Did you know that in agriculture, genomics enables farmers to accelerate and improve plant and animal breeding practices that have been in use for thousands of years?

The ability to read genome sequences coupled with technologies that introduce new genes or gene changes allows us to speed up the process of selecting desirable traits in plants and animals.

Let's say that you were a farmer thousands of years ago. If you found a couple of plants that were more productive than others, and you needed more food, you might experiment to see if you could combine (breed) those two plants in some way to get better seeds for a better yield in next year's harvest. If you were successful and able to plant those seeds, and then in future generations chose even more productive plants to breed together, over time most of the plants in your field would be even more productive. This is called selective breeding. From Mendel's experiments with peas, we learned that plants have genes that influence their traits such height, seed shape and color. From genome sequencing, we can now find specific variants in those genes that contribute to desirable traits and select for those genomic variants in future crops.