Learning Tours

There were four official learning tours which was organised for me during my time here.

Chesterfield Village Facility

This is a large facility and I work in one of the buildings. This tour brought me around to the other interesting aspects and facilities of the building. The tour also showed us the various processes involved in the research and examples of how their products have improved crop quality dramatically.

Jerseyville Farm tour

This is the Monsanto field test site. Here is where the crops "end up" as one of their final stages and they spend several years at this test site to ensure that the crops will grow normally or as expected in the farmer's field. The tour provided stark examples of how their products were clearly more effective in prevention of weeds and insect attacks compared to conventional use of herbicides and pesticides.

Quality Control Facility, Chesterfield Village Site

This tour was a personal tour for three people. Dr Pang, one of the researchers there explained what they did at Quality Control and answered all our questions pertaining to the kind of work they did. The facility was well equipped with robotic systems for high-throughput screens and many many PCR machines. The facility also employed a new technique called Taqman which was able to determine how many copy numbers each transformation event had based on real-time PCR.

Insectarium Tour, Chesterfield Village Site

This was a tour of the insectarium where work goes into identifying gene products that would help control these pests in the field.