Locations -- Bayer's Formula: Two Sites

Dec. 21, 2004

Both Research Triangle Park, N.C., and Kansas City, Mo., are home to newly created Bayer CropScience's North American Operations.

John McClenahen

Facilities When Bayer CropScience sprouted nine months ago from Bayer AG's acquisition of Aventis CropScience, something unusual in economic development happened. Bayer's crop-protection business group designated not one, but two principal locations for its North American operations. And the places it named, Research Triangle Park, N.C., and Kansas City, Mo., were communities in which Bayer and Aventis already did business. Investments were retained. Research Triangle Park, which had hosted Aventis CropScience's North American headquarters, is now the headquarters site for Bayer CropScience, with general management, administrative, marketing and regulatory activities based in the 7,000-acre business complex in north-central North Carolina. Meanwhile, Kansas City, which has been the headquarters for Bayer's NAFTA-region crop protection business, is Bayer CropScience's core technology center. It oversees manufacturing and formulation operations and some R&D activities. In addition, the company's U.S. regional sales offices are being relocated from several places around the U.S. to Kansas City, Mo., which is right across the border from Kansas City, Kans. Corporate Strategy "Our overall strategy for long-term growth is best supported by our approach of selecting two principal sites to meet the business needs of our new company," said Jochen Wulff, chairman of the management board for Bayer CropScience, when the selections were announced in February. "We need to secure the success of the ongoing business operations of both companies, which can only be achieved for the immediate future by making available the core competencies and resources of both sites." At Research Triangle Park, "we will have a modern infrastructure situated among a number of other well-known research-based companies such as ours," stated Emil Lansu, the regional head of Bayer CropScience in North America. He said Research Triangle Park was a location where the company can readily attract and retain top quality employees. "We also determined that the Kansas City area is the right place to pursue the new company's goal of becoming a leader in bringing innovative solutions to American agriculture through new technology and manufacturing," said Lansu. Kansas City's life sciences initiative, a community effort begun in 1999 is one of the pluses Bayer cites. It "opens doors for us to some of the best laboratories and leading scientists in the country," said Lansu. Bayer CropScience's NAFTA-region manufacturing also will be directed from Kansas City, one of two manufacturing centers for Bayer's crop-protection business worldwide. Locations profiles selected siting and facility strategies by manufacturing companies. Send submissions to Senior Editor John S. McClenahen at [email protected].

About the Author

John McClenahen | Former Senior Editor, IndustryWeek

John S. McClenahen, is an occasional essayist on the Web site of IndustryWeek, the executive management publication from which he retired in 2006. He began his journalism career as a broadcast journalist at Westinghouse Broadcasting’s KYW in Cleveland, Ohio. In May 1967, he joined Penton Media Inc. in Cleveland and in September 1967 was transferred to Washington, DC, the base from which for nearly 40 years he wrote primarily about national and international economics and politics, and corporate social responsibility.

      McClenahen, a native of Ohio now residing in Maryland, is an award-winning writer and photographer. He is the author of three books of poetry, most recently An Unexpected Poet (2013), and several books of photographs, including Black, White, and Shades of Grey (2014). He also is the author of a children’s book, Henry at His Beach (2014).

      His photograph “Provincetown: Fog Rising 2004” was selected for the Smithsonian Institution’s 2011 juried exhibition Artists at Work and displayed in the S. Dillon Ripley Center at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., from June until October 2011. Five of his photographs are in the collection of St. Lawrence University and displayed on campus in Canton, New York.

      John McClenahen’s essay “Incorporating America: Whitman in Context” was designated one of the five best works published in The Journal of Graduate Liberal Studies during the twelve-year editorship of R. Barry Leavis of Rollins College. John McClenahen’s several journalism prizes include the coveted Jesse H. Neal Award. He also is the author of the commemorative poem “Upon 50 Years,” celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Wolfson College Cambridge, and appearing in “The Wolfson Review.”

      John McClenahen received a B.A. (English with a minor in government) from St. Lawrence University, an M.A., (English) from Western Reserve University, and a Master of Arts in Liberal Studies from Georgetown University, where he also pursued doctoral studies. At St. Lawrence University, he was elected to academic honor societies in English and government and to Omicron Delta Kappa, the University’s highest undergraduate honor. John McClenahen was a participant in the 32nd Annual Wharton Seminars for Journalists at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. During the Easter Term of the 1986 academic year, John McClenahen was the first American to hold a prestigious Press Fellowship at Wolfson College, Cambridge, in the United Kingdom.

      John McClenahen has served on the Editorial Board of Confluence: The Journal of Graduate Liberal Studies and was co-founder and first editor of Liberal Studies at Georgetown. He has been a volunteer researcher on the William Steinway Diary Project at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., and has been an assistant professorial lecturer at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C.