Combining foresight & precision: How plant breeding can improve sustainable agriculture

Top-quality seed is the key to achieving the very best yields. One of the central requirements for seed to produce high-yielding plants is for it to contain a healthy embryo.

Something truly big is at stake: the future of the potato. It’s one of the most important foods there is. Germans eat around 60 kilograms of them a year – and the Latvians even twice that.

The future of breeding is up in the air, among other things: KWS uses drones over its fields in order to produce new varieties even faster.

Successful pig fattening and happy animals – Andreas von Felde believes they are not mutually exclusive goals. This Northern German farmer plants rye and uses it for feed. He needs less fertilizer, and a recent study backs him up.

Precision farming thanks to satellites: Since the 2018 season, KWS has been able to detect the ideal time to harvest silage corn - thanks to satellite images supplied by a system that is unique worldwide.

Bacteria are the extremists among living things. They live in 100-degree hot water, in strong acids or in sulphurous sources of the deep sea...

Organic farming may not use artificial chemical agents against bird damage in freshly sown maize fields. Therefore, in the spring the animals sometimes pick whole freshly sown crops...

How do you watch the roots of a sugarbeet at a depth of 1.50 meters grow? It's quite simple. You only need a giant drill, long Plexiglas tubes, a special scanner, a lot of software to...

The small French town of Pithiviers south of Paris is notorious among the growers of sugarbeets. In the region, there are many and especially aggressive variants of the virus that is found in sugarbeets ...

Germany has restricted the permissible amount of nitrogen in many fields with the new Fertiliser Ordinance. In many places, even less ...

Bacteria, fungi, viruses: Plants are the target of countless attacks. The pathogens want to reproduce in the energy-rich leaves or fruits...

KWS will continue to process the versatile potato in a breeding process, pursuing long-term goals: At the end of the process, with the hybrid potato one can...