The Father of PhytoGen’s Phylosophy

From Cotton Grower Magazine – June 2015

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Though he was born and raised in Mississippi—the same state where he now resides—it’s safe to say that Dr. Mustafa McPherson took the long way home.

A career in agronomic and breeding research has led him from the Deep South to the Midwest and all the way out to Arizona and California before bringing him back to Leland, MS, where he now works as a cotton breeder for PhytoGen. He looks comfortably at home, sitting in his quiet office just south of the tiny Delta town. The lawn outside is perfectly manicured in a way that is befitting of a large, successful agriculture company.

PhytoGen operates thousands of test plots and breeding plots here in the fertile Mississippi Delta, and McPherson is a hands-on participant. Though he’s originally from Mississippi’s Gulf Coast region—four hours due south of here—he’s happy his winding journey has led him back to his home state. Along the way, he’s helped produce some of the most historically significant cotton varieties ever planted in the United States.

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“Home is where the heart is,” McPherson says, “and I’m a Mississippian at heart. It took a little bit of adjusting for me to live in the Delta. When I was in college, I enjoyed living in Starkville and living in the hills and being able to go hunting and fishing there. I used to say ‘There’s no way I’d live in the Delta.’ But I’ve really acclimated now, and I really enjoy it here.”

Those years spent in Starkville at Mississippi State University were highly influential on McPherson. He initially went to the school with ambitions of earning an engineering degree, but after watching a movie at church about agricultural missionaries in Africa, he decided to switch his focus.

“I went into agronomy, and I enjoyed the agriculture classes, and I did well in them,” McPherson now says. “That’s how I initially got interested, but then I got into plant breeding after I graduated with my bachelor’s degree.”

After graduating from Mississippi State, McPherson went north to Purdue University and began focusing on plant breeding in corn. After receiving his Master’s degree there, he moved back to Starkville and started working with the USDA, ARS in the Cotton Host Plant Resistance Unit in 1985, and, after a few years, re-enrolled at Mississippi State to pursue his doctorate.

“My work with the USDA under the direction of Dr. Johnie Jenkins established a foundation for conducting research that I have built upon over the years,” McPherson says. “One of our primary activities was conducting field trials and lab assays to evaluate cotton for host plant resistance to tobacco budworm and the bollworm. In fact, I helped in the evaluation of the very first transgenic Bt cotton plants for resistance to these pests.”

It was a demanding field in its earliest stages, but McPherson was up for the challenge. That time spent working with USDA gave McPherson a unique opportunity to work in plant breeding and host plant resistance. It served to lay the foundation for a lifelong career in cotton breeding.

“Working with cotton, it’s a difficult crop to work with, because it is so complex,” McPherson says. “You either love it or you hate it. But after you get into it, it gets into your blood. And it’s just something that I really enjoy.”

Company Man

He worked with USDA from 1985 to 1993, when he graduated with his doctorate from Mississippi State. From there, McPherson went to work for a private seed company in Arizona before eventually landing a job at Mycogen, which took him to California. Shortly thereafter, the company formed a joint venture with J.G. Boswell which resulted in the formation of PhytoGen.

 

“That afforded me the opportunity to move back to Mississippi, and I jumped at it,” McPherson says. “I thought, ‘I’d rather work in the field than in the greenhouse any day.’”

It didn’t take long for McPherson to make a major impact on U.S. cotton. PhytoGen was still a young seed company when he began there in the late 90s, and McPherson says the focus at that time was to build a germplasm base that was high-yielding. To focus immediately on producing a single workhorse variety at that stage, he says, would be like attempting to run before you can crawl.

“Each year, we evaluate thousands of progeny rows,” McPherson says. “Each one of those is potentially a new variety. So you evaluate many, and then you select down to the very best to make more crosses with those, and then eventually you develop a new commercial variety from there,” he says.

McPherson estimates that from an initial “conventional cross,” it typically takes from 13 to 14 years before a variety is commercialized. Cotton breeding is not for the impatient.

Still, it took McPherson less than a decade to produce a parent of what would become PhytoGen workhorse PHY 499 WRF. In the years 2012, 2013 and 2014, PHY 499 WRF was the single most-planted variety in the United States, accounting for roughly 10 percent of every Upland cotton acre in that timeframe. PhytoGen agronomists rave about the variety.

“It is broadly adapted across the country to fit in many different irrigation regimes and soil types,” says Scott Fuchs, PhytoGen cotton development specialist for all of West Texas, and formerly Oklahoma and New Mexico. “It has very good stress tolerance and has a very extensive root system that allows it to withstand many of those stresses and still produce. Its storm tolerance is where it needs to be, and it just has outstanding yield potential.”

For all its accolades, PHY 499 WRF wasn’t the first wildly successful variety McPherson had a hand in producing. He is also credited for being instrumental in the development of PHY 375 WRF, itself a former leader in national acreage share. Clearly, McPherson is doing something right.

“My philosophy for deciding which crosses to make is to match the very best parents in a complimentary manner such that the weakness of one is offset by the strength of another,” McPherson says. “I try to maximize the genetic diversity among parents and actively cross with germplasm releases from public breeders including USDA and the University of Arkansas. My breeding objectives include yield, enhanced fiber quality, reduced leaf pubescence and host plant resistance (HPR) to pests such as root-knot and reniform nematode, bacterial blight, Verticillium wilt and Fusarium wilt.”

McPherson says cotton breeders are keenly aware of how cotton farmers depend on new varieties to enhance yield potential through the years. While input costs consistently rise, the price of cotton remains relatively unchanged. Yield, it seems, is the only variable that keeps cotton farming profitable. However, he has also worked diligently to improve fiber.

“Yield gains are not made in a gradual climb,” McPherson says. “It’s a staircase. You make improvements, and then you go along for a few years and nothing beats the best line. Then you have a new variety that beats that, and nothing beats it for a few years.”

With that staircase model in mind, McPherson insists PhytoGen has new varieties in the pipeline that will outshine existing yield leaders.

“We have conventional lines that are beating the parents of existing commercial lines hands down,” he says. “Add to that our improvements in fiber quality and resistance to things like bacterial blight and nematodes. I’m really very confident as we move forward. I don’t see a plateau in our germplasm or varieties at all.”

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