Participatory plant breeding: the best way to breed for sustainable agriculture?

Breeding for abiotic stresses for sustainable agriculture.

Using cereal crops as examples, we review the breeding for tolerance to the abiotic stresses of low nitrogen, drought, salinity and aluminium toxicity. All are already important abiotic stress factors that cause large and widespread yield reductions. Drought will increase in importance with climate change, the area of irrigated land that is salinized continues to increase, and the cost of inorg...

Plant microbiomes and sustainable agriculture

B acteria had been around long before multi-cellular eukaryotes evolved and quickly began to colonize these new life forms as another suitable habitat and potential source of nutrients. Nearly all higher organisms across taxa now have bacterial communities living on and within them—from mutually beneficial symbioses to antagonistic parasitic conflicts. They have co-evolved with their microbiota...

Participatory breeding, an approach for sustainable production of new rice cultivars in Iran

 Over the past 50 years, thousands of rice varieties have been introduced by plant breeders to agricultural communities all over the world. Despite the improvement of attributes such as grain yield and tolerance to biotic and abiotic stresses, a significant portion of farmers still prefer local varieties over the improved cultivars. The main reasons for this perference are the absence of a dire...

Sustainable Agriculture: More than One Way Ahead

Recent discussions of the way ahead for agriculture have tended to centre around the frequently incompatible claims of the proponents of technological agriculture, now further developed through inputs from biotechnology , and ecological agriculture, of which organic farming is the best known example.There is a need for the claims made for these two versions to be put into a broader scientific a...

Plant breeding for harmony between agriculture and the environment