Improving the Focus of Forage Breeding Research

Abstract

Forage crop breeding is particularly exposed to the risks of insufficient focus, owing to challenges and dilemmas arising from the wide diversity of possible bred species, target traits, target environments, crop utilizations, breeding approaches and seed markets, as well as from contrasting demands by farmers, the seed industry and the society. Despite the large number of satisfactory results from forage crop breeding, pitfalls associated with insufficient focus have not been rare. They have included different types of mismatch between selection and target environments, overlooking important traits (e.g., seed yield) or fairly inefficient multi-trait selection, and suboptimal exploitation of genetic diversity, among others. Dilemmas have arisen also from poor research efforts on various crucial issues and occasionally from shortcomings of variety registration procedures. Selecting simultaneously for several traits is hindered by high costs that could be alleviated by marker-based approaches. A focused choice of methods, plant material and phenotyping conditions is indispensable for the successful implementation of genomic selection and other marker-based selection procedures for higher forage yield. As a trend, we expect increasing breeding attention for legumes and. insofar as the application of breakthrough technology depends on seed market opportunities, less breeding effort for minor forage crops.