Plant breeding

Forms of plant breeding

• Farmer selection / landrace breeding — the original form. Farmers save seed from the best-performing plants each year; over generations, populations adapt to local conditions and farmer preferences. Still the dominant form in much of the world.
• Mass selection — saving seed from many strong plants; maintains [[genetic-diversity|genetic diversity]] while gradually improving population traits
• Pure-line selection — saving seed from individual best plants; produces more-uniform varieties; common for self-pollinating species
• Cross-breeding — deliberately crossing two parent varieties to combine desired traits; multiple generations of selection follow
• Hybrid breeding (F1) — controlled crosses between inbred parent lines; produces uniform vigorous F1 generation; see [[f1-hybrid]]
• Marker-assisted selection — using DNA markers to identify desired traits earlier in the breeding cycle; speeds traditional crossing
• Mutation breeding — inducing mutations chemically or with radiation; selecting beneficial mutants. Predates GMO; now uncommon.
• Genetic engineering / GMO — direct insertion of specific genes (often from other organisms); a separate technical category. Limited to specific crops; commercial GMO varieties are mostly in corn, [[soybean|soybean]], cotton, and a few others.

Lineages of public plant breeding

• Mendel and the discovery of genetics — Gregor Mendel’s 1866 pea-breeding paper established the basic laws of inheritance, foundational to all subsequent breeding
• Vavilov and the centers of origin — [[nikolai-vavilov|Nikolai Vavilov]]‘s 1920s-30s expeditions mapped the world’s centers of crop [[genetic-diversity|genetic diversity]]; established the Vavilov Institute, one of the world’s largest seed banks
• Land-grant university breeding — U.S. land-grant universities developed thousands of public-domain varieties from the 1860s onward; this tradition has weakened as breeding shifted to private companies
• Indigenous breeders — Native American, Mexican, Andean, and African farmers have bred and maintained the world’s most-diverse crop landraces; the genetic foundation of modern agriculture rests on this work
• Public organic breeding — Organic Seed Alliance, university programs, and farmer-led collectives breeding for organic and regional production systems
• Climate-adapted breeding — emerging programs breeding for drought tolerance, heat resistance, novel pest pressures

Modern controversy

The shift from public to private breeding has produced consequential changes:

• Concentration — most commercial seed production is now in the hands of a few global corporations
• Patent enclosure — see [[plant-variety-patent]]; modern breeding is increasingly enclosed by intellectual property
• Loss of diversity — commercial breeding optimizes a narrow set of traits for commodity production; thousands of traditionally-bred varieties have been lost as commercial varieties displaced them
• Re-emergence of public/farmer breeding — [[open-source-seed-initiative|Open Source Seed Initiative]], Organic Seed Alliance, [[the-land-institute|the Land Institute]], regional seed networks are explicitly reasserting public/community breeding as alternative

See also

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• Shares approach with: [[seed-saving]]
• Member of: [[practice]]
• Pioneer of: [[wes-jackson]]

Sources

• Plant Breeding for the Home Gardener, Joseph Tychonievich (Timber Press, 2013)
• Breeding Organic Vegetables, Rosalind Creasy and Carol Deppe
• USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources documentation

Rooted in life.