Where are the future jobs? What if I told you that a high-value, high-tech field is poised to explode, and talented experts are desperately needed for the wave of careers that might rival the computer explosion of the 90's? Would you be interested? Surprisingly, we're going back to the future, as the one trend we can predict is the need more food. In 2050 we'll need more food than the amount produced in all of human history combined, and we need to produce it with fewer resources and heightened environmental sensitivity. The rewarding future careers are in food-- both in genetics and production.
When we examine the food situation globally we see a wild imbalance. In many places human lives deteriorate because of the absence of a single micronutrient, perhaps equivalent to a fraction of a grain of sand a day. In the industrialized world we suffer from maladies accrued from chronic over-consumption, as too many calories, and the wrong kind of calories, promote long-term degenerative disease and a impinge quality of life. In both cases, a fresh emphasis on nutritious, flavorful, abundant, and resilient crops can help rescue the human condition.
Why do we need to improve crops? Mostly by accident, humans have been making better plants through the process termed selection, essentially, keeping the seeds from a season's surviving plants that had the most favorable products. Early farmers took notice of edible plants with improved traits, and devised clever ways to ensure their propagation.
Analysis of crop evolution shows that corn's much-removed grandparents were unattractive Mexican bushes, and the corn cob was a little stick featuring about a dozen rock-hard kernels. Tomatoes were tiny green beads on ground-borne vines in the Andes. Even our favorite fruits were mere shadows of their current forms. Today's abundance did not come from nature, it came from humans improving nature's raw and rough resources and randomly shuffling the genetics provided, and then picking the most practical outcomes. This was the primitive face of plant breeding.
Over the past fifty years, new techniques in breeding have led to favorable changes in plant disease resistance, yields, shelf life, and shipping quality. Yet at the same time the emphasis on these production traits de-prioritized interest in the traits framing consumer desires. While today's tomatoes and strawberries produce many fruits and ship well, their sensory qualities leave some room for improvement. The genes associated with flavor, aroma and texture have been lost in the process of corralling production-oriented traits into a common genetic background. Now the task is to retain and improve those production traits while identifying and re-introducing the sensory-experience genes lost to time and industry-centric breeding objectives.
Today's demand for new varieties has spawned an unprecedented demand for traditional plant breeders. These are facilitators of plant sex that pick productive parents and scour acres of progeny for that one single plant that may represent an improved variety. Plant breeding is the collision of art and science, a convergence of observation and vision.
What does the plant breeder of the future look like? First, he or she must be interested in long days and slow returns. Citrus, almond or apple breeders might spend a career to find the one superior tree. Even those breeding annuals like tomato, or perennials like strawberry might identify a few superior game-changing varieties in the course of a career. The glacial pace of plant breeding is a challenge to those committed to its advances, especially when the numbers of varieties developed may dictate corporate or academic promotion.
Luckily, the explosion of modern molecular biology and genomics tools has helped to level the time lag in variety development. Modern breeders utilize these strategies to help ensure desired traits are present in future generations. The trick is to use DNA-based landmarks that physically travel through generations in parallel with the trait of interest. A simple DNA test, much like those used in forensic science, tells a breeder if a seedling has a high likelihood of presenting a coveted trait upon maturation. These tests allow breeders new ways to identify the most relevant parent plants, and eliminate non-candidate offspring at the seedling stage, long before valuable time, labor, acreage, fertilizers, and water are invested.
What kind of training is necessary to make a career in this field? The modern plant breeder needs to have a strong understanding of plant biology, including physiology, pathology, and nutrition. A good breeder will understand the industry related to the plants being bred. While mastery of molecular biology techniques is not required, modern breeders need to be conversant in the technologies, and excited to integrate with collaborators. A modern breeder will have strong skills in statistics, and even computational prowess. Undergraduates should focus on biology and math, with lots of basic plant biology, and that can be gained from any college or university. They should prepare for application to graduate programs that specifically train in plant breeding, and outstanding programs exist at many land-grant universities.
After reading the last few paragraphs, it is easy to see why we may have a dearth of plant breeders. Years of school, arduous work, long time lines, a steep learning curve, and lots of training make this a career choice with a substantial entry cost and no guarantees. It is a career like a ten-sided Rubik's Cube where one almost-impossible combination may define career success.
But there are many reasons to pursue this line of training. First, there is tremendous demand, and jobs in academic, government and industry labs are plentiful at the B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. levels. Companies constantly inquire about the students navigating our university curricula, in preparation for enticing them into breeding positions. The last two plant breeders that left my lab with Ph.D.'s found positions waiting for them, with entry salaries well exceeding those of tenured professors.
But the most important reason to consider a career in plant breeding is a noble one. In the next 35 years we will be joined by three billion more hungry people. We will need to provide for them, and continue to provide for ourselves. We will need improved varieties with improved traits targeting the consumer, while still satisfying the needs of the industry. New flavors and colors, higher nutrition, and reasonable prices will help consumers. Less dependence on water, fertilizer and pesticides will benefit our fragile environment. Crops producing well in floods, heat, drought, or salty soils may revolutionize farming in the developing world.
When thinking about a future career, what could be more exciting than inventing the next generation of food? The satisfaction of contributing to the health of people, with sensitivity to health of a planet, with one foot in the farm and the other in the lab, might rival traditional opportunities in the cubicle or boardroom. Most importantly, we carry on a mission begun by Dr. Norman Borlaug and many others who saw command of plant reproduction as the first step in ending suffering, improving quality of life, and potentially conjuring a palette for sustainable, peaceful living for the world's people.