Trends and innovations in plant breeding

Just like their colleagues in other countries throughout Southeastern Europe, Romania’s farmers have been frequently grappling with extreme periods of drought for years. The drought stress has been detrimental to the corn crop. Modern plant breeding is giving rise to hope.

Soil with a high humus content is the key for healthy plants and a high yield. But it’s also an ideal carbon pool and contributes to climate protection. Anyone who builds up humus should be financially rewarded in the opinion of Rolf Sommer of the WWF. He’s a soils expert and knows about the challenges for the agricultural industry –and what farmers will need to change in the fields in the future.

A farmer with passion and an advisor with the best seeds – a successful duo, which brought in a record harvest for an eleventh-generation farm during the drought year of 2018.

Nothing shapes life in Argentina as much as tango, soccer and beef. Luís Parra is a farmer and cattle breeder – not to mention a fan of River Plate, the arch-rivals of Boca Juniors. Alfonso Callegari is commercial director at KWS and a Boca Juniors fan. Even though they will never agree on soccer, Callegari and Parra are pulling together as business partners. Callegari is willing to go a long way for this to happen.

High planting density, standing power in a difficult climate and smaller corn cobs: Plant breeding and the targeted use of seeds bring Chinese farmers a more bountiful harvest and make it possible for them to rely more heavily on the use of machines. And with that, the days of hard field work are over for many people.

Corn and bean plants together in one field: A method that has been practiced in South America for 2000 years is being attempted by more and more farmers here in Germany. The benefits are obvious: more food for bees and up to two percent more protein in the silage. But in the end, it primarily comes down to the type of bean.

The earlier Cercospora leaf spot is stopped, the fewer the losses that sugarbeet farmers will suffer. In the “DataPlant” project, three research institutions and companies are combining their farming and optics expertise in an effort to automatically spot the fungus at an early stage – with the help of light, sensors, weather data and artificial intelligence.

Artificial intelligence is gaining in importance in seed breeding. KWS is currently developing and conducting tests with a field robot in the U.S. to find out how plant traits can be identified automatically and precisely to support variety selection decisions and enable conclusions that will help improve yields and resistances in agricultural crops.

Satellite images show precisely how much seed should be sown and where. This innovation helps farmers achieve higher yields – and Italy’s largest dairy farm already counts on it for sowing its corn.

Top-quality seed is the key to achieving the very best yields. One of the central requirements for seed to produce high-yielding plants is for it to contain a healthy embryo.

Something truly big is at stake: the future of the potato. It’s one of the most important foods there is. Germans eat around 60 kilograms of them a year – and the Latvians even twice that.

The future of breeding is up in the air, among other things: KWS uses drones over its fields in order to produce new varieties even faster.

Successful pig fattening and happy animals – Andreas von Felde believes they are not mutually exclusive goals. This Northern German farmer plants rye and uses it for feed. He needs less fertilizer, and a recent study backs him up.

Precision farming thanks to satellites: Since the 2018 season, KWS has been able to detect the ideal time to harvest silage corn - thanks to satellite images supplied by a system that is unique worldwide.

Bacteria are the extremists among living things. They live in 100-degree hot water, in strong acids or in sulphurous sources of the deep sea...

Organic farming may not use artificial chemical agents against bird damage in freshly sown maize fields. Therefore, in the spring the animals sometimes pick whole freshly sown crops...

How do you watch the roots of a sugarbeet at a depth of 1.50 meters grow? It's quite simple. You only need a giant drill, long Plexiglas tubes, a special scanner, a lot of software to...

The small French town of Pithiviers south of Paris is notorious among the growers of sugarbeets. In the region, there are many and especially aggressive variants of the virus that is found in sugarbeets ...

Germany has restricted the permissible amount of nitrogen in many fields with the new Fertiliser Ordinance. In many places, even less ...

Bacteria, fungi, viruses: Plants are the target of countless attacks. The pathogens want to reproduce in the energy-rich leaves or fruits...