Efficiency of Plant Breeding

By S. Ceccarelli. 2015

144 citations recorded by the source corpus.

participatory plant breeding ( ppB) has been prac - ticed for several reasons, including sociological, humanitarian, and egalitarian. This paper aims to demonstrate that ppB should be practiced sim - ply because it increases plant breeding efficiency, which is defined as (i) the ratio between the num- ber of varieties adopted and the number of crosses made, (ii) the response to selection, and (iii) the benefit/cost ratio, not only as often done by pub - lic breeding programs, by the number of varieties released by public breeding programs. After review - ing the reasons for the lack of adoption of several of the varieties released, and the theoretical basis justifying the use of correlated response to measure selection gains, the issue of the benefit/cost ratio is discussed within the context of adoption rates. The assumption is that without adoption, no ben - efit will occur. Ways to increase the three measures of breeding efficiency are discussed in detail, and the conclusion is made that the three measures can be increased by combining decentralized selection with farmers' participation in a pp B program. The essential features of a ppB program are reviewed, including the experimental designs and statisti - cal analysis used to increase the precision of on- farm trials. The findings show that ppB increases breeding efficiency, both in terms of response to selection measured over the time from the initial cross to adoption and in terms of the benefit/cost ratio as a consequence of a higher adoption rate. In a ppB program, adoption starts during the pro

Subfields: Plant Science

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