Pasture biotechnology — not as you know it

The breeding of improved varieties of agriculturally important species requires constant effort and innovation. The ways we in New Zealand use emerging technologies to maintain our low-cost, low-input, sustainable, pastoral agricultural systems are extremely important. When it comes to developing elite varieties and strains of ryegrass we have been, until very recently, disrupting much to achieve little: we rely on chance to find the right combinations of traits in our breeding lineages, whether animal germplasm or plants cultivars. The use of Cisgenics®, where heritable material is moved only within a species by either traditional or modern biotechnological means offers a better way for ryegrass breeding in line with a key principle of science and economics.