2017 ASHS Annual Conference

Precision agriculture is the need of the hour as we face the daunting challenge of feeding a burgeoning population. Confounding that situation is the fact that resources such as water are becoming limited. Further, global climate change is creating new forms of biotic and abiotic stresses that threaten food production. There is an urgent need to develop and deploy crops that can be resilient and remain productive with reduced inputs. Traditional approaches of developing new crops is inefficient and cannot keep pace with the changing realities of agriculture. While the primary focus remains on subsistence crops such as cereals, the challenge is greater for perennial crops that sustain many a people and large economies. Given these scenarios there is a need to utilize precise and efficient approaches in perennial crop improvement. In this workshop, method and approaches to improve perennial horticultural crops via FastTrack Breeding, horticultural management, in vitro procedures and Genome Editing will be discussed. With the help of a few selected examples, techniques involved in precision breeding of perennial crops will be illustrated.