b'Whats YourWHEN YOU THINKabout plant breeding, do you immedi-ately think of the amount of planning that goes into specific varieties? Its not only planning for specific diseases and specific Final Goal inpests on the marketplant breeders and their teams have to be forward thinkers as well as plant breeders.Breeding targets are a general-purpose word, but when I think of it, the first thing that comes to mind iswhat is your Breeding? final goal? Mike Popelka, corn breeder with AgReliant Genetics, says on Seed Speaks. Theyre actually the measurable and actionable areas of improvement within your product pipeline and your breeding program that can help you improve that final Its Not Alwaysproduct going to your customers.Popelka says its important to focus on how measurable the goals are, as youre incentivizing what you measure. What you use for your benchmarks is really going to matter Obvious when youre talking about those targets, he says, adding how when talking about corn yield, we could talk about the number of hybrids advanced every year. In the vegetable realm, its no different. According to Brian Just, its important to keep in mind who your customers are when deciding on your targets. Though plant breeders keep breedingMy main customers are the farmers that we sell seed toI targets in mind, sometimes surprisestry to put myself in their shoes and figure out what I could do to offer them a product thats going to keep them coming back and come down the pipeline.buying the product year after year, Just, senior plant breeder Alex Martin and Marc Zienkiewicz and sweet pepper lead for Sakata Seed America, says. Targets in the vegetable world look different than targets in the row crop world. While row crops like corn typically focus on Want to hear the rest of the conversation where Popelka, Just and Swegarden talktargets like yield, Just says the vegetable world looks at a variety more in-depth about creating goals to make a stable, hardy product? of things: fruit size, of peppers, quality and flavor, on top of the Watch the conversation at: youtube.com/watch?v=PNgT7XC2AK0 typical yield, disease-resistance and pest resistance.Occasionally, especially with exploratory projects, its hard to pin down an exact breeding target, says Hannah Swegarden, plant breeder with PanAmerican Seed. Most projects do start with a general concept or trait that were interested in, Swegarden says. It really involves a lot of dialogue between breeding directors, breeders, even some product development and sales team members. Its not a super highly structured process, but it encourages some regular con-versation about whats in our nursery and what we plan to do.Once you can demonstrate a trait or concept at the genetic level, Swegarden says you can either reevaluate the target, or begin to communicate it across the companys business units to integrate product development and sales. From there, the prod-uct roadmap starts to take shape. Just says you cant form your goals without spending an incredible amount of time in the field with your customer.We figure out what [the customer] really needs, and then we decide what we can breed for and what we cant breed for, and then the team takes it from there, he says. That way, we can be really sure that were offering something that has come up in our conversations, and things are going to help the grower at the end of the day.SW32/ SEEDWORLD.COMJUNE 2023'