I found this text I wrote 20 years ago(*), part of a discussion document I prepared for a review of the radiata pine breeding strategy. Fixed a couple of typos, but I guess we still need pretty much the same thing. 🤔

“Different breeders value different things or, better put, they emphasise different values when developing breeding strategies. One of the reasons why many breeding programs struggle to achieve results is that they face an extremely complex list of activities, which are almost impossible to complete.

“A knee-jerk reaction from some breeders has been to recur to the KISS principle when developing breeding strategies. Unfortunately, the typical reaction has been “let’s create this dumb down strategy because it is simple to apply”. Bzzz. Wrong answer! What they have often done is to create a glorified “deployment strategy” that has almost no chance of surviving in the long term: that is, short term gain based on long term disappointment.

“Breeders need to realise that what needs to be simple is the _interface_ of the strategy. This means that we need a smooth interaction between the “theoretical animal” and the people that will be implementing it. This does not mean that the strategy is theoretically simple, but that the day-to-day activities are a breeze to complete.

“This type of interface requires the development—either in-house or through contracting the service—of tools that make life easy. For example:

  • Easy access to predicted breeding values, including desktop and online access. In addition, there needs to be an idea of the reliability of those predicted values if we are going to use them for deployment purposes.
  • Tools that make easy deciding what to select and which trees should be mated with each other (mate selection and allocation).
  • Protocols for deployment and tools for keeping control of the availability of genetic material.
  • Easy management of the interaction between improvement and deployment objectives.

“In summary, breeders need tools for dealing with the huge amount of data created by breeding and deployment activities, so it can be transformed into information.”

(*) Well, 19 years ago, this was 2005, but twenty sounds much better.