Syngenta isn’t going anywhere, which is good news for Greensboro.

Instead of moving to a new location, Syngenta announced on Tuesday, March 16 that it would be staying right where it is on Swing Road and invest an estimated $68 million in building new facilities on its current campus.

Syngenta announced that it plans to build a more than 100,000-square-foot office building to connect with its existing laboratory facility on the north side of the 70-acre campus.  The laboratory facility will also be completely renovated.

Construction is expected to start later this year and will take about three years to complete. The new workspaces will support an estimated 650 employees and 100 contract workers.

The large campus with 17 buildings on Swing Road was established in the 1960s as Ciba-Geigy, which became Novartis, which then merged into Syngenta.

In January 2020, the Greensboro City Council approved a $1.7 million incentive to keep Syngenta in Greensboro.  The average wage of the 650 employees at Syngenta is $107,000 a year.  The Guilford County Board of Commissioners approved an incentive on the same day of up to $2 million and the North Carolina Department of Commerce also offered Syngenta incentives to stay in Greensboro.

Syngenta is one of the world’s leading agricultural companies.

In a press release, Greensboro Mayor Nancy Vaughan said, “For as long as I can remember, the Syngenta facility – once Ciba-Geigy – has stood at one of the main entrances to Greensboro, a showplace of our community’s agricultural science and technology abilities.  Simply put, the company and its employees are an essential part of the fabric that makes this community so special.  My fellow City Councilmembers and I placed the highest priority on making sure these jobs remained here. And we are so thrilled that Syngenta has decided to build its new state-of-the-art office and research facility here.”