Stronger Plants, Stronger Science, and Stronger Communication
Written by Matt DiLeo JetBlue airlines now gives out blue potato chips as their “official” snack. I’m very impressed by the fact that these blue potato chips exist. It’s no small feat to create a good-frying potato with excellent agronomic qualities in itself. I can’t imagine crossing in blue coloring (anthocyanin expression) on top of…
Written by Matt DiLeo Among plant geneticists, breeders are always held up as the pragmatic experts who know what matters in the Real World. But not all fields perceive breeders this way… Sustainable agriculture was a popular session topic at the tri-societies joint meeting in San Antonio. More specifically, many speakers took pleasure (rightly so) in…
Written by Matt DiLeo Someday you’ll be able to use CAD software to draw up what you want a plant to look like and the software (containing detailed growth models) will tell you what genetic constructs you need to bring it into the world… But for now we barely understand how natural morphological variation is…
Written by Matt DiLeo The “perennial grain” story seems to pop up every few months. The basic idea is that perennial crops would have higher yields and lower environmental impacts than their annual kin. The picture on the left explains pretty clearly why – large permanent root systems secure the topsoil, exhaustively scavenge water and…
Written by Matt DiLeo It’s 3 am local time and I’m wide awake, fixated on the challenge of brand differentiation in ketchup… I recently spoke with one of the ketchup tomato breeders I know. Among other topics, he lamented the consumer’s irrational fixation on price. He pointed out that most of us won’t hesitate to…
Written by Matt DiLeo “Heirlooms were varieties that were so unsuccessful that they wouldn’t be sold today… Every product declines until it’s replaced by new heirlooms.” The backlash was inevitable.
Written by Matt DiLeo I recently had the opportunity to visit the fabled heart of the USDA-ARS empire: Beltsville. I heard all about the tornado that knocked down all the campus trees, smashed in the greenhouses and threw doors down hallways a few years ago, visited their food sensory lab (a controlled environment where fruit samples…
Written by Matt DiLeo “With over 80% of the corn grown in the US genetically modified, and biotechnology companies phasing out non-GMO corn seed varieties, American farmers have fewer choices for finding non-GMO seeds to grow. As a result of this narrowing of farmer choice, a new initiative was launched in 2009 by Practical Farmers…
Written by Matt DiLeo This is why farmers like hybrid seed. The parents on the left and right are inbred lines that have been self-pollinated for many, many years.* The two rows of much bigger plants in the middle are simply their hybrid offspring – they grow faster, produce higher yields and are tougher in…
Written by Matt DiLeo Variety IR8 is the original “Miracle rice” of the 1960s. This carefully-crafted variety has a stunted, semi-dwarf phenotype, which increases it’s harvest index (the proportion of grain biomass to total biomass), and allows it to resist lodging (falling over into the mud), even when heavily fertilized. As with wheat, the creation…
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