LINCOLN, Neb. -- Monsanto officials expect to have their new seed corn processing plant west of Utica on line in time for the 2009 harvest.

The new complex along U.S. 34 is part of an increasingly visible $155 million project in Nebraska that also includes a major expansion of a sister plant at Kearney.

Along with work on the Keystone petroleum pipeline a few miles to the east, and the expected July start on the new $42 million state fairgrounds to the west at Grand Island, the Monsanto agenda is another hedge against the worst of the recession gripping other states.

Tom Schaffran, manager of the Monsanto site in York County, said there are still at least 300 construction workers moving toward the finish line on a job that includes eight buildings, among them a 180-foot-tall conditioning tower.

Much more important to the St. Louis-based Monsanto than the size of the construction payroll is getting past the wet conditions that slowed progress in 2008 to a degree of certainty about taking in corn this year.

"We still anticipate being able to receive our crop here in late August," Schaffran said.

Seed corn production has become a big part of the farm revenue picture in Nebraska since a 1988 drought farther east and the new sense of appreciation for the state"s irrigation resources.

Over that same period of time, a series of biotechnology breakthroughs has endowed seed with insect resistance and herbicide tolerance.

A handful of companies that could afford that kind of research investment, led by Monsanto and DuPont"s Pioneer Hi-Bred, have gained market share as smaller competitors have exited the business or gotten swallowed up in mergers and acquisitions.

The Kearney expansion and the new plant 40 miles west of Lincoln will double Monsanto"s processing presence in Nebraska.

That won"t translate immediately into a doubling of acres. "Not for this year," Schaffran said. "It will give us the ability to continue to grow."

He expects the number of full-time employees on the plant"s workforce to reach the 40 range in the next few weeks.

As acres grow, so will the need for detasseling crews, many of them typically teenagers from the Lincoln area, to pull off plant tops and assure cross-pollination.

"It"s all market driven," Schaffran said. "We built this plant for current needs, plus room to continue to grow."

Much of the growth that comes with biotechnology and the ability to alter the gene structure of corn is still ahead.

Darren Wallis, a spokesman for Monsanto in St. Louis, said the company expects to offer single seed products enhanced with as many as eight separate gene manipulations over the next couple of years.

The giants of the seed industry don"t talk much about market share. But Lincoln-based crop consultant Dale Flowerday thinks Monsanto"s piece of the pie could easily be 30 percent.

"I would think they"re a little ahead" of Pioneer, Flowerday said. "In Nebraska, they certainly are at the moment."

Among surviving smaller companies, it is common practice to buy the marketing rights to the genetic traits developed elsewhere.

"The line gets pretty darned fuzzy," Flowerday said, "because they all market to everybody else to get their share of the market share."

As of 2009, "there probably isn"t more than a half dozen companies left that are not cooperating with somebody, or licensed by somebody. And it"s the whole business of the trait thing."