NIFA Investments in Plant Breeding: Strategies, Achievements and Impacts in Research, Education, and Extension

Plant breeding is critical to increasing abiotic and biotic stress resistance and nutritional quality, to enhancing yields and to meeting regional and other specialized production requirements, such as organic. Long-term capacity in public plant breeding is supported by non-competitive programs such as Hatch and Evans-Allen, which represented about half of NIFA’s (National Institute of Food and Agriculture) 2014 plant breeding investments. NIFA has prioritized competitive programs in plant breeding in the 2015 Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) Foundational and Food Security Challenge areas. One of the first and largest AFRI-funded projects to integrate genomics and plant breeding was the $25M Triticeae Coordinated Agricultural Project (TCAP) (2011) on barley and wheat germplasm for changing environments. TCAP included 56 participants in 28 institutions and 21 states. By 2014, TCAP reported 9 new varieties plus significant contributions to 53 additional varieties, representing 15% of U.S. wheat acreage, 62 germplasm releases, 21 population releases, 186 scientific publications, and training of 115 individuals. Other AFRI projects that included plant breeding are the Bean and the Solanaceae CAPs. Current AFRI support for plant breeding is mostly in the form of smaller, single investigator awards, which may, however, build on the larger awards. From 2011 to 2014, the AFRI Plant Breeding for Agricultural Production Foundational area made 27 awards for a total of $12.3 million for 21 different crops. The Organic Research and Extension Initiative (OREI) and Specialty Crops Research and Extension Initiative (SCRI) have also supported plant breeding research and extension. A downy mildew resistant cucumber cultivar was released based on initial funding from OREI for the Northern Organic Vegetable Improvement Collaborative, followed by an award from the AFRI Foundational area. Between 2009 and 2014, SCRI awarded 32 grants in plant breeding for a total of $56.5 million, including renewing a CAP program for the Rosaceae (RosBREED). OREI made 17 plant breeding awards, for a total of $25.4 million from 2009–2014. NIFA investment in plant breeding has resulted in the development of new vegetable cultivars and tools for breeders that are currently used throughout the country, such as a lettuce cultivars resistant to Verticillium wilt and identification of a candidate gene that encodes resistance to root rot disease in chili peppers. While NIFA has made significant strides in providing competitive funding to advance plant breeding, sustained investment is needed to address emerging issues and to train the next generation of plant breeders.