Considering the role that beer plays in Super Bowl party traditions and considering the growing popularity of “craft beers,” it seems like an appropriate time to look at some new and encouraging developments in how a key crop for beer making is being improved. The model I’ll be describing has potential applications for many other industries and the farmers that supply them.
The foundation of beer making and an important aspect of its quality hinges on a crop called “malting barley.” This crop is grown in many places around the world, and the plant breeders who work in each area tend to be public sector employees or breeders in relatively small seed companies. While this system has served the farming and brewing sectors fairly well in the past, there is a three-fold challenge now facing the industry that will require an upgrade in the way that new barley lines are developed.
First, the industry needs to make barley more competitive with other crops in order to be able to maintain an adequate supply. For a farmer to choose to grow barley as part of his/her crop rotation, it has to have a profit potential similar enough to other regional crop options like corn, soybeans or wheat. So barley lines need to be quite productive. But barley isn’t just barley – and so the second part of the challenge is that new varieties also have to have the key quality characteristics that are desired as the barley is “malted” in the beer-making process. Breeding for both productivity and quality at the same time is hard to do. The third part of the challenge is that as the climate changes, it will effect both the yield and quality of barley so that new high-yielding, high-quality lines will have to keep being developed for a shifting growing environment.
Barley lines are improved using “traditional plant breeding” methods of making crosses through the normal pollination process in which thousands of genes are mixed coming from a male and female part of the cross. What has changed in modern plant breeding is that the breeder can now know so much more about which genes are distributed in which breeding lines, and how those genes relate to the yield, quality and weather adaptation traits the breeder is trying to simultaneously improve. The tools for studying genetics have become increasingly sophisticated and also much more affordable, primarily because of the massive investment in biotechnology for the medical and industrial sectors. For a time, only the largest crops with the largest seed company players could really afford to keep up with the state-of-the-art, data-enabled version of “traditional breeding,” but the barley industry turns out to be an encouraging example of how a new business model has emerged that could not only help barley with its triple challenge, but could allow many more crops to have needed, advanced tools for breeding goals.
There is a company in St. Louis called Benson Hill that has developed a data and analytics platform it calls “CropOS” for crop “operating system.” What they have done is to gather a great deal of publicly available information about the genetics and performance of barley that has been generated by the diverse collection of public and private barley breeding programs around the world. With all of that data combined and put through a quality screening process, breeders can now get far better guidance on how to make the most efficient crosses. They can then focus their important, local evaluation efforts that in turn generate more data for the model. It has usually taken between 9 and 12 years to come up with good, new barley lines. With the help of the CropOS tool it might be possible to cut that time in half. By knowing as much as possible about which potential crosses will combine the right genes, something like 80% of the possible field evaluations can be avoided so that the resources are focused on just the most promising combinations.
The key aspect of this system as it has been set up by Benson Hill is that it represents a model based on community cooperation. CropOS pools data from public and private sources, empowering innovators to discover and develop traits faster. All participants are better off because of the power of their shared data.
Anheuser-Busch has its own barley breeding efforts but it also works with other breeding entities. They have shared some of their genetics/performance data to enhance the CropOS platform.
Most barley is grown under contract because the brewer needs to give guidance on which varieties it wants to be grown in each region to meet its quality standards. In the shared breeding data model, a buyer like AB is more likely to be able to recommend good options for their contracted growers and to see those good options adapt over time as needed. AB also has an outreach effort it calls SmartBarley which helps the growers to make more optimal choices about the details of how they grow these elite varieties. Genetics are very important, but so are the agronomic details and how those fit with other sustainability and soil health goals.
So this new means of cooperation and communication are good news for those who enjoy beer, but there are many more applications of this cooperative, data-rich approach. It is particularly promising for quality-focused crops that don’t tend to have very large breeding entities that can do the high-tech version of “traditional plant breeding” on their own dime. What this barley example highlights is the increasing degree to which high tech plant breeding is being democratized.
