Working Together on Plant Breeding

Public and private plant breeders believe there are opportunities to work together on plant breeding.

While the public and private plant breeding sectors may seem separate, there’s a lot of work the two can collaborate on and do. While they may focus on different sectors or parts of plant breeding, both see opportunities to work together to create the crops farmers want and need.

“In the private sector, plant breeding is a factory to continue delivering new and improved products for the farmers. Collaborating in new technologies and joining efforts on the next thing — that’s something that could be done with the public sector,” Luis Verde, the product development director for North America at Corteva Agriscience, says during the March 8 episode of Seed Speaks.

Corteva, as of the big four plant breeding companies, has access to a wealth of resources when it comes to plant breeding. For Verde, he’s aware of that and knows not everyone working in plant breeding has the opportunities he does, which to him is part of the reason why he sees collaboration between the public and private plant breeding worlds as being important.