David Friedberg, a former Google executive, sold his tech startup to Monsanto. Now, he defends genetically modified crops against criticisms he says don't 'have much root in fact.' Jason Henry for The Wall Street Journal
When Monsanto Co. purchased Climate Corp. for $930 million last year, it got a San Francisco-based startup that crunches weather data to improve crop yields and design insurance. It also got David Friedberg, the company's 34-year-old co-founder, who may prove an even more valuable asset.
Mr. Friedberg, a former Google Inc. executive, now oversees the "precision agriculture" services Monsanto sells to farmers, a major initiative encompassing high-tech planting equipment, soil and seed analysis, and weather modeling.
The lifelong vegetarian has also emerged as an unlikely champion of Monsanto at a time when the company—and the business of genetically engineering crops that it pioneered—face intensifying attacks.
State ballot initiatives have sought to compel companies to label foods containing genetically modified organisms, or GMOs—which the industry fears would be a scarlet letter. Vermont in May became the first state to unilaterally adopt such a measure. Meanwhile, companies like General Mills and Chipotle are stripping GMOs from some foods in response to consumer groups raising health and environmental concerns.

"We have nothing to hide, we just weren't talking about it," Mr. Begemann said.Executives at St. Louis-based Monsanto, a 113-year-old company with deep Midwestern roots, admit they didn't anticipate the level of public distrust of GMOs. "We were absent from the conversation," said Brett Begemann, Monsanto's president, in an interview. "For years we had viewed ourselves as a company that helps farmers increase their productivity, and food companies were the ones that took the product to the consumer."
Enter Mr. Friedberg, whose Silicon Valley pedigree helps him advocate for Monsanto in a region that helped to cultivate the organic food movement and to launch California's 2012 ballot initiative to require GMO food labeling—an effort that failed, but generated the "March Against Monsanto" crusade.
Genetically modified seeds, in Mr. Friedberg's view, enable farmers to grow larger crops with less resources and represent a way to help sustain the growing world population. Some of Monsanto's critics "want to live in a natural world where we're all living in treehouses in the rainforest and picking coconuts out of the tree," Mr. Friedberg said. "Maybe it would be possible if we had 100,000 people living on earth, but that's not the reality that we're living in today."
A graduate of the University of California at Berkeley with a degree in astrophysics, Mr. Friedberg helped run Google's online advertising platform, AdWords, before starting Climate Corp. in 2006. Now, while not his day job, he works to engage Monsanto detractors and defend its technology. His success remains unclear, but he has built new bridges for the company.
For Tom Spier, a former executive of the Bear Naked granola brand and a board member of a group calling for GMO labels on foods, Mr. Friedberg arranged a tour of a Monsanto molecular breeding facility for vegetables. Mr. Friedberg also hosted a dinner party pairing Michael Pollan, a prominent food writer and critic of industrial agriculture, with Monsanto Chief Technology Officer Robert Fraley, a pioneer of genetic engineering in plants. A spokeswoman for Mr. Pollan said he was unavailable to comment.
"He's helped me understand the motivations of people at Monsanto," said Ali Partovi, a San Francisco-based investor in tech and agriculture startups who also has backed GMO labeling efforts. "That company is perceived as a sort of secretive and closed-door place, and Silicon Valley has a very open approach to everything. David has brought some of that ethos to Monsanto."
Mr. Partovi said he shares Monsanto's concern about the challenge of feeding a fast-growing global population—something GMO proponents say biotechnology can help address—but he still finds "a lot of hubris" in the company's approach and thinks it should embrace labeling.
A continuing series about how consumer perceptions and corporate strategies shape the national diet.
    Mr. Friedberg himself was only vaguely familiar with Monsanto before early 2013, when his startup began exploring partnerships with large agricultural companies. He soon discovered Monsanto had one of the biggest troves of the crop growth data needed to build more detailed weather models, and the two companies started talking.
    To learn more, Mr. Friedberg said he "bought all the anti-Monsanto books." He read an Environmental Protection Agency report on glyphosate—the weed-killer Monsanto sells as Roundup—and scientific papers on GMO safety, as well as critiques of those studies. He probed claims that Roundup causes cancer, that eating GMO corn causes tumors in rats, and that the high cost of GMO cotton seed drove farmers in India to suicide.
    Mr. Friedberg says he found the criticisms unpersuasive. "There were very many things about Monsanto that were repeated but didn't have much root in fact," he said.
    Proponents say genetic modification isn't fundamentally different from the breeding of crops that humans have done for centuries. The Food and Drug Administration says food made with GMOs is safe, as do a number of major U.S. health and science groups including the American Medical Association. The European Union has approved many GMO foods for consumption, though it requires labeling in member countries.
    Critics say more research is needed on whether GMOs are safe for consumers, and that bioengineered crops rely on pesticides and fertilizers that hurt the environment. They argue that Monsanto and other big agricultural companies influence regulators—which means Mr. Friedberg, as a Monsanto employee, may have trouble changing minds.
    "I think Mr. Friedberg could be effective, however any senior staff member from 'big food' will likely be viewed with skepticism" by Americans who desire mandatory labeling, said Mr. Spier, who no longer works for Bear Naked granola. Mr. Spier said he continues to view GMOs as a "catastrophe waiting to happen" due to their heavy reliance on pesticides.
    To Mr. Friedberg, the stance of many GMO critics clashes with the scientific principles underlying other issues that some of the same people champion. "It's amazing to see the pro-'climate change is a problem' audience being anti-GMO," he said. "The proof of climate change is rooted in science and proof of GMOs' health and efficacy is rooted in science."
    David Friedberg, playing ping pong in San Francisco, says most of his startup's staff stayed at Monsanto.Jason Henry for The Wall Street Journal
    Founders often depart when they sell their companies, but Mr. Friedberg says he stayed because he saw the sale as a way to supercharge Climate's work with deeper crop data sets and more money to invest in research.
    Some of Mr. Friedberg's then 180 employees—most of whom are programmers and engineers in San Francisco and Seattle—initially balked. Recruiters swarmed to poach his staff. Mr. Friedberg and Monsanto arranged a multistate tour of Monsanto's research facilities and headquarters, including a lengthy town hall with senior executives, whom Climate staff grilled for hours.
    Mr. Friedberg said one employee ended up leaving over concerns about Monsanto's business practices.
    Today Mr. Friedberg's enlarged, 635-person unit operates separately from Monsanto, and Climate website makes few mentions of its parent. The unit retains its spacious San Francisco headquarters, with math equations scrawled across walls and a ping pong table stashed near a stairwell.
    Since the Monsanto deal, Mr. Friedberg says he has had lengthy discussions with his own family members, some of whom were Monsanto skeptics. And at Bay Area dinner parties, Mr. Friedberg often discusses his new employer, alongside his devotion to quinoa and his own organic garden, with some of the "staunchest, hippiest anti-Monsanto people you can imagine," says Bill Maris, founder of Google Ventures, the Internet giant's investment wing, which invested in Mr. Friedberg's firm.
    "After talking with David they may not come away with a different mindset, but they do come away with a different framework and way of understanding the issue," said Mr. Maris, who sat on Climate's board and socializes with Mr. Friedberg.