Developments in breeding cereals for organic agriculture

The need for increased sustainability of performance in cereal varieties, particularly in organic agriculture (OA), is limited by the lack of varieties adapted to organic conditions. Here, the needs for breeding are reviewed in the context of three major marketing types, global, regional, local, in European OA. Currently, the effort is determined, partly, by the outcomes from trials that compare varieties under OA and CA (conventional agriculture) conditions. The differences are sufficiently large and important to warrant an increase in appropriate breeding. The wide range of environments within OA and between years, underlines the need to try to select for specific adaptation in target environments. The difficulty of doing so can be helped by decentralised breeding with farmer participation and the use of crops buffered by variety mixtures or populations. Varieties for OA need efficient nutrient uptake and use and weed competition. These and other characters need to be considered in relation to the OA cropping system over the whole rotation. Positive interactions are needed, such as early crop vigour for nutrient uptake, weedcompetition and disease resistance. Incorporation of all characteristics into the crop can be helped by diversification within the crop, allowing complementation and compensation among plants. Although the problems of breeding cereals for organic farming systems are large, there is encouraging progress. This lies in applications of ecology to organic crop production, innovations in plant sciences, and the realisation that such progress is central to both OA and CA, because of climate change and the increasing costs of fossil fuels

The need to breed crop varieties suitable for organic farming, using wheat, tomato and broccoli as examples: A review

It is estimated that more than 95% of organic production is based on crop varieties that were bred for the conventional high-input sector. Recent studies have shown that such varieties lack important traits required under organic and low-input production conditions. This is primarily due to selection in conventional breeding programmes being carried out in the background of high inorganic fertilizer and crop protection inputs. Also, some of the traits (e.g., semi-dwarf genes) that were introduced to address problems like lodging in cereals in high-input systems were shown to have negative side-effects (reduced resistance to diseases such as Septoria, lower protein content and poorer nutrient-use efficiency) on the performance of varieties under organic and low-input agronomic conditions. This review paper, using wheat, tomato and broccoli as examples, describes (1) the main traits required under low-input conditions, (2) current breeding programmes for organic, low-input agriculture, (3) currently available breeding and/or selection approaches, and (4) the benefits and potential negative side-effects of different breeding methodologies and their relative acceptability under organic farming principles. © 2010 Royal Netherlands Society for Agricultural Sciences. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved