Breeding crops for the next decade

The next 10 years, in wheat breeding terms, will be about achieving a massive boost in production, against a backdrop of increasing environmental constraints.

Nonetheless, the next decade could potentially be one of the most exciting for wheat breeding developments, says Bill Angus.

“Worldwide wheat production is currently about 600 million tonnes. By 2030 we will need to produce 900m tonnes to meet the extra demand for food resulting from population growth.

“We need a second ‘Green Revolution’. The first one stemmed the tide of hunger - it was about dwarf wheat varieties, nitrogen, fungicides, agronomic changes such as the development of field tramlines - and UK farmers were brilliant at picking these up.

“Now we’ve got a backdrop of environmental issues and some of these are actually antagonistic to the need to increase output,” he says.

Recent pesticide and water legislation, which will limit the range of agrochemicals available to farmers, provide good examples of the constraints facing the industry. Plant breeders have been thrown a challenge to equip
farmers to produce more with fewer inputs, a challenge that can only be described as daunting, he says.

“What are we going to do about it? Well, we have to look at every possible opportunity we can, and that means revisiting some technologies discarded in the past.

“There are two in particular I think need to be looked at very, very seriously; one is hybrid wheat and the other is GM.

“We’ve got to have a mature discussion about GM and move away from the emotive stuff. We’ve got to get rid of the antagonistic positions of ‘GM is the answer to all our dreams’ in a stand-off with ‘GM is Frankenstein food’. What we’ve got to say is GM must be considered as potentially one of the building blocks to help us achieve sustainable output.

“If we don’t do that we are in severe danger of letting our fellow human beings in the Third World down very badly.
“I think mass starvation and hunger are really going to be something we are looking at in 10 years time if we don’t do something now.”

There are already signs the plant breeding sector is adapting in order to meet the challenge. Most recently there has been increasing interest in the sector from R&D-based agrochemical businesses.

Within the last few months Monsanto has renewed its interest in wheat breeding via the acquisition of the US Westbred business, says Mr Angus.

What is driving this investment is a fundamental of the worldwide wheat market - the need globally to produce more wheat.

“We are starting to see companies coming back into wheat breeding because of this. The fundamentals say the price of wheat has got to rise, with demand increasing and supply chains becoming more limited.

“Therefore, the agrochemical companies will be looking to take a share of that increase in price. It’s as simple as that.”

Mr Angus admits, a few years ago he would have been highly critical of this encroachment into the seeds business. But, in today’s economic climate, he sees global agrochemical businesses as organisations who, through their greater resources, could make a significant and complementary investment in wheat production.

“It’s going to be very difficult under the current financial returns system for private sector breeders to meet the demands for increased production unless we can tap into public funding and/ or form strategic partnerships with those who have the money.

“If you look at corn (maize) yields in the US, they’ve gone up massively. Why? Because plant breeders have invested in developing new varieties.

“Agrochemical giants, such as Monsanto, invest significant sums into research.That investment is manifested in the increasing output we are seeing in maize.”

In stark contrast, wheat breeding in the US has seen much lower levels of investment and, as a consequence, yields have increased at a much slower rate.

Worldwide there are traits already identified in wheat, which with GM technology, and a refocusing of investments, could provide a significant yield boost within 10 years he maintains.

“I think we are developing an understanding of key traits - there’s lots of talk about nitrogen use efficiency, water use efficiency and modified starch profiles, for example - but we’re still very much in the proof of concept stage.We’re not in position where we could say ‘We’ve got these traits, off we go’.

“I’m not suggesting we should embrace GM - but I do think we should make sure we look at it as an option. There are technologies available to us. If I look, for example, at the molecular marker work we do here, it’s brilliant in terms of giving additional information.

“Wheat breeding has become a much more sophisticated activity than it was 20 years ago. Now we need to find people who can balance traditional technologies with new technology, because the answers are going to come from the selective use of the different technologies available.”

What is needed in the plant breeding industry during the course of the next 10 years is boldness, says Mr Angus.

“I think we need to be much bolder than we are being at the moment. We need to look at developing varieties with different photosynthetic pathways, different crop structures. We need to broaden the genetic pool, look outside of the current wheat germplasm into related grasses to see if we can build improved yield potential and, possibly, also source some better disease resistance than we’ve got at the moment.”

Such developments will require funding and, with total royalty income from wheat amounting to £13-14 million per year, it is about time some of the revenue generated along the food chain is returned to plant breeders, he
argues.

While limited funding for commercial plant breeding is a concern, so too is funding for, and targeting of, plant breeding research.

“We’ve lost our way in the public sector,” he says. “We have become too interested in blue sky research topics that are meaningless to farmers.

“I think the public sector has got to really realign itself with what UK plc needs in terms of agriculture - output.”

This realignment is already underway, with the formation of the Crop Improvement Club, the Technology Strategy Board and initiatives such as the Wheat Genetic Improvement Network (WGIN).

“I think if we take some of the technologies available to us now, we stand a chance of increasing our average yield in the UK from eight tonnes per hectare to 12 tonnes a hectare. People will say, well we’ve already got plenty of wheat in the UK. That is not the point - we need to look at it from a global perspective as well as being a major exporter into the world markets.

“If we were to increase UK wheat yields from eight to 12 tonnes per hectare, we would be able to supply everyone on the planet with a loaf of bread.

“The potential is there, but the onus is on us to increase yields in environments where we can
capture that yield potential.

“There will be parts of the world, where, because of global warming, we are not able to
capture further yield potential.

“While politicians are talking in timescales extending forward over 10 or even 20 years and beyond, the reality for plant breeders is the deadline is much closer because of the time taken to develop new varieties. “If we don’t do something in the next two to three years we’ll really be struggling,” says Mr Angus.

“If we say it takes seven years to produce a new variety, there are only three cycles left to get to 2030.”

What of the wheat varieties of 10 years hence? Will they look and perform like the wheat varieties of today?
More robust and reliable disease resistance is certainly achievable. “I’d like to think in 10 years time we’ll have varieties resistant to take-all but that may depend probably on acceptance of GM technology.

“I think we could be working with a range of modified starch profiles, so wheat may look the same but it may deliver to the marketplace a range of different quality characteristics.

“I also like to think we’ll see varieties much more tuned into the marketplace and we will have moved away from generic ‘feed’ or ‘bread’ classification - but that depends on end users being prepared to invest in downstream breeding activity.

“If they’re not, it’ll be what we’ve had for the last 20 or 30 years. If they don’t share with us what they want and they’re not prepared to help the breeder get to where they want to be, it’s not going to happen.”

Of course, in the UK the HGCA Recommended List system has an enormous influence on the
commercial success or otherwise of varieties.

The Recommended Lists have done a good job for farmers - but they are due for a radical rethink if they are to retain their value over the next 10 years he maintains.

Such an overhaul is unlikely, he says, but if only one thing could be changed it should be to include all varieties in all RL trials.

“What farmers want is more data, better data - and a better quality of interpretation of that data.”

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