Pasture perfect

Grasslands form a significant proportion of the world’s land area and provide many ecosystem services for humans. Plant breeders can provide germplasm best adapted to the range and variety of grassland systems and functions. To achieve this, these methods and processes are used: collection of natural ecotypes, selection, hybridization, speed breeding, introgression of wild relatives, genomic and marker-assisted selection, phenotyping, metabolomics, transgenic techniques, and targeted gene editing. Current plant breeding goals encompass production, persistence, herbage quality, seed yield, environmental adaptation, and compatibility with microbes that have co-evolved with the species, such as Epichloë in temperate grasses and Rhizobium with legumes. For turf grasses, the specific targets include sod density, colour, fineness of shoot tillers, and tolerance to wear. Future targets will need to include adaptation to environmental constraints and impacts of a changing climate, reducing their environmental footprint, the ability to sequester more carbon, and improving resistance/tolerance to threats to pasture resilience from invasive pests.