The lament in Europe during my talks there often brought up discussions about the dropping of old fashioned plant breeding education. So few plant breeders were like me, from the farm and seedsmen for generations. The necessity of registering seed varieties all but dried up backyard breeders since their varieties were deemed illegal. If you are not a registered seed grower you could not sell seeds, and the whole hierarchy of breeding and selling seeds fell apart from the standpoint of the non-professional.
I was reminded of the following link that I read years ago. It is still time appropriate today.
http://km.fao.org/gipb/images/pdf_fi..._DOC_apb09.pdf
Quote:
Plant breeding is critical to the future of productive agriculture, food security, and economic
prosperity. Increasingly, many plant breeders are working in industry or governmental agencies
that do not include education of the next generation of plant breeders as part of their mission. At
the same time, many educational institutions lack resources and programs of sufficient size and
scope to adequately educate/expose students to applied plant breeding. Furthermore the
technology of plant breeding is changing, so established plant breeders need ongoing
opportunities to develop new skills to take advantage of the new tools such as genomics. Two
key questions facing our science are: 1. Do we have the capacity to educate the numbers of plant
breeders that will be needed in the future? and 2. Do we have the approaches to continue to
educate modern plant breeders in these changing times? Globally, in many developed and
developing countries, it appears that the answer to both questions is “no”
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Tom Wagner