The “Breeding Costing Tool” is software made freely available from the Queensland Alliance for Agriculture and Food Innovation and the University of Queensland in Australia. It is a powerful solution for allowing users to “estimate the cost of crop breeding and its associated research activities and to help breeders make decisions about resource allocation.
In March 2019, EiB surveyed its members to identify preferences for models of equipment used to digitize breeding operations. The results are provided below.
In managed drought stress trials, it is critical to achieve the required level of drought at the target crop stage in order to generate high-quality, repeatable trial data.
The three key factors to be taken account are:
Crop breeding programs using conventional and/or molecular breeding approaches rely heavily on high-quality phenotypic data generated by evaluating genotypes in different environmental conditions, such as drought.
In this manual, the traits of interest for phenotyping are those that mitigate yield losses rather than those involved in the survival or escape of plants exposed to drought stress.
This manual is targeted at maize breeders and field technicians in tropical environments who are working on improving maize tolerance to drought stress.
Maize crops grown during the summer rainy season in the tropics occasionally face extreme weather conditions that limit crop establishment and yield potential. Among various abiotic stresses, contingent/intermittent soil waterlogging is one of the important constraints for maize production in the Asian tropics and many other maize growing areas around the world.
Monitoring soil moisture is critical to understand genotypic performance in yield trials and is then an important factor for data quality.
This tool provides information on theory, protocol, troubleshooting, and equipment needed to undertake a rigorous soil moisture monitoring in your breeding plots.
Detailed assessment and planning is required for breeding programs to continuously improve phenotyping operations. These templates have been created to assess and act on potential improvements in the following areas, each of which are further divided into sub-categories:
Field Book was created to replace paper field books to enable increased collection speed with greater data integrity, using a novel collection system that only displays a single cell to be collected at a time.
Field Book can collect data in the following formats: numeric, percentage, categorical, date, Boolean, text, photo, counter, rust rating, and audio. Traits are defined by the user and can be exported and transferred between devices. Sample files are provided with the installation.
The KDSmart application, designed for Android handheld devices, enables data collection in the field. Trial/Nursery phenotypic data, selectively imported into KDSmart, is available in the field for efficient and reliable data capture and storage ready for upload.
KDSmart can be used:
Phenotyping tools and services
Steve Corak
Steve Corak brings over twenty years of private sector experience to his new role with Excellence in Breeding. The majority of Steve’s past efforts have focused on seed production research as well as implementation of improved technologies. He holds graduate degrees in crop physiology and soil science, as well as multiple US and foreign patents. He was awarded DuPont’s Sustainable Growth award and Pioneer’s Owen Newlin Business Excellence award for his contributions in developing an internet-enable global plant disease diagnostic network.