Perfecting the Plant

By: Laurie Bedord

Because plant breeding and seed product development is a long, expensive process, crop breeders want to find any problem a variety might have as soon as possible to get it out of the pipeline.

In the past, measuring traits like plant height meant relying on humans to assess plants. Armed with a ruler and an electronic device to record data, large teams typically made up of high-school-age students walked through rows of corn yelling out numbers.

“It was really hard, because sometimes you’re dealing with corn that is 14 feet tall,” says Neil Hausmann, Corteva Agriscience field sensing lead and distinguished research fellow. “The measurements were not really that good, but it was difficult to collect it any other way.”