This time I don’t mean breeding objectives (a list of biological traits that we want to improve and their respective relative economic weights) but more of a lofty goal. Something beyond ‘we’ll keep on doing things a little bit better and hope that something happens’.
Perhaps it could read like ‘We are going to reduce rotation age (time from planting to harvesting) by 20 percent’. In New Zealand that would mean shaving 5 years or so from an average rotation. It is sort of a big ask, but not unachievable. It would mean improving wood quality to a point in which we can shift a bunch of industrial grade volume to structural grades volume. Less crap, more solid wood for building, for engineered wood products (and for carbon storage if that’s your thing).
In my head it sounds as ‘We can rebuild him. We have the technology. We can make him better than he was’, but instead of my childhood’s hero Steve Austin, the sentence is about pines. Classical breeding, acoustic tools, NIR, genome wide selection, … we have the technology.
P.S. The boxed set image comes from this toy collectors’ site
