Can New Technology Help Plant Breeding Decision Making?

Plant breeding has historically been a highly manual process. Breeders and their teams rely on their hands, eyes, and physical effort to collect phenotype data for evaluating genotypes in their programs. The breeding team walks the field, measuring traits from plot to plot. This is a time-consuming and labor-intensive process. Phenotyping for some traits is a major bottleneck in maximizing the efficiency of the plant breeding process. Advances in sensor technologies and UAVs offer the potential to transform this process by replacing much of the manual labor with automated, high-throughput phenotyping (HTP). These advanced sensor technologies can collect millions of measurements in a short time, dramatically reducing the time, effort, and cost required. The more phenotypes that are evaluated for each genotype, the easier it is to find the ‘one in a million’ cultivar which will eventually reach the producer. Plant breeding is a numbers game: the larger the volume of phenotyping we can do, the greater the probability we have for genetic gain. Capitalizing on high throughput phenotyping technology could improve the evaluation step in the breeding process and accelerate breeding accomplishment.