No yield limits

Press, 21 October 1983, Page 28

No yield limits

There is no foreseeable limit to the huge increases in wheat yields witnessed in. Britain over the last 10 years, according to Professor Peter Day, director of the Plant Breeding Institute at Cambridge. Professor Day, who recently visited New Zealand to talk with plant breeders about reciprocal exchange agreements, heads one of the world’s most successful groups of plant breeders. He told the Agronomy Society of New Zealand, which was meeting in conjunction with the annual 1 conference of the New Zealand Institute of Agricultural Science in Wellington,

that the Plant Breeding Institute had been successful in producing varieties which appealed to farmers by continual inputs from new technical developments. “The result has been a 50 per cent improvement in the national wheat yield over the last 12 years and substantial advances in other crops such as potatoes,” Professor Day said. “I see a bright future for new plant varieties continuing through the 1980 s and beyond the 1990 s because of the rapid advances being made in molecular biology or ‘genetic engineering’.”