A Plant Science Company's Perspective: Targets for Improved Productivity in Corn in the Next Decade – Water Optimization.

Water deficits are one of the most complex and highly variable stresses impacting corn production. To address this production challenge, Syngenta’s R&D groups developed a rigorous in-field evaluation program, referred to as Managed Stress Environments (MSE), to successfully identify genes that impact tolerance to water deficits. The MSE program creates a uniform testing environment that delivers reproducible water stress intensity treatments over multiple timings that are transferable across years and locations. This program consists of monitoring crop progress and yield across multiple irrigation scenarios. Screening was focused on comparing yield of fully irrigated plants vs. moisture stressed plants to isolate optimum alleles involved in moisture stress mitigation. Selected alleles were incorporated into elite germplasm to create water-optimized hybrids. The resulting water-optimized hybrids deliver up to 15 percent yield preservation under moderate to severe moisture deficit stress without a yield penalty in high yielding environments.