Dive Brief:

• Monsanto said its net income dropped 6% in the most-recent quarter on rising costs and a drop in the sale of corn seeds.
• The St. Louis-based company, which sells strains of commodity crops as well as the Roundup brand of herbicide, boosted its outlook for the remainder of the year and said it expected to double earnings during the next five years.
• The company, which recently ended merger talks with rival Syngenta, said it would spend some $10 billion of its war chest on a stock-buyback plan. 

Dive Insight:

Monsanto said profit from its corn business, which is Monsanto's largest segment, fell 13%. But that was apparently an isolated problem. Profits in other seed units rose.

But it seems unlikely that Monsanto expects corn to bounce back so strongly, or for other seed sales to continue to rise so much, that the company would actually double earnings in just five years.

So what would prompt such a rosy outlook?

Our guess is that Monsanto is, as it has hinted in the past, very close to rolling out a GMO strain of wheat.