Breeding Reboot: The Second Green Revolution.

The projected growth in food demand, especially for major crops, exceeds the historic trends in production gains.  Furthermore, some of the major contributors to past productivity gains are expected to have lesser roles in future productivity gains (e.g. irrigation, fertilizer, pesticides).   Hence the challenge for plant breeders for genetic improvement is both increasing and daunting.  Plant breeders will need to use all of the genetic variability available to them, proven and novel methods of selection and inbreeding, and efficient field design for evaluating new cultivars and hybrids. The greater genetic understanding of crop productivity and the traits that contribute to it will require in depth “mining” of our genetic resources to find new, useful sources of genetic variation.  As unprecedented rates of improvement are needed, a major emphasis will be on improving breeding efficiency by reducing the time it takes to create new cultivars (e.g. shortening the time required for inbreeding, taking advantage of increasingly less expensive molecular marker and sequencing tools, precise and high throughput phenotyping, and modeling for predicting adaptation).  The importance of efficient phenotyping cannot be overstated as it will remain the most costly aspect of plant breeding and most necessary due to our imperfect understanding of genetics of productivity.