Covid-19 Fears Shut Down Bayer HQ, Delay DFA Meeting

Bayer CropScience’s North American headquarters is closed following fears that one of its employees might have coronavirus. The Saint Louis Post Dispatch reports that Bayer’s Olive Boulevard campus in Creve Coeur would close temporary for precautionary cleaning measures. According to the Post-Dispatch, the company learned Sunday that an employee at the site is considered a person under investigation for infection, and employees were notified by e-mail that evening. The potential case remains unconfirmed as of Monday afternoon. Saint Louis County is the site of Missouri’s first presumptive positive case of Covid-19, a college student who had recently returned from Italy. Bayer said it is also temporarily closing the downtown St. Louis offices of its Climate Corporation subsidiary, plus two offices in New Jersey, citing an abundance of caution.

Also citing an abundance of caution, Kansas City-based Dairy Farmers of America announced over the weekend it would postpone its annual meeting scheduled for next week. About 15-hundred attendees were expected to gather in KC for the cooperative’s business meeting. The metro also had its first potential case over the weekend when a woman in Johnson County, Kansas, tested presumptive positive.

Other ag events are becoming online-only gatherings. A dietary guidelines meeting between USDA and the Department of Health and Human Services set for later this week will now take place online. Alltech’s Ideas Conference in Lexington, Kentucky this May will now be a virtual setting. Their conference annually hosts more than 35-hundred attendees from 70 countries.