By ANN HINCH
Assistant Editor

INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. — Fourteen years immersed in biotechnology strategy at Dow AgroSciences for corn and soybeans might make the job of executive director of Indiana’s corn and soybean organizations look to be old hat – but Mark Henderson still has plenty to learn in this new job.

Henderson, 53, has been with the umbrella made up of the Indiana Soybean Alliance (ISA), Indiana Corn Marketing Council (ICMC) and Indiana Corn Growers Assoc. (ICGA) for a couple of weeks. He retired from Dow three years ago, after a quarter-century career with the company. Much of what he did at Dow AgroSciences, he’ll also be doing for ISA, ICMC and ICGA.

“The whole strategy of how do we create business around (corn and soybeans) … including intellectual property – it’s like stepping back into a second skin,” he said, explaining Dow put him into developing commercial ventures for corn and soybean products when it created its biotech arm in the 1990s.

What’s new about this job is the social aspect – developing external relationships for these organizations with growers, other corn and soybean groups, academics, state and federal officials and legislators. Henderson said Dow had a separate public and
government affairs office that he worked with, which in turn created and maintained relationships for Dow with all these outside parties. Now he’s doing that.

It’s not the first time he’s had to adjust. Raised in Kansas City, he earned an undergraduate degree in pre-dentistry at Kansas State University before deciding it wasn’t the career for him. He moved away for a couple of years, but returned to KSU to earn an MBA and Dow hired him upon graduation in 1982.

Henderson pointed out Dow is made up of small companies engaged in various pursuits, and while he was still a city boy, he liked Dow’s people in agriculture the most. He started working with urban pest control researchers and marketers and eventually moved into ag – with no background in farming.

“The closest I came to agriculture was pushing a mower,” he said.
His first assignment with Dow’s new biotech program was to determine what the company had to work with out of corn and soybeans: starches, proteins, fiber and oils. From there, Dow settled on research into oils and animal nutrition and Henderson’s job was to help create new business and products around these outputs.

Compared to that, he said the development side of his new job is much simpler. The ISA, ICMC and ICGA know who their customer is and they know what the customer wants – at Dow, he had to help determine both.

“That was one of the things that impressed me about this organization,” he said, when applying for the job. “They know what they’re here to do.”

For example, he said ISA’s aquaculture program is in its strategic plan with steps for development laid out, and challenges such as promotion and processing issues are already being addressed.
Another for both corn and soybeans is biofuel, which was a big impetus for the three groups to band together not long ago.
Henderson described their working together as “synergy,” even if each group’s funding has to be kept separate and focused on its particular crop. Because it is such a new alliance, he said there is still room for merging of work dynamics and standardization – which will be part of his job.

He wants to keep the groups’ employees and boards clearly focused on strategy, to the point of reviewing their strategic plan with the involvement of corn and soybean growers. He intends to explore how the groups can better diversity their revenues while keeping them separate as dictated by law (checkoff dollars must continue to be kept separate from lobbying costs, for example).

“We’re not here as a collective of 20 people saying ‘How should the money be spent?’” he said, adding they should do so according to what growers and experts have set forth, in the strategic plan.

Henderson wants to see the three groups develop more intellectual property resources to provide them funding, by investing in
research for new genes, manufacturing processes and products. They already have patents gained through checkoff spending, but he believes they can add more which would be profitable to the groups.

“The nice thing about important patents is that we can utilize Indiana corn and soy,” he said. If such a patent were put to work outside Indiana and even overseas, the ISA, ICMC and ICGA would benefit financially.

“If I took a 1 percent royalty of this, then I can capture value off of that (patent) and reinvest in agriculture back here in Indiana.”

The first step in such research is to invest within Indiana, and he believes the best place to do that is with Purdue University.
Despite falling prices and slowed production, he still thinks biofuel is a good investment, too.

“When you’re dealing in a commodity, you’re going to have good years and bad years,” he said, pointing out the fluctuations are not unique to biodiesel and ethanol producers.

He suggested that in the long-term, these industries need to learn to plan for such rises and drops.

Petroleum will likely go back up, he added, at which point there will be a resurgence in demand for biofuel – but the growth curve probably won’t be as steep as it was in the initial flush of development.

One issue with which he is still largely unfamiliar is the American Soybean Assoc.-backed USDA investigation of the national soybean checkoff program. His only comment was that Indiana’s checkoff is audited annually by both the United Soybean Board (which is in charge of the national checkoff) and by an external accounting firm.