History of plant breeding
Plant breeding began with the start of farming about 9,000 to 11,000 years ago. Early farmers chose food plants with traits they liked and saved their seeds for the next generations, gradually shaping crops over time. Later, people began deliberately crossing plants to combine good traits, and Gregor Mendel’s work laid the foundation for genetics, the science that underpins modern plant breeding.
Today, plant breeding is about applied genetics. It also uses many other areas of science—molecular biology, cytology, physiology, pathology, entomology, chemistry, statistics, and more—and it has developed its own specialized techniques and tools.
Domestication is the human-driven selection of plants to have more useful traits, making them dependent on cultivated environments. This process goes back 9,000–11,000 years. Many crops we rely on today were domesticated thousands of years ago in different parts of the world—roughly 5,000 years ago in the Old World and 3,000 years ago in the New World. Domestication often took a long time, sometimes thousands of years, and today almost all major food crops come from domesticated varieties.
Regions where crops originated still host a great diversity of wild relatives that can help improve modern crops through breeding. A cultigen is a plant that originated primarily because of human activity, while a landrace is a cultivated variety that evolved under local farming or natural conditions. For example, different subspecies of rice were domesticated in different regions: indica in South Asia and japonica in China.
Humans have long traded useful plants and sent plant explorers to bring new species back for cultivation. When Columbus reached the Americas in 1492, plant resources moved between Europe and the New World in unprecedented ways. In the early 1700s, Thomas Fairchild produced one of the first documented artificial hybrids, a cross between a sweet William and a carnation, showing that crossing plants could create new varieties.
Gregor Mendel’s experiments with plant hybridization revealed the basic laws of inheritance, which later sparked the science of genetics. By the late 19th century, commercial plant breeding began to take hold. England’s Gartons Agricultural Plant Breeders were among the first to cross-pollinate crops for new varieties. In Australia, William Farrar's work on wheat led to the release of the fungus-resistant Federation wheat in 1903. Italian breeders like Nazareno Strampelli contributed to increasing crop production in the early 20th century and helped lay the groundwork for the Green Revolution.
In 1908, George Harrison Shull described heterosis, or hybrid vigor—the idea that crossbreeding could produce offspring with superior traits. By the 1920s, breeders and scientists developed statistical methods to separate genetic effects from environmental influences. In 1933, cytoplasmic male sterility in maize was described, a trait that made producing hybrids easier.
The Green Revolution of the 1960s brought major yield gains in the developing world, driven by hybrid maize, high-yielding semi-dwarf wheat, and short-stature rice, along with improvements in sorghum and alfalfa. This period showed how targeted breeding could dramatically boost food production.
Advances in molecular genetics have led to genetic engineering and other biotechnologies. Breeding now includes traditional crossbreeding, genome modification, and gene editing. Most breeding approaches rely on DNA repair and recombination, the same basic cellular processes studied for decades in other organisms. Our growing understanding of these processes in plants continues to drive crop improvements for the future.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 20:32 (CET).