An Economic Investigation of Early-Generation Quality Testing in a Wheat Breeding Program

Public plant breeders, in seeking the most efficient means of achieving their objectives, face decisions on the appropriate breeding strategy and program structure to use. This paper reports an analysis comparing the changes in costs and benefits from the introduction of recent technology enabling testing for flour and dough properties to be carried out on small samples in the early-generations of a wheat breeding program in Australia. The average costs of a suite of early-generation tests are higher than the equivalent (unreplicated) yield testing. The analysis presented confirms that the introduction of early-generation quality testing leads to a faster rate of expected progress in quality, but a slower rate of progress in yield. The estimated market value of an increase in yield is greater than that for quality, based on current market information. Thus, the result of incorporating early-generation quality testing is higher costs and lower expected returns, so that there is a loss of community welfare from using early-generation quality testing if the resultant cultivar is released from each program. However, the probability of the higher-quality cultivar being released for commercial cultivation is greater, so that recognition of the probability of release means that there may be net gains from the use of early-generation quality testing.