Jeff Rowe grinned with satisfaction when the dashboard of his John Deere combine harvester showed the yield of the first run on his family’s farm during this year’s harvest: 253 bushels per acre, equivalent to 13.8 tonnes of corn per hectare.
The yield on the 100-acre Schubert parcel was the highest in many years, said Rowe, the CEO of Syngenta Group and the son of the owners of Rowe Farm, Dean and Carol. Located in the corn belt of Illinois state in the US Midwest, the farm used Syngenta’s newly improved seeds, weed retardants and pest control solutions, drone scanning and artificial intelligence (AI) on its soybeans and corn crops, Rowe said.
“We are at a very exciting time in agriculture, where there is a lot of technological innovation,” Rowe said in the air-conditioned cockpit as he powered up the US$1 million harvester on the final day of September.
“For me, this is the best job there is; all the science and technological innovation at the disposal of farmers like my family” to help them get to the front of the agricultural revolution, he said.
Rowe’s full-time job is actually seven time zones away from the sparsely populated, wide open fields of middle America, in Basel, a city of 200,000 people straddling both banks of the River Rhine in Switzerland, where he runs a company with 56,000 employees and operations covering 90 countries.
After the year’s harvest wrapped up and the family celebrated Thanksgiving, Rowe turned his attention towards one of the biggest goals of his day job: the successful initial public offering (IPO) of Syngenta, widely expected to be one of the world’s largest fundraising exercises in 2026 when it lands next year in Hong Kong.