Roy Martens: From sugar beets to rice, a crop scientist who has made a difference

How does a man who grew up on a sugar beet farm in Wyoming become a nationally known expert in rice hybrid science?

Well, it’s complicated.

Roy Martens of League City, Texas – about halfway between Houston and Galveston – and the son of Elsie and the late Bob Martens of Lovell, retired last July from RiceTec, Inc., of Alvin, Texas, concluding a career steeped in science and innovation to make sugar beets and then American rice better.

Martens grew up on the Martens’ Little Valley Ranch off Highway 32 southwest of Lovell, where he and his brothers learned to farm with their parents. In high school he was active in FFA and did well in crop science judging, also accompanying his dad on Great Western Sugar research tours.

“Going with Dad on Great Western research tours in the summertime and looking at new beet varieties was what kind of piqued my interest in plant breeding and making varieties,” he said. “I didn’t even know really what it was called at the time. We didn’t Google and what kids have available (for information) today. I didn’t know what plant breeders were, not really. I knew that people worked on that stuff, but I didn’t really understand how it worked.”

Graduating in 1986, Martens moved on to the University of Wyoming and earned a Bachelor of Science degree in crop science through the Plant Soil and Insect Sciences Department, and he gained experience during his first two years working as a field inspector for the Wyoming Crop Improvement Association.

“I inspected grass and barley alfalfa in the Big Horn Basin. My entire range was in the Big Horn Basin,” he said. “It led to my decision to go into ag science. … I was the only undergraduate student my freshman year in the Plant Soil and Insect Sciences Department when I went to UW, so I was treated pretty well by all of the professors.”

Martens graduated in 1990, then earned a Master of Science degree at North Dakota State University in 1992 because “it was the one school in the country that I could find somebody working with sugar beets,” he said, adding, “I was very interested in sugar beets and didn’t realize how small the industry was at the time.

“My focus was with plant breeding, but it was primarily looking at kind of a population breeding scenario, attempting to try to improve sugar content by selecting for yield by selecting for a leaf characteristic. I wanted to be a sugar beet breeder, and partway through it, I realized that the industry was so small that the likelihood of me being a sugar beet breeder was nearly impossible with just a master’s degree, so I chose to go on and get a doctorate, as well.”

He moved on to the University of Florida and earned a PhD in 1996, working part of the time at a University of Florida research station in the Florida Panhandle in Quincy, Florida, where he worked with wheat triticale and oats with a focus on disease resistance. He said triticale is a cross between wheat and rye that can be grown in poorer soils than a typical wheat crop.

After earning his PhD, Martens did post-doctorate research at Montana State University in Bozeman for a few months but was soon recruited to a position with Hilleshog-MonoHy of Sweden in Longmont, Colorado, working in hybrid sugar beet research. He noted that his work was integral in the development of Roundup Ready beets, which has revolutionized the domestic sugar beet industry.

Hilleshog-MonoHy became part of Novartis Pharmaceuticals and then Syngenta, the latter two based in Switzerland, though Martens continued to live in Longmont. He stayed with the company until 2011, when he was hired by RiceTec of Alvin, Texas, a company, he said, that wanted him because of his work with sugar beets.

Martens worked as a senior scientist at RiceTec, then became the director of new product development managing a team of plant breeders developing hybrid rice varieties that are more productive and disease resistant.

Travel

During his career working with multinational companies, Martens has been able to travel. While in the sugar beet field, he traveled often to Europe, racking up 65,000 air miles a year flying to Sweden and seed production areas in southern France, northern Italy, Denmark, the Netherlands, Germany and the United Kingdom, as well as sugar beet growing areas in the United States “from California up to Oregon and all the way to Michigan,” he said.

“It was a collaborative effort to make hybrids or make new varieties for North America’s farmers,” he said. “When I was in Europe, they weren’t really focusing on North America, but some of the lines that they created we could use in the U.S. Some of the lines that I created were used in Chile, Japan and all over Europe.”

Although he enjoyed the travel, “It got old,” he said.

With RiceTec, he did get to travel to Asia, South America and the Caribbean from time to time to work with scientists in China and other countries, but his main focus was the rice growing areas of the United States, primary Arkansas but also parts of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, southern Missouri and California.

Martens said there are around 2.5 million acres of rice grown in the United States, and while that acreage is about twice that of sugar beets, it’s still considered to be a minor crop. By comparison, China grows some 65 million acres of rice but has to import rice to meet the demand. India grows 110 million acres of rice annually.

Enjoying a challenge

He said he enjoyed the challenges that came with developing hybrid rice and working in quality control.

“Producing enough hybrid seed to meet the farmers’ needs was the biggest challenge that RiceTec had, and the products are phenomenal, fantastic,” Martens said. “The large yield advantage compared to traditional (or varietal) rice is tremendous, and it kind of saved the rice industry in the United States. 2025 was the 25th year of hybrid varieties in the United States, and it went from basically a few acres (of hybrid rice) that one farmer grew in Arkansas one year to just over half of all the rice grown in the U.S.”

Two years before his retirement, RiceTec asked Martens to take over the company’s quality control department because of his experience in research and production. He enjoyed the work.

His wife, Monica, who he met at the University of Florida and received her Doctor of Education degree at the University of Houston, teaches at Midland University in Fremont, Nebraska, near Omaha but works remotely, so the couple has been able to travel over the past year.

Asked what he enjoyed the most over the years, Martens said it really was the people he worked with.

“Initially, I told people that I worked with plants because it was easier than working with people. And, you know, plants don’t talk back to you and things like that,” he said. “But looking back at it, the people are the absolutely most important part of it and learning together and helping to teach people how to continue this. When I accepted the role of a manager instead of a hands-on plant breeder, I knew it would take me out of the field. I really enjoyed being out in the field, but I also knew that I could have a lot more influence if I had four people working for me instead of my one person doing things.

“So I worked with a lot of talented people including scientists from the U.S., China, India, Africa and South America – anywhere where rice is important. The team in Alvin was very diverse, and we learned a lot of things together. As a scientist, I always felt like I needed to be in the field, and every time I went in the field, I learned something, but then as a manager I necessarily spent less time in the field and helped my team as I could.”

For Martens, it has been a fascinating career, one that has taken him all over the world but began right here in Lovell.