156
PLANT HEALTH
How do new traits get into crop varieties? Trait development is long term and expensive, the latter making it hard to fund from commercial sources, but it is critical for delivering the step changes required for future profitability.
By Professor David Jordan
Plant breeding and crop management have been one of the most important drivers of productivity gains in cropping systems around the world in re- cent years. While the pathways behind changes in management, such as adjustments to agronomy, advances in machinery, are generally clear to farm- ers, the processes that deliver new genetic traits in new varieties are more complex and far less visible. Traits such as resistance to emerging diseases and pests or adaptation to stresses like drought, salin- ity, and waterlogging often appear in new varieties without a clear understanding of the long and com- plex pipeline that underpins their development. Pre-breeding vs Breeding Plant breeding is the science of improving the gen- etic potential of plants to create new, better-per- forming crop varieties for farmers. In Australia, the term breeding is defined to describe the process of crossing of parents together to produce new lines or hybrids that have the potential to produce new commercial varieties or hybrids. In contrast, pre-breeding is used to describe the discovery, testing, and evaluation of new traits which may result in the development of improved varieties or hybrids. In Australia, there’s been a clear shift in “who does what” when it comes to breeding and pre-breeding. Commercial seed companies now do most of the breeding, turning ideas into new varieties, while the early-stage work, is largely done by universities, the CSIRO, and state government agriculture departments.
Professor David Jordan in a sorghum field.
Powered by FlippingBook