Abroad and Adaptable: SeedWorld Q&A with Ioana Tudor
Ioana Tudor, global head of Seedcare at Syngenta Crop Protection, discusses living abroad and being adaptable to everything a country has to offer.
Seed World: What’s your favorite movie?
Ioana Tudor: One of my favorite movies of all times remains to be “Pulp Fiction” – I love the music and the humor, and each time I get into a McDonalds in Europe I remember about the mayonnaise comment…
SW: Favorite genre of music?
IT: While living in Romania many years ago, I was big rock music fan and never missed any live concerts. Now I enjoy blues music, especially Chicago style. And we are very lucky in Basel that an enthusiastic local music association keeps bringing U.S. blues musicians for live performances every few months or so!
SW: Do you speak more than one language?
IT: I grew up in Romania, but over the past 25 years I lived in the U. S. and Switzerland. So English is what I speak most of the time now, and occasionally I try to communicate in German (although here in Basel everyone speaks English very well, so not too many incentives to progress with German). In addition, during my school years in communist Romania, we all had to learn Russian in school, and I picked up a little bit. In retrospect, now I wish I learned more of it given the significant growth opportunity for agriculture in the CIS countries.
SW: What do you see as the most important innovations in the seed industry over the next decade?
IT: Seed technology innovations will continue to bring step changes in yield. First, hybridization in crops like wheat can bring significant step change in yield potential. Second, further penetration of GM technology in new geographies (e.g. China) and new breeding techniques, like gene editing will make a significant impact on productivity. From a seed treatment perspective, we are very excited about many new innovations that we can launch on the seed – over the next 10 years I see nematicide seed treatment becoming more of a standard and in addition products with abiotic stress management will have a significant role to play to stabilize yield potential in increasingly volatile environmental conditions. Lastly, mother Nature continues to give us challenges with resistance building towards existing solutions (whether chemicals or GM traits) and this creates new innovation opportunities and keeps our R&D teams always very busy. I am happy to report that our pipeline is full, and our challenge is to bring these new products to market on record time, in the hands of our customers.