Husband and I own a small business designing and making machines for the horticulture industry. Our machines pick up seeds and deposit them into plug trays for germination and growing. Most of our customers are smaller greenhouses growing plants for sale, but a few of our customers are large growers that use our machines for "test flats" (for example Proven Winners will run 100 flats of a new Pansy variety to test them prior to releasing th new variety for sale).
Yesterday we delivered a machine to Dow Agro Sciences to run test flats. Before we shipped it I got a chance to play with it. If the seed the customer wants to sow is something we're not used to running we request samples of the seed. This seed was indeed different in size, shape and weight - but we were able to run it quite well. I asked my husband "what the heck is this seed!". Yup - Cotton. If you haven't seen cotton seed, it's interesting. Tear drop shaped, about 1/4" long and 1/8" at it's widest. Not sure of it's natural color as this seed had been coated in graphite to assist germination as well as a few other benefits.
Husband came home from work this evening and told me he got a call from Monsanto today and they wanted to know if our machines could sow cotton!! Funny you should ask ...... but no, we couldn't say "sure Dow is using one" all we could confirm is that we did indeed have "A" customer using one for cotton.
So ... my little business is doing it's part to assist two of the larges Agro Science businesses grow test batches of cotton seed for resistance to everything from climate issues, pests, herbicides ... etc. The guy at Dow told us that Dow is currently funding Agro Science in a big way. That's nice to hear!!