Where is your deployment program?
When doing the post-mortem of failed breeding programs there are certain causes that appear very often:
- The program was not aligned with corporate needs (read lack of breeding strategy),
- Selections were not superior (poor genetic evaluation system), and
- There was no output from the breeding program (lack of deployment).
I will only discuss the last cause in this article.
Breeders and quantitative geneticists tend to emphasise the breeding side of a breeding program, forgetting that its main objective is to provide organisations with superior genotypes; and lots of them. Ultimately, an excellent breeding population with no material going to operational plantations is a failure, unless you are doing conservation genetics. Thus, a good benchmark to evaluate the success of a breeding program is the improvement (on terms of your breeding objective) that is actually being deployed in the field.
If you are part of a consolidated breeding program you should not have much problem finding genotypes to deploy. However, what are your options if you are just starting a program?
- Buying material from already established programs (normally from landrace selections).
- Buying material from reputable seed merchants collecting the natural distribution of the species. If buying enough seed you probably can establish criteria for collection.
- Slowly include untested genotypes in plantations. This should be a calculated risk; avoid establishing thousands of hectares with untested material. This can provide you with a preview of the results from the progeny trials.
You should keep track of the material released to operations as part of your forest management system. This information will be very valuable from the management point of view in the future, particularly if you are using family or clonal forestry compartments with a single family or clone).
Never underestimate the need for deployment gain (also called ‘realised gain’): it is the only way to keep people paying for breeding work in the long run.