Monsanto Co. said it will speed up the availability of higher yielding biotech corn and soybean seed as the company aims to meet ambitious profit goals laid out two years ago.

Creve Coeur-based Monsanto will offer more than 4 million acres of its SmartStax corn and up to 10 million acres of its Roundup Ready2Yield soybeans in 2010. The company had previously said availability of SmartStax corn would be limited to 3 to 4 million acres and the new soybeans to 7 to 8 million acres.

The new biotech seeds will be available to all U.S. growers by 2012, a year ahead of schedule, executives said Tuesday.

The announcement kicked off Monsanto's biennial investor conference in Research Triangle Park, N.C., where the company operates a new research center. It is the first such meeting since CEO Hugh Grant promised to double the company's 2007 gross profit in five years.

Grant said the key to meeting that goal lies in the company's seed business. More specifically, it depends on the willingness of farmers to trade up to new, more expensive biotech corn and soybean seeds. The other key to meeting the profit goal is greater adoption of biotech traits by growers in Latin America, he said.

"The elephant in the room is 'Can Monsanto deliver in 2010? Can Monsanto deliver in 2011? Can they really double gross profit by 2012?' The answer is 'yes,'" he said.

Executives also presented data indicating that Roundup Ready2Yield soybeans delivered an average yield increase of 7.3 percent compared with the first generation of soybeans, which are genetically modified to resist applications of Roundup weed killer. Average yield gains were even greater in the largest soybean growing states, the company said.

Roundup Ready2Yield soybeans were sewn on 1.5 million acres in 2009, the first year they were available. As recently as September, company officials stood behind a promise that the beans would deliver average yield gains of 7 to 11 percent.

The company dismissed reports that cast doubt on whether the soybeans would deliver the promised yield gains, or enough to justify a higher price.

About 20 farm managers and seed distributors in five states said in a report released Oct. 27 that yields from the new soybean seeds didn't meet their expectations, said Jon Gates, research director at OTR Global, a research firm based in Purchase, N.Y.

"The initial performance here is not meeting the expectation in a pretty broad area," Gates said.

Goldman Sachs analyst Robert Koort cited conflicting reports from growers in a Nov. 3 note. In the report, one farmer called them "the real deal," while another indicated a reluctance to pay a premium for the beans, which are priced at $74 an acre, or $22 an acre more than the first generation Roundup Ready soybeans, for 2010.

"There seem to be mixed responses regarding the quality of RR2 soybeans," Koort wrote. But "with only 51 percent of the soybean crop harvested, we believe it's premature to draw a conclusion regarding yields."

Monsanto said its yield results reported Tuesday are based on 25,000 data points, a much broader sampling than anecdotal reports that caused shares to sag.

Bloomberg News contributed to this report.