Final answer:
Selective breeding in agriculture is used to create wheat crops with desirable traits like high yield, disease and pest resistance, and drought tolerance, utilizing biotechnology for improvements. Genetic modification and hybridization contribute to food security and ease of farming, with advances in genomics playing a significant role.
Step-by-step explanation:
As a farmer who sells crops to food manufacturers, using selective breeding to ensure your plants have desirable characteristics is essential. Selective breeding allows the development of wheat crops with a variety of beneficial traits.
These include high yield to maximize production, disease resistance to protect the plants from common diseases, pest resistance to minimize damage from pests, drought tolerance for survival in dry conditions, and many others such as uniform maturity, nutritional value, and adaptability to different soils.
Genetic modification and biotechnology have advanced the capability to create crops with specific traits. These scientific approaches help in producing wheat that is not only resistant to environmental stresses but also improves nutritional qualities.
With the help of genomics, new hybrid strains can be generated, and disease resistance can be vastly improved. Through conventional breeding and genetic transformation, crops like wheat can be developed to withstand harsher climates and contribute to greater food security.
In modern agriculture, maintaining biodiversity is essential for creating new crop varieties and combating evolving pests. Furthermore, the development of hybrid seeds has led to more vigorous and uniform plants that are easier to harvest and possess a combination of favorable traits developed in parental lines.