To enhance and stabilise crop performance, organic farmers need a plurality of crops and cultivars adapted to a wide range of environments and organic farming systems, with high adaption potential and stress tolerance to tackle climate change.
- diversity between available cultivars to harness genotype by environment by management interactions and target local adaptation
- increasing within-cultivar diversity to enable resilience and evolutionary breeding
- increasing species diversity through more species, longer rotations and crop mixtures (intercropping, agroforestry) supported by appropriate cultivars
LIVESEEDING project strengthens the interplay between ex situ conservation, on-farm dynamic management, pre-breeding and breeding through a more integrative and transdisciplinary approach involving genetics and breeding methods, scientific knowledge in functional ecology and agronomy as well as practical knowledge based on farmers and practitioners’ experiences. Breeding of both OV and OHM will be addressed with emphasis on the level of intra-varietal/intra-population diversity that is desirable in different farming systems. Different breeding strategies and breeding tools will be applied, while addressing a wide range of crop species based expertise of partners and related LLs to foster broad innovation uptake.
Main objective of WP1 is to increase and optimize the available crop diversity to be used in organic farming systems.
