Plant breeding has the potential to improve quality of life for millions of people, and to harmoniously link agriculture, societies and ecosystems. Global efforts have been made to improve awareness and create a better and brighter future for plant breeding worldwide. Though substantial international research funding is available, and tremendous efforts have been made to achieve food security and sustainability in agriculture, their success can only be ensured when they are complemented by counterparts at the national level. India is ideally poised to reap the benefits of plant breeding by integrating various parameters like adaptation, uncertainty, vulnerability and resilience into agriculture research strategies. Priorities include making agriculture more appealing to young talents, formulating farmer-friendly policies, combining advanced technologies with conventional plant breeding practices, and building the competencies needed to address emerging challenges in agriculture. This book provides an essential overview of modern plant breeding, and demonstrates how education, entrepreneurship training and professional approaches can help transform the image of agriculture from a poor and unattractive domain into a lucrative and business-oriented one. In addition, it presents strategies to help achieve sustainable, accessible and affordable outcomes with breeding programs. The book’s primary goal is to encourage policymakers, academics, private institutions and non-profit organizations to combine their efforts in order to achieve a major transition in plant breeding activities in Asia. Accordingly, it highlights the importance of partnerships and collaborations for making breeding programs more comprehensive and meaningful.

The present book entitled “Commercial Plant Breeding-1 Vegetable Crops” contains 32 chapters bifurcated into two parts, part I “Commercial Plant Breeding and Regulatory Affairs” having initial 14 chapters deals with commercial plant breeding, the vegetable seed business, vegetable seed supply chain management, all India coordinated research project (vegetable crops), world vegetable centre (AVRDC), and seed and IPR related acts. The part II “Commercial Breeding of Vegetable Crops” having remaining 18 chapters is devoted to commercial breeding of individual major vegetable crops relevant to seed industry. The book is intended for undergraduate and post graduate students of state agricultural universities and agricultural colleges for the courses on vegetable breeding in general and commercial vegetable breeding in particular and the professionals across ICAR Institutes, SAUs and Seed Industry. First of its kind, the present book aims to bring academic and vegetable seed business worlds both on a common platform

This book is the result of a study on demand-led plant variety design for changing markets in Africa, the purpose of which is to identify and share best practices in demand-led plant breeding from private and public sector breeding programmes worldwide. The intended audiences are professionals in plant breeding and related areas, such as seed production, who have interests in developing and disseminating new plant varieties as a way to increase productivity and profitability in crop agriculture, especially in Africa. The volume is also intended for use as a resource book for the education of postgraduate scholars in plant breeding and genetics, and for the continuing professional development of plant breeders. For this purpose, boxes are included in the main sections of each chapter that summarize its educational objectives and present the key messages and questions that are involved; in addition, there is a final box at the end of each chapter that summarizes its overall learning objectives.

Plant breeding has the potential to improve quality of life for millions of people, and to harmoniously link agriculture, societies and ecosystems. Global efforts have been made to improve awareness and create a better and brighter future for plant breeding worldwide. Though substantial international research funding is available, and tremendous efforts have been made to achieve food security and sustainability in agriculture, their success can only be ensured when they are complemented by counterparts at the national level. India is ideally poised to reap the benefits of plant breeding by integrating various parameters like adaptation, uncertainty, vulnerability and resilience into agriculture research strategies. Priorities include making agriculture more appealing to young talents, formulating farmer-friendly policies, combining advanced technologies with conventional plant breeding practices, and building the competencies needed to address emerging challenges in agriculture. This book provides an essential overview of modern plant breeding, and demonstrates how education, entrepreneurship training and professional approaches can help transform the image of agriculture from a poor and unattractive domain into a lucrative and business-oriented one. In addition, it presents strategies to help achieve sustainable, accessible and affordable outcomes with breeding programs. The book's primary goal is to encourage policymakers, academics, private institutions and non-profit organizations to combine their efforts in order to achieve a major transition in plant breeding activities in Asia. Accordingly, it highlights the importance of partnerships and collaborations for making breeding programs more comprehensive and meaningful. --

This book complements the traditional approach to plant breeding by addressing a number of issues specifically related to the participation of farmers in a plant breeding programme, and provides a comprehensive description and assessment of the use of participatory plant breeding in developing countries. It is aimed at plant breeders, social scientists, students and practitioners interested in learning more about its use, with the hope that they all will find a common ground to discuss ways in which plant breeding can be beneficial to all and can contribute to alleviate poverty.

The Indian Society of Genetics and Plant Breeding was established in 1941 in recognition of the growing contribution of improved crop varieties to the country's agriculture. Scientific plant breeding had started inIndia soon after the rediscovery of Mendel's laws of heredity. The Indian Agricultural Research Institute set up in 1905 and a number of Agricultural Colleges in different parts of the country carried out some of the earliest work mostly inthe form of pure-line selections. In subsequent years, hybridization programmes in crops like wheat, rice, oilseeds, grain legumes, sugarcane and cotton yielded a large number of improved cultivars with significantly higher yields. A turning point came in the 1960s with the development of hybrids in several crops including inter-specific hybrids in cotton. And when new germplasm with dwarfing genes became available in wheat and rice from CIMMYT and IRRI, respectively,Indian plant breeders quickly incorporated these genes into the genetic background of the country's widely grown varieties with excellent grain quality and other desirable traits. This was to mark the beginning of modem agriculture in India as more and more varieties were developed, characterized by a high harvest index and response to modem farm inputs like the inorganic fertilizers . India's green revolution which has led to major surpluses offood grains and othercommodities like sugar and cotton has been made possible by the work of one of the largest groups of plant breeders working in a coordinated network.

This book highlights the technicalities of plant breeding in a seed-business environment and explains the crucial aspects of the value chain. It educates the readers on how to initiate, participate, sustain national and international agreements for material transfer, how consortia work to facilitate germplasm accessibility, and how to set visionary goals to develop a superior plant varieties. The book covers the aspects such as how to conduct disease screening trials at hot spots, preparing an operational budget, and how to accelerate product advancement. Plant breeding is broadly defined as manipulation of plant genotypes to create phenotypes that are beneficial to mankind. It helps to achieve food security and sustainability by developing high yielding, climate-resilient, nutritious varieties of crops and hence is able to address unprecedented challenges like rising global population, diminishing genetic biodiversity, and uncertainties of the weather . This book is an extraordinary source of information starting from goal-genesis to market-oriented product-profiling and help readers to accelerate/enhance? their work/professional performance more effectively. This book will be very useful to practicing plant breeders at various levels in the public and private sectors. It is a must-have book for potential plant breeders who enter plant breeding profession just after the completion of their formal plant breeding education.