The immense challenge facing agriculture in meeting the future needs of an expanding global population while protecting land, water and habit resources has been widely recognized.  At the same time we are facing a significant erosion of the funding needed to sustain the public sector research infrastructure that will be required to generate innovative knowledge and/or technologies necessary to meet these future challenges.  Private companies are increasing their agronomic research efforts in an attempt to partially offset declining public sector resources and address some of these challenges. This talk will present trends for Pioneer support of agronomic research in the public sector and highlight a few of these activities as a means of illustrating the potential for public-private sector collaborations.