Transforming breeding programs through digital solutions

Stephanie Manrilla
July 24, 2025

How can conventional crop breeding approaches be transformed to efficiently address the pressing challenges of malnutrition, food insecurity, and climate change?

Part of the solution lies in leveraging digital technologies to accelerate crop breeding processes and making sure these platforms and services are accessible to breeders. This is exactly what the CGIAR Breeding for Tomorrow (B4T) teams showcased at the Asian Development Bank’s (ADB) Digital Tech & Innovation Marketplace exhibit on 25-26 June 2025 at the ADB Headquarters, Philippines.

Featuring the following breeding resources, the 2-day exhibit provided an avenue to promote digital solutions that aim to future-proof their crop breeding programs:

    1. Enterprise Breeding System (EBS): a next-generation, cloud-native, and highly-interoperable breeding data management platform used to accelerate 20 crop breeding programs to date.

    2. Biometrical Genetics Workflow (BioFlow): the CGIAR-developed open-source platform for advanced breeding analytics.

    3. Global Shared Services: a resource hub for high-quality and comprehensive laboratory services and trialling and nursery support

    4. Cloud Computing Resources: a robust and reliable cloud service and infrastructure support for digital platforms

    5. Lastly, an AI-enabled tool, currently in development, envisioned to help farmers make real-time agronomic decisions.

The exhibit is part of the larger Asia Pacific Digital Transformation Forum, which gathered organizations leading the digital transformation across development sectors.

The CGIAR B4T was represented by team leads from Digital Solutions, a unit of Breeding Resources—one of the five interconnected Areas of Work of the CGIAR Science Program: Breeding for Tomorrow.

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