Breeding climate resilient sorghum cultivars

Australian sorghum production environments are characterised by extreme variation in temperature and rainfall creating enormous challenges for crop improvement specialists. Despite these challenges research combining agronomic and breeding interventions has been able to produce a cropping system that is remarkably productive and stable with  productivity gains averaging around 4% per annum for the last 20 years. Under the influence of global warming it seems likely that the variability and extremes experienced by sorghum producers in Australia will become more common in other parts of the world, and that approaches used to improve sorghum in Australia will be applicable to sorghum improvement programs worldwide and potentially provide learnings for other crops. In this presentation we will describe our integrated approach to breeding which uses simulation modelling crop physiology and genomics to develop sorghum cultivars adapted  to hotter and drier environments.