Global Reach, Local Roots 

Adrian grew up in Fargo, ND where he attended North Dakota State University and in 1991 earned a B.S. in Biotechnology in the College of Agriculture with the constant encouragement of his dad, Dr. H.R. Lund, who was the Dean of the College and Director of the ND Experiment Stations. He went on to graduate school at the University of Nebraska - Lincoln where he earned his Ph.D. studying the molecular mechanisms of heat stress response in maize. 

In 1999, Dr Lund started work for Monsanto studying drought stress response in maize with aims at providing the crop an effective means of coping with these stresses using transgenes.  He spent the next 14+ years working with the Monsanto team to develop high-throughput drought, heat, cold, nitrogen, and population stress testing and phenotyping methods for transgenic plant characterization. These assays were developed in growth chamber, greenhouse, and field environments. The managed stress field testing method he developed was a key tool in discovering the first commercial drought tolerance transgene in corn. In 2010, Dr Lund was made a Monsanto Fellow and in 2012, he was awarded the Biotechnology Innovation Award for a novel high throughput field screening process that is still in use today.  Dr Lund is an inventor on 4 US patents stemming from his work at Monsanto.

In 2013, Dr Lund took a Principal Research Scientist job at Syngenta and moved back to Minnesota.  For the next 11 years, Dr Lund worked diligently to create scalable, validated technology solutions for the collection and analysis of seeds research trials.  This work included the development of ground-based rovers for early season note taking as well as testing nearly every sUAV platform that has been developed since 2015 to see how the team could use its benefits and minimize the platform's deficiencies.  Dr Lund has been a FAA certified Part 107 sUAS pilot since 2017 and has logged hundreds of hours collecting and thousands of hours analyzing UAV data.  It was during his work at Syngenta that Dr Lund was introduced to vegetable crop phenotyping and towards the end of his time there, developed a novel (patent pending) method for high throughput, objective, and quantitative measurement of complex marketability traits in sweetcorn.  It was during his time at Syngenta that Dr. Lund discovered he has a real knack for project management.  I have used multiple PM and PC frameworks (Agile, Scrum, LEAN, 6-Sigma) and have developed a kind of hybrid seat-of-the-pants style of PM that incorporates all the best if these project management and process control technologies.  In 2025, Dr Lund's team was awarded runner-up in the Syngenta Global Science and Technology Prize for their work on sweet corn phenomics.

2025 sees the launch of a new era for Dr Lund with the roll out of his agricultural research consulting company, AgCision LLC. 

Dr Bensen received a Ph.D. in biochemistry with a focus on plant physiology at the University of Minnesota, followed by 6 years of fellowship supported research at Texas A&M and the Plant Research Laboratory at Michigan State Universities, where his research focused on the regulation of plant growth and development across multiple major crops including: corn, soybeans and tomatoes.

He was then recruited to join Pioneer Hy-Brid where he continued his work with corn, applying the then novel tools of molecular biology towards a better understanding of how plant growth regulators impact plant growth and development. He subsequently joined Monsanto where he focused on leading the discovery and early development of the first commercial transgenic drought tolerant product: DroughtGard, which continues to be a best seller in the western US corn belt. It was through this work, teamed with Dr. Adrian Lund, that he demonstrated a proven ability to move projects from conception to a commercial track, by identifying and prioritizing strategic approaches, developing increasingly sophisticated and informative evaluation tools, and defining and assembling the scientific package that enabled a commercial product.

Based in part on his accomplishments at Monsanto, he was recruited by Syngenta to lead their efforts to develop a competitive drought tolerant corn product using marker assisted breeding tools. Under Dr. Bensen’s leadership this effort was also successful, resulting in another bestseller: Artesian. For this work to succeed the field evaluation tools applied to the process were continuously improved using the latest technologies in both the field and the laboratory. Dr. Bensen is driven to continue to innovate tool development in the field and to broaden their application across crops and geographies.