Wayne Smith says the Plant Breeding Coordinating Committee (PBCC) can be a valuable tool to help plant breeders communicate their successes, and as outgoing chair, he’d like to see it happen even more.
Smith, a professor in the department of soil sciences at Texas A&M University, sat down with Seed World’s Marc Zienkiewicz at the 2022 annual meeting of the National Association of Plant Breeders (NAPB) in Ames, Iowa, recently to talk about his accomplishments as chair of the PBCC and what he thinks the future holds.
The PBCC founded the NAPB, and the PBCC serves as a forum for leadership, regarding issues, problems, and opportunities of long-term strategic importance to the contribution of plant breeding to national goals. The NAPB is the outreach group that represents plant breeders in federal, state, commercial and non-government organizations.
“If I had to pick one thing I think [the PBCC] needs to focus on, it would be development of a protocol to get the success stories and the story of plant breeding on the desk and in the hands of decision makers. I’m not talking about legislators, we cannot lobby. But there are deans and experiment station directors, there are science teachers in high schools, ag teachers, there are community colleges that will have a genetics and plant breeding module, if you will, as a part of their science classes,” he says.
“We need to figure out how to disseminate that information. We’re good at putting information together. That’s the easy part. It is the dissemination of who we get that information to that is the key.”
Watch the interview below!
For more coverage of this year’s NAPB meeting go here.
