Monsanto Forest Park an auditorium, a space for permanent and occasional exhibitions, and a Centre of Multimedia Resources. Quercus, the largest Portuguese non-profit national environment organization for the conservation of the natural environment, is based in Monsanto Park. The intensive agricultural usage of the soils led to erosion and practically to a destruction of the original vegetation. In the 1930s, the increasing demand for construction areas led Duarte Pacheco, the then Minister for the Public Works of Portugal, to resuscitate an idea from 1868: the reforesting of the then practically bare Serra de Monsanto. The regulation for Monsanto Park was put in place
Monsanto was the first method for the catalytic production of pure chiral compounds. Knowles' team designed the "first industrial process to chirally synthesize an important compound"—L‑dopa, which is used to treat Parkinson's disease. In 2001, Knowles and Ryōji Noyori won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In the mid-1960s, chemists at Monsanto developed the Monsanto process for making acetic acid, which until 2000 was the most widely used production method. In 1964, Monsanto chemists invented AstroTurf (initially ChemGrass). In the 1960s and 1970s, Monsanto was a producer of Agent Orange for United States Armed Forces operations in Vietnam, and settled out of