Training Needs of Breeders Working in the Public Sector and Small Companies, with a Focus on the Developing World.

Plant breeders in universities, CGIAR centers, national and state departments of agriculture, and small companies produce most of the staple crop cultivars on which our food supply depends, especially in the developing world. These breeders work largely independently, with little of the support available to breeders in multinational seed companies. They need to be trained to manage the whole cultivar development process, from the design product profiles, through the optimization of breeding pipelines, to dissemination planning. Low-cost or open-source resources for breeding information management, genotyping, and genomics that can be used in graduate education will be introduced.