Market Driven Plant Breeding For Practicing Breeders

This book highlights the technicalities of plant breeding in a seed-business environment and explains the crucial aspects of the value chain. It educates the readers on how to initiate, participate, sustain national and international agreements for material transfer, how consortia work to facilitate germplasm accessibility, and how to set visionary goals to develop a superior plant varieties. The book covers the aspects such as how to conduct disease screening trials at hot spots, preparing an operational budget, and how to accelerate product advancement. Plant breeding is broadly defined as manipulation of plant genotypes to create phenotypes that are beneficial to mankind. It helps to achieve food security and sustainability by developing high yielding, climate-resilient, nutritious varieties of crops and hence is able to address unprecedented challenges like rising global population, diminishing genetic biodiversity, and uncertainties of the weather . This book is an extraordinary source of information starting from goal-genesis to market-oriented product-profiling and help readers to accelerate/enhance? their work/professional performance more effectively. This book will be very useful to practicing plant breeders at various levels in the public and private sectors. It is a must-have book for potential plant breeders who enter plant breeding profession just after the completion of their formal plant breeding education.

This book is the result of a study on demand-led plant variety design for changing markets in Africa, the purpose of which is to identify and share best practices in demand-led plant breeding from private and public sector breeding programmes worldwide. The intended audiences are professionals in plant breeding and related areas, such as seed production, who have interests in developing and disseminating new plant varieties as a way to increase productivity and profitability in crop agriculture, especially in Africa. The volume is also intended for use as a resource book for the education of postgraduate scholars in plant breeding and genetics, and for the continuing professional development of plant breeders. For this purpose, boxes are included in the main sections of each chapter that summarize its educational objectives and present the key messages and questions that are involved; in addition, there is a final box at the end of each chapter that summarizes its overall learning objectives.

The purpose of this book is to examine the nature of and relationship between the knowledge of farmers and of scientists, and how these can be best integrated in plant breeding.

This book, Plant Breeding, has it bases in an earlier text entitled An Introduction to Plant Breeding by Jack Brown and Peter Caligari, first published in 2008. The challenges facing today’s plant breeders have never been more overwhelming, yet the prospects to contribute significantly to global food security and farmers’ quality of life have never been more exciting and fulfilling. Despite this there has been a worrying decline in public funding for plant breeding-related research and support for international centers of germplasm development and crop improvement. In part, this has resulted in a serious reduction in the number of young people interested in devoting their professional careers to plant breeding as well as the number of universities offering plant breeding courses or conducting relevant research in plant breeding. The authors’ aim in writing this book is to provide an integrated and updated view of the current scientific progress related to diverse plant breeding disciplines, within the context of applied breeding programs. This excellent new book will encourage a new generation of students to pursue careers related to plant breeding and will assist a wider audience of agricultural students, agronomists, policy makers and those with an interest in agriculture in gaining insight about the issues affecting plant breeding and its key role in improving the quality of life of people and in securing sufficient food, at the quality required and at an affordable price. With comprehensive coverage including questions designed for students, and an accompanying website containing additional material to help in the study of the subject, Plant Breeding is an ideal text for all those studying plant and crop sciences, and a convenient reference source for professionals working in the area. All libraries within universities and research establishments where biological and agricultural sciences are studied and taught should have multiple copies of this book.

PLANT BREEDING by A. L. HAGEDOORN, Ph. D. Preface: Twenty years ago I wrote my Handbook of Animal and Plant Breeding in the Dutch language, and my Animal Breeding, grew out of the first book. The publishers have asked me to write a plant-breeding book as a companion volume to Animal Breeding with a similar scope and in the same style, and the present work is the result. As a young geneticist, I started my career as a plant-breeding consultant with the French firm of de Vilmorin Andrieux et Cie. After the first years I became more and more absorbed in matters of theoretical genetics, and during the last decade 1 have been chiefly concerned with genetics as applied to man kind and to the breeding of domestic animals. I have, how ever, never quite given up plant-breeding matters, although the only kind of practical plant breeding I have been more directly engaged upon has been the production of sugar-beet seed. This book is certainly not a textbook on Genetics, nor does it pretend to be an exhaustive treatise of everything pertaining to plant breeding. As far as possible, I have throughout the book avoided tht use of technical and scientific terms where plain English would do as well. The book is written in the first place for those who are actively engaged in the ameliora tion of cultivated plants or in the creation of plant novelties. I have quite an extensive experience of correspondence with plant breeders and amateurs, and I have often co-operated with plant breeders during some generations of their material, discussing the results obtained and helping to decide future breeding policy. This co-operation with so many people has 5 6 Plant Breeding helped to give me an understanding of apractical plant breeders difficulties, and it has afforded me some experience in explaining genetic complexities in simple terms. Plant breeding and this is especially true of plant breeding in the larger institutes is subject to fashions, and I have a notion that the preoccupation with higher mathematics is due to a certain extent to one of those fashions. I am convinced that there is very much more in selection, and even in the comparison of the yield of experimental plots, than in matters which can be ap proached only by means of slide-rules and mechanical calculators. Even though the breeding of plants nowadays is chiefly con centrated in the hands of the bigger Institutes and the more important seed firms, there are as appears from my experience large numbers of people interested in plant-breeding subjects. Apart from the host of amateur gardeners and lovers of flowers and fruit, there are thousands of amateur plant breeders, lovers of gardening who sow an occasional bed of dahlia seedlings or who raise a few hundred seedling apple-trees or seedling roses. Since I started as a plant breeder I have become greatly interested in some tropical plant-breeding problems, and as my animal-breeding book seems to have penetrated to all parts of the world, it seems to me that it is necessary to treat of the amelioration of tropical plants as well as of the breeding of plants in our temperate regions. I collected my examples in the five different countries where I have worked. The Dutch book has often been used as a textbook, and in writing the present volume I have taken this possible use into account. It is quite impossible to write a book on plant breeding without going into some technicalgenetical details, and as identical principles and phenomena are met with in both plant and animal breeding, it is unavoidable that some of the first chapters in both books treat of the same matter in much the same way. ..

This book attempts to present a readable format on plant breeding principles and their application, based on the collective experience of the three authors, but with a heavy dependence on the scientific literature. Modem pedagogy recognizes that teaching can occur when students are motivated to learn. Subject matter must be communicated in an interesting, appealing, and understandable fashion. In preparing the text, every effort has been made to translate pertinent plant breeding references into a clear, logical, and comprehensible format for those studying the challenging and dynamic field of plant breeding.

Plants have been successfully selectively bred for thousands of years, culminating in incredible yields, quality, resistance and so on that we see in our modern day crops and ornamental plants. In recent years the techniques used have been rapidly advanced and refined to include molecular, cell and genetic techniques. An Introduction to Plant Breeding provides comprehensive coverage of the whole area of plant breeding. Covering modes of reproduction in plants, breeding objectives and schemes, genetics, predictions, selection, alternative techniques and practical considerations. Each chapter is carefully laid out in a student friendly way and includes questions for the reader. The book is essential reading for all those studying, teaching and researching plant breeding.