Novus International brought a group of agricultural journalists into their St. Charles, MO headquarters today. We were greeted by Scott Fleetwod, Executive Director, Global Marketing and Products. I sat down with him right after his opening remarks to discuss what he hopes we accomplish here today and tomorrow.

The company has a significant investment in the dairy industry which we’ll learn more about in tomorrow’s session and I’ll have a follow up post from it. I did appreciate one remark Scott made in our interview about how the carbon footprint of the dairy industry is so much smaller than it used to be. The fact is there are so many fewer cows in production today. But you sure won’t hear that reported very often.

He reminded us that the company was a spinoff from Monsanto back in the mid 80’s and has grown tremendously since then. Since many of their products are targeted to animal nutrition and health he says that he believes there will be recovery in the animal industry starting with beef and even in dairy within the coming year. The company also see great opportunities to improve animal food production in developing countries where the bulk of the hungry and starving people are today.

While we’re here we’ll get to tour this new company headquarters facility which was built with sustainability in mind. Sustainability is a key work here at Novus.

I’m also happy to report that Novus will be a partial sponsor of our coverage of this year’s World Dairy Expo!

Listen to my interview with Scott here: [audio:http://zimmcomm.biz/novus/novus-media-09-fleetwood-agwired.mp3]