some extent. I mean, the pests themselves adapt to the new strains and it makes them more resilient or perhaps more aggressive towards the old strains. And everyone is kind of forced into this, this battle with nature.
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Harry Stein
Yes, that's very true. But you see, the same concept is true about traditional breeding. So we'll breed traditionally a crop that's more resistant to a particular disease, and that disease adjusts and pretty soon there's mutations that we aren't resistant to anymore. So it's no different than traditional breeding.
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Interviewer
So you're confident you are a force for good in the world in terms of that contribution you're making?
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Harry Stein
Well, we like to think we're helping. The name of the game is always to have better products every year. That's the most fun thing we do.
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Interviewer
Tell me then about where we're at now. You are a private company, Steinseed. Is there any thought, as you enter the later years of your life, of going public, of making yourself another of those multinationals?
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Harry Stein
No, there's no reason to do that. So we have no intention. When I'm gone, people say, well, what's going to happen then? And I say, I don't care, and I don't know.
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Interviewer
As simple as that.
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Harry Stein
Simple as that.
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Interviewer
You are a billionaire, at least according to Forbes, you are. And you may deny it, but that appears to be what the figures suggest. Does being a man of great wealth, does that come with responsibilities, do you think?
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Harry Stein
Well, if you're around me very much, you'll notice that I don't live as if we had any significant wealth, and I don't care about that. I have fun doing what I'm doing and enjoy making better corn and soybean varieties every year. And so that's the reward that I have.
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Interviewer
What would you like your legacy to be?
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Harry Stein
Well, that I was a simple farmer who, despite being dyslexic and autistic, was able to do pretty well.
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Ed Butler
That's Harry Stein, the CEO of the Steinseed Company, the largest private seed firm in the world. He was speaking to me, Ed Butler, for this edition of Business Daily. The program was produced by Amber Mahmood. To get in touch with the team, send us an email. The address is business dailybc.co.uk thanks for listening.
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