Agroecology and Crop Science

Plant Breeding

Plant breeding, or crop genetic improvement, is the production of latest, improved crop varieties to be used by farmers. The new variety crops may have higher yield, improved grain quality, increased disease resistance, or be less prone to lodging. Ideally, it’ll have a new combination of attributes which are significantly better than the varieties already available. The new variety will be a new combination of genes that the plant breeder has put together from those available in the gene pool of that species. It may contain only genes already existing in different forms of identical crop, or it may contain genes from other distant plant relatives, or genes from unrelated organisms inserted by biotechnological means.