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Hello and welcome to Business Daily Meets on the BBC World Service. I'm Ed Butler, and today I'm with Harry Stein, the founder and CEO of the US firm Stein Seed Company.

It's the largest private seed firm in the world. Now 84, he's been in farming for

eight decades. I started working in a field right beside our office when I was four years old.

And today they would put my parents in jail for doing that.

Harry tells me how he's helped to transform farming into a high-tech business.

And in the United States, in the 1930s, for the entire decade, the average yield of corn was 24

bushels per acre. So if you were to told my father that your kid will be able to get 10 times the national average,

that would seem crazy.

And how he overcame some big personal challenges to get where he is today.

I was a simple farmer who, despite being dyslexic and autistic, was able to do pretty well. That's Harry Stein, founder of

the Stein Seed Company here on Business Daily from the BBC World Service. And just a warning,

this program does contain strong, discriminatory and offensive language.

I couldn't reach the pedals.

I had no idea what the gear shift was for.

And I remember I was really just guiding it down the field as we were picking up bales.

In those days, we put bales on the ground, and people would walk on each side and pick up a row and put them on a hay rack. And I remember very clearly when I was coming to the end of the rows, I thought, my goodness, what am I going to do now?

Well, one of the people that were walking got up on the tractor and turned it

around and headed it the other direction for me. Harry's father, Bill Stein, had started the seed

business growing just a few dozen acres of oats and soybeans. He would often clean the seeds

to get rid of the debris and sell them to his farming neighbors.

At the time, intellectual property rights for soybean plants didn't exist.

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