Friday, September 2nd 2016
Global populations are booming, food demand is skyrocketing and climate change is threatening food security—meanwhile, access to mobile technology is becoming commonplace. The ground is fertile to harness the power of this global mobile network to create and implement tools to accelerate the development of food crops that can withstand the coming challenges of the 21st century. Researchers with expertise in breeding, genetics and computer science at Kansas State University, Cornell University, Texas A&M University, the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture and the International Institute for Maize and Wheat Improvement have partnered to meet that challenge head on. With $1.5 million in funding from the National Science Foundation Basic Research to Enable Agriculture Development, or BREAD, Program, the team will work to develop mobile phone and tablet applications that enable breeders and scientists around the world to accelerate development of improved plant varieties. The BREAD Program is a partnership between the NSF and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation designed to take ideas that are at the forefront of research and put them into a context that can help smallholder farmers in the developing world. Through this BREAD project, the team plans to develop new mobile apps to collect phenotypic plant data, such as disease resistance, plant height or seed size in the field, much more efficiently and at a much lower cost than is currently possible. The team is focusing on developing mobile technology, applications and systems that would work under this paradigm: where a group needs to be functioning every day during the field season, the budget is very limited, and power and internet access might not be available. The project also is part of Kansas State University’s leadership in global food systems research.