A three-day workshop, Designing, Implementing and Managing a Breeding Program for Hybrid Crops, sponsored by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Department of Agronomy and Horticulture, is set for 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Aug. 10-12, 2021. Instructors are Blaine Johnson, agronomy and horticulture adjunct professor and lecturer, and Keith Boldman, research scientist at Corteva Agriscience^TM.

The workshop will be available for either in-person or online participation via Zoom. For those attending in-person, the workshop will be held in 280 Plant Sciences Hall on the university’s East Campus.

Centered around designing and managing a hybrid breeding program, the workshop will focus on the decisions that must be made when managing a breeding pipeline that results in the release or commercialization of a hybrid cultivar. Strategies for managing an effective and efficient hybrid breeding program under the restrictions of resource limitations will be the focus but will always consider the underlying genetic principles. The workshop will reflect a strong influence of applied hybrid breeding from an industry perspective.

“While essential concepts and terminology of hybrid breeding will be presented, the workshop will not be a series of formal presentations, but rather will focus on active learning with a high level of instructor and participant interaction,” Johnson said.

As cornerstone to the learning process, participants will use background information and templates provided by the instructors to develop their own examples of a hybrid breeding pipeline, beginning with parental line development and evaluation, through hybrid development and evaluation, and ending with an explicit strategy for identifying hybrids deemed worthy of release or commercialization.

Johnson retired from DuPont/Pioneer as a plant breeder in 2016 having worked with adapting many of the hybrid breeding processes, tools and methodologies used in hybrid corn product development to breeding and commercialization of hybrid spring and winter wheat. He spent 10 years as a faculty member in Nebraska’s Department of Agronomy and Horticulture before moving to private industry at Monsanto and Dupont/Pioneer.

Workshop is limited to 30 people and costs $75. For details and registration, visit the workshop site.