Wood density and wood quality are not identical: after the wood quality debacle of the 1990s, the reaction of New Zealand companies has been mostly to extend rotation, aiming to increase the proportion of outerwood in the final crop. But breeders could so improve the trees as to permit growers to follow more tolerable shorter [...]
Will this be a good investment? This is a common question asked by buyers of ’superior’ genetic material. Why the quotation marks? Because the statement brings to mind the question ‘Superior for what?’ Before dealing with the initial question, we have to recognise a few things about tree improvement that have an effect on the [...]
One of the eternal problems with applied research is how to rank competing projects. In a “previous article”, I described breeding objectives and their importance. Unfortunately, breeding objectives is a misnomer, which implies that those objectives are meant only for breeding. Although they have been formalised by breeders, these objectives reflect the effect of ‘a [...]
I have seen many cases where companies start a breeding program because ‘everybody else has got one’. Although that might be the case, there is no point on investing in developing superior genotypes if there is no clear idea of what is a better tree.