The disparity between technology used in plant breeding and other departments is not uncommon among seed companies. Departments like seed multiplication, sales, marketing, and finance use current and expensive enterprise software, but plant breeders primarily use spreadsheets. This practice constitutes a bottleneck for the operations of any seed company. This article will illustrate the role …
Think: If you could take any experimental design and with one click expand it out three years or five years. Not only that, but when you analyze the data, all the means are stored for every location and every year.
If data is lost, or ends up being seen by a competitor, disaster can result. The knowledge as to what parents are being used in crosses is critical and often top-secret.
The way to do this is with good database software designed specifically for plant breeding. To make the best decisions you MUST use all possible data available, if not it could be costly.
The nuances of data standardization become absolutely critical. If you don’t standardize certain points of data, a functioning relational database is simply not possible.
when I was conducting yield trials as a plant breeder, drought seemed imminent a few months after planting. Rather than lose the entire trial, I requested sprinkler irrigation at the research station. Unfortunately, water pressure to the far end of the station wasn’t ideal, and there wasn’t a perfect fit for one of the pipe connections.
Are you seriously contemplating using plant breeding software for your research program?
Do you know how much time you, or plant breeders within your company, spend looking at spreadsheets? It might surprise you. I’ve recently had conversations with leaders at one large seed company who estimate breeders there spend about 20 percent of their time looking at spreadsheets.