New Breeding Technologies? For some, both inside and outside the scientific community, this phrase is synonymous with gene editing—or used exclusively to describe the application of CRISPR/Cas9 to plant improvement. Much as, historically, the term ‘biotech crops’ has been hijacked to only mean crop plants produced using genetic engineering. However,‘breeding technologies’ refers not only to genetic modification using techniques of molecular biology, but also to a vast number of other techniques developed for breeding via the application of scientific advancements emanating from disciplines such as computer science, plant biology, statistics, automation, robotics and artificial intelligence. This concept is not new: in reality, technology has been a feature of crop improvement since early in the last century.

With the development of genetics as a stream of biological sciences, it is evident that many major advances were first delivered in plants. The fathers of genetics and selection, Gregor Mendel and Charles Darwin, were both keenly involved in the improvement of plants; hence, this is not really surprising. Plants were considerably easier and faster to manipulate genetically than animals, with inherent advantages such as shorter generation times, the potential to produce very large populations and an ability to manipulate genetic recombination by selfing, outcrossing or both. Within the first three decades of the 1900s, the harnessing of inbreeding and hybrid vigour could best be described as