Page 5 - Breeding Edge ebook

• A new cassava plant, engineered to be resistant to brown streak disease, could make the
difference between small farmers in Africa having a crop to eat and having no crop at all.

• New breeds of livestock and poultry could be engineered to no longer be susceptible to
widespread disease outbreaks, like pigs resistant to Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory
Syndrome Virus (PRRSV), which can cost hundreds of millions of dollars annually.

• Cover crops that naturally improve soil health can be developed to grow in more diverse climates,
improving environmental sustainability, water quality and animal nutrition.

• Dairy cows can be bred without horns, removing the need for cows to endure the polling (horn
removal) process.

• Fruits and vegetables could be engineered to resist browning, extending their consumer appeal
and reducing food waste.

Indeed, the science is moving so rapidly that some
are wondering if producers, as well as consumers,
and regulators will ultimately be able to
understand and embrace the changes.

As history demonstrates, new advancements in
breeding have almost always been controversial –
even though safety or environmental risks have not
been proven.

“It is critically important that everyone in agriculture
becomes rapidly conversant in this technology, as it
already has been a game changer,” notes Kevin Folta,
who chairs the Horticultural Sciences Department at
the University of Florida in Gainesville. “If these
technologies are delayed because of misunderstanding, we will lose many opportunities to bring
improved varieties to the field and better fruits and vegetables to consumers.”

The long, long road to gene editing

Change has always occurred in plant and animal breeding, but by a long shot, agriculture’s genetic
advances haven’t always been so brisk. Quite the opposite.

Even though the pace toward modern plant and animal breeding quickened remarkably in the 20th
century, since the birth of farming about 8000 B.C., in what’s now Iran and Iraq, and in Central America
not much later, most improvements in strains of crop and animal species have gradually evolved over
hundreds of years.

Farmers, gardeners and others learned a wide range of husbandry skills over the centuries, says
E. Charles Brummer, plant breeder at the University of California, Davis, and president of the
Crop Science Society of America. “Cloning of grapes goes back hundreds of years,” for example,
and manure has been used to enrich soils since the earliest agriculture; crop rotations have long
been used, too, to improve soil and crop vigor, he points out.

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