Systems-Based Breeding Approach: How To Implement It?

Summary

Organic breeders need to meet many demands in developing cultivars, e.g. with high yield, good quality, resource-efficiency, climate-robustness, and culturally and ethically acceptable and contributing to ecosystem services. Given the current and future climatic, agronomic, economic and societal environment working towards ecological and societal resilience can only be achieved by concerted action. The concept of systems-based breeding tries to integrate the strengths of different breeding orientations and provides a perspective where breeders can be initiators of developments towards an ecologically and societally resilient crop production. In this paper we present the first steps for operationalising this concept.