68 / SEEDWORLD.COM OCTOBER 2018 Put Relationships First Iowa State University graduate student Kevin Falk grew up in Carman, a small town of 3,000 in the Canadian province of Manitoba. The town is home to many research stations, some of which Falk worked at throughout high school, and helped lead him to pursue canola breeding at the University of Manitoba. “While I was there doing my undergraduate and master’s degrees, I saw there was a wave of soybean acres flowing north and thought it would be a great oppor- tunity to influence the expansion of soybean across Canada,” the 34-year-old says. One project of his includes con- ducting a genetic scan of the diver- sity of root system architecture. Falk developed and improved research methods, as well as deployed advanced statistical tools including the integration of computer vision and machine learning to develop new insights that eluded previous studies on a complex set of traits. Roy Cantrell is a Florida-based plant breeding consultant who has a long history in the industry, including 11 years as a professor at New Mexico State University and a decade as global cotton breeding lead for Monsanto. He’s now also a mentor for the Borlaug Scholars program. “Plant breeding is very interac- tive,” he says. “The days of having a single breeder working on a project are more or less over. You may be working with data scientists, some- one in machine learning, genomic scientists, the list goes on. “Plant breeders are looked upon as leaders. You get blamed if that variety or hybrid fails. You get rewarded if it’s successful. You have to be prepared for both and act with dignity and maturity no matter what you’re faced with. I try to instill that upon students. It’s crucial to know how to be a good leader and inspire people to want to work with you.” Elizabeth Lee, plant scientist at the University of Guelph. Kevin Falk, PhD candidate at Iowa State. Roy Cantrell, NAPB mentor. Arron Carter serves as a wheat breeder at Washington State University and NAPB mentor. Make Sure You’re Well-Equipped Austin Dobbels loves to fly drones. Dobbels, 27, is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Agronomy and Plant Genetics at the University of Minnesota studying how unmanned aerial vehicles can be used for high- throughput phenotyping of soybean iron deficiency chlorosis. Iron deficiency chlorosis causes reduced soybean yields due to lack of available iron in the soil. Applying nutrients is costly, so the best tool for the farmer is to plant a variety tolerant to iron deficiency chlorosis. “With a drone we can fly the field in five minutes, capture images and go back to the computer and use image processing to get data from each plot to inform our breeding decisions. With a drone we can capture images every week and it literally takes five minutes.” Having the right tools and knowing how to use them is not a new concept to plant breeders, of course. Arron Carter is a Washington State University wheat breeder and mentor for NAPB’s Borlaug Scholarship program. He says being adept at using the latest tools has always been a crucial skill of successful breeders. Austin Dobbels is a PhD candidate in the Department of Agronomy and Plant Genetics at the University of Minnesota. “It’s crucial to know how to be a good leader and inspire people to want to work with you.” — Roy Cantrell