Crop Breeding and Biotechnology for Drought Tolerance.

One rule of plant breeding is to know your target environment including the cropping system; and to breed cultivars specifically for that environment.  Breeding for cropping systems that are prone to drought or with water scarcity is and has been a key goal of plant breeders that will increase as climate change induced water shortages expand and cropping systems intensify with the limited water allocations being shared among multiple crops in rotation.   Examples from past efforts to breed cultivars for water limited environments such as limited irrigation or conservation tillage will be presented.  In addition the critical importance of understanding when the likely period of drought stress or when the crop is most vulnerable to stress will be given.  Clearly cultivars are only one part of a cropping system, but the goal of this presentation will be to share how breeders approach breeding for a cropping system from finding the parental germplasm to selecting for the ideal genotype or phenotype to how to evaluate lines in stress environments before they are released.  Insights on how breeders deal with the complex traits, the trade-offs they accept, and some of the surprises they have learned as we develop a better understanding of the genetics that affect stress tolerance in water limited cropping systems will be discussed.  It is important that breeders work in system-based teams so that they can modify the environment to capitalize on the plant genetics.