Cropping

Pulse breeding hits a new beat

By McPherson Media Group

Dec 8, 2023

Agriculture Victoria molecular plant breeder Dr Abeya Tefera attended a Genomic Prediction Breeding course at the University of Florida.

The pulse breeding program at Agriculture Victoria’s Horsham Smart Farm is reaping the benefits from a researcher’s recent study trip to the United States.

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Agriculture Victoria molecular plant breeder Abeya Tefera attended a Genomic Prediction Breeding course at the University of Florida with a special focus on applied artificial intelligence followed by field visits to the University of Minnesota.

The course brought together scientists from the private sector and public organisations who are interested in learning more about different prediction frameworks and how to integrate layers of data for plant and animal breeding.

Dr Tefera enjoyed fostering new ties with international peers for future collaboration and the skills he learnt have already helped inform new AI processes to study crop development and isolate climate resilient lentil and field pea varieties.

“Our current advanced breeding strategies are already seeing rapid gains in genetic improvement and now with AI, we can incorporate additional data such as climate and crop development processes to selectively breed resilient traits into new varieties,” Dr Tefera said.

“Plants from our hi-tech glasshouses are photographed in the Plant Phenomics Victoria facilities at the SmartFarm and then we use Meta AI’s Segment Anything program to map varietal characteristics, such as boron toxicity and disease susceptibility; this can then be applied across thousands of lines within Horsham Smart Farm’s pulse breeding program.

“Compared to manual methods AI is making this process more accurate and speeds up the delivery of newer and more resistant varieties within our breeding program.

“Our research is all about accelerating genetic gain to create higher yielding and more resilient varieties and this new application of AI is a true feather in the cap for our breeding program.”

Dr Tefera’s research is a co-investment between the Grains Research and Development Corporation and Agriculture Victoria.