Crop Breeding and Applied Biotechnology (Jan 2011)
Breeding tropical forages
Abstract
Brazil has the largest commercial beef cattle herd and is the main beef exporter in the world. Cultivated pastures arethe basis for the Brazilian beef production, and occupy an area of 101.4 million hectares. However, very few forage cultivars arecommercially available, and the majority of these are of apomictic reproduction, thus genetically homogeneous. Tropical foragebreeding is at its infancy, but much investment and efforts have been applied in the last three decades and some new cultivars havebeen released. In this paper, origin of different species, modes of reproduction, breeding programs and targets are discussed andthe resulting new cultivars released are presented.
