From the time of Farrer in the late 19th century until now, genetic improvement has been foundational to wheat production in Australia. Originally a farmer lead exercise, wheat breeding became a publicly funded science for a century before moving back to a private investment model at the start of the 21st century.

Over this time breeding impact has followed on from breeding investment. This is particularly demonstrated by the development of Australia’s unique End-Point Royalty model which has resulted in substantial investment into the scale and sophistication of Australian wheat breeding and is now paying strong dividends to Australian farmers.

It is estimated that across the breeding companies within Australia more than 500,000 wheat breeding plots are sown annually to evaluate grain yield across some 150 unique locations.

Furthermore, technologies such as marker-assisted backcrossing, robotics, GPS, genomic prediction, and rapid generation advancement are now commonplace in Australian breeding, while some companies are also investing heavily into technologies such as gene-editing, machine learning, and cross prediction.

Analysis of long-term field trials shows that the rate of genetic gain for wheat grain yield in Australia has risen sharply over the past 20 years of private investment and is now more than four-fold higher than observed during the public era of breeding.

This trend shows no sign of slowing and excitingly, the impacts of recent technological investments are yet to have their full commercial impact.