Vegetable variety trials: an administrative point of view

Since the establishment of the land-grant systems in the late 1800s, universities and experiment station systems have sought out and tested vegetable germplasm for its suitability in regional and local areas across the United States. The private seed industry continued to grow, both in number and volume of sales through the early half of the twentieth century. It was during this time that many of the public breeding programs at land-grant universities began corollary plant breeding programs in variety development for vegetables. For many years it was a cooperative coexistence between the private seed industry and the public programs, wherein the seed industry derived much of its germplasm for new variety releases from the public sector. Beginning in the 1970s, the numbers of public breeders began to decline, while the numbers, especially of PhD plant breeders in the private sector, began to proliferate. Throughout this 100-year period university personnel were actively involved in vegetable variety trials, both on main campuses as well as at experiment stations, and in many cases in locales in various counties through cooperative efforts with county agents. Up through this period much credit could be given to individual faculty members for their involvement in such endeavors. In the past 10 to 20 years, many things have changed in university operations and perspectives, namely faculty are only given credit for refereed publications, regardless of the area in which they work. Moreover, they must constantly procure money to support their programs. In the past, vegetable variety testing generally did not lead to refereed publications and was not supported by the industry. Moreover, as previously mentioned many of the public programs in germplasm improvement for vegetables across the United States have ceased, thus ending a direct need for variety testing to support these programs. The critical issue for today’s faculty is the relative importance of variety testing and delivering information to the general public versus how they would support such a program and eventually get academic credit for conducting such a program.