Open access publications in the SLU publication database

Abstract

More than ten thousand years ago people began to cultivate the land and grow different plants. Thus they did not need to wander around to hunt and collect their
food. That was the time when plant breeding history began. Wild plants were adapted to become crops when humans began to pick and sow the seeds from the plants with the best properties. They chose plants with for example many seeds that remained long on the plant and thus gave them a lot of food. Through thousands of years, it was in this way that plants bred in agriculture have provided the foundation on which today's plant breeding is based. This method can be called selection breeding, since the selection of properties had not occurred naturally without human intervention. Since then, the plant breeding has evolved to include more advanced tools to modify and combine plant genomes to achieve improved properties of crops for adaptation to human agriculture and quality needs.