Phase 1: Understand the economic value of trait improvements
Your Trait Prioritization Program starts with quantifying the economic values of the traits you’re considering. To do justice to your organization’s complexity, we look at this data from a range of perspectives, across different production systems and target markets. For example, if you’re looking to breed for environmental outcomes, we transform the economic values into desired sustainability metrics.
Easy-to-use economic algorithms help you to understand the net benefit of an improvement in each genetic trait of interest. So your breeding programs focus on the values that matter most. And your selection or advancement decisions will no longer neglect crucial elements such as revenues, costs, or sustainability metrics.
Phase 2: Understand stakeholders to develop powerful selection indices
Once you know the economic value of your preferred genetic traits, we’ll help you understand how your stakeholders evaluate each trait. Our method captures the preferences of growers and other stakeholders as well as non-market and sociodemographic drivers.
With this data aggregated, you can identify and group stakeholders according to trait preference, views, attitudes, and priorities.
By forecasting how specific genetic traits will drive demand for your product, you’ll design new varieties with confidence, increase adoption, and maximize economic and social impact.
Phase 3: Convert industry signals into tools for confident candidate selection
Now we’re ready to integrate the trait weightings gathered from the models, algorithms, and surveys in phases 1 and 2. So you can select candidates with confidence, we’ll determine an optimal combination of trait weightings. Our methodology balances genetic gain over the range of traits competing for selection effort while considering existing correlations amongst them. This approach protects you against incompatibilities between economic values and Expected Breeding Values (EBVs).
To ensure success, breeders need a detailed understanding of how indices inform selection. We undertake training and validation of breeders’ use of indices. This isn’t to check if indices are being used correctly, but to help predict candidate advancements as a result of index use.
Phase 4: Apply easy-to-use selection indices based on sound science, rationale, and plausible scenarios in your breeding program
Once we have all the results from phases 1, 2, and 3, we can apply them to the structure of your breeding program(s). To realize the maximum benefit from using your new selection indices, we incorporate the modeled economic impacts and evaluated stakeholder preferences for trait changes into your breeding programs.
The best selection index is the one that gets used in everyday decision-making. That’s why we work with breeding program managers and breeders to integrate selection index tools to support advancement decisions in all pipeline stages and for product placement. Your users get access to information on new genetics products such as varieties, lines, hybrids, breeds, and selection candidates, which creates a solid foundation for their decision-making process.
We’ll also quantify the value generated for stakeholders from historic and ongoing genetic improvement efforts. This data will support the accurate inclusion of selection indices you developed previously into the information technology infrastructure that supports genetic improvement, product deployment, and marketing activities in your organization.
