Since its inception in 2007, breeders at the West Africa Centre for Crop Improvement (WACCI) in Ghana have produced 23 new varieties of corn, seven new varieties of peanuts, 11 new varieties of rice and seven new varieties of sweet potato.

Jason Wallace, an assistant professor at the University of Georgia College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences (CAES), has received one of nine 2018 New Innovator in Food and Agriculture Research Awards from the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research (FFAR).

With the advent of CRISPR technologies and other precise genome editing methods, it has become faster and easier for crop scientists to breed new varieties. But there are still a few technical roadblocks that need to be overcome.

Rice has been a staple food crop around the world for millennia, but little was known about the wild origins of the world’s most widely produced crop until the recent mapping of the genomes of 13 ancestral rice species. Scott Jackson, director of the University of Georgia Center for Applied Genetic Technologies (CAGT) in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, helped to map these genomes as part of The International Oryza Map Alignment Project.

As farmers around the world battle extreme drought and other climate events, researchers turn to pearl millet to find ways to make other grains more resilient to climate change. A global team of 65 scientists, including nine from the University of Georgia, have decoded some of the secrets to the crop’s coping strategies.

University of Georgia Professor Peggy Ozias-Akins has been awarded the title of Distinguished Research Professor, an honor awarded to UGA faculty recognized internationally for their contributions to knowledge and whose work promises to foster continued creativity in their discipline. She and her colleagues have created new and improved plant varieties that are higher yielding, more disease resistant, more nutritious or have greater ornamental value.

It may be a while before robots and drones are as common as tractors and combine harvesters on farms, but high-tech tools may soon play a major role in helping feed the world’s rapidly growing population.

UGA cotton breeder Peng Chee’s groundbreaking research in molecular genetics provides Georgia cotton farmers with root-knot-nematode-resistant cotton varieties. It has also garnered Chee national recognition.

The University of Georgia’s newest pecan variety will be released next spring and has shown good resistance against scab disease so far, according to Patrick Conner, a horticultural scientist at the UGA Tifton Campus.