The National Association for Plant Breeders (NAPB) Friends of Plant Breeding Award honors individuals whose career may or may not have been involved in plant breeding, but who, through their professional activities and passion have contributed significantly to the advancement of the plant breeding discipline.
The 2020 recipient is Dr. Donn Cummings, who will speak at this week’s virtual meeting of the NAPB. During a 30-year career with Pfizer Genetics, DeKalb and Monsanto, Cummings was a highly successful corn breeder, Station Manager and Area Research Director. Donn became Monsanto’s Global Breeder Sourcing Lead in 2007, where he provided overall leadership and global strategic planning to build and maintain a Ph.D. and M.S. level plant breeder talent pipeline for Monsanto until his retirement in 2015.
He sits down with Seed World to talk about his career in corn breeding and his relationship with Dr. Norman Borlaug, the father of the Green Revolution.
“In today’s world, the breeders are working a lot more with data and doing a lot of predictive work so that they don’t have to plant as many things in the field and can still get the data on the products that are needed,” he says.
“It’s much more of a collaborative team effort with large amounts of data, and a lot of analysis and prediction. It’s made it easier in some regards, but it’s also become more difficult, as we did not have for many years the genome to work with. Now you can sequence the whole genome of many of your selections in your breeding program, and use that information. You have new ways of editing the genome and making changes that were not possible in early stages of plant breeding. So the job has changed tremendously.”
Cummings met Borlaug on more than one occasion during his career, but the first opportunity was in 1976 when Cummings won the H.K. Hayes award given to one graduate student in the department each year at the University of Minnesota, and Dr. Borlaug was the invited speaker that year.
“Dr. Borlaug really was focused on the next generation of plant breeders and encouraging people to take on the profession and work hard at it. He knew that we were just biding time with the Green Revolution, and that we needed people to continue the effort in a vigorous way. And that really inspired me, along with the Golden Opportunity Scholars mentoring program later on, where I was mentoring students. Having been mentored in my career, I knew the importance of that and I decided to help start a scholarship,” Cummings says. The NAPB is awarding 24 Borlaug Scholars this year.
“I had a chance to talk to Dr. Borlaug in his living room shortly before he passed away and tell him how much of an influence that was to me. I really enjoy mentoring students because of [my experience knowing him].”
