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.