Corn Breeding and Genetics with Rex Bernardo
Good day and welcome to the University of Minnesota CropCast, I'm your host Dave Nicolai, University Minnesota Extension Native and Field Crops along with my co host Doctor. Seth Nave, University of Minnesota Extension soybean specialist. And Seth, we're into January of twenty twenty four. I didn't know if we'd make it but here we are nonetheless and we're still on the air with University of Minnesota CropCast and we're gonna start off with a bang I think you know we have New Year's but we have our our lead hitter so to speak coming out from the Department of Agronomy here and we actually have an opportunity to visit with Doctor. Rex Bernardo.
Speaker 1:He's from the University of Minnesota Department of Agronomy and Plant Genetics. He's a professor in corn breeding and genetics and I want to say welcome first of all here to the podcast.
Speaker 2:Well thank you so much for having me Dave. It's a pleasure to be here.
Speaker 1:Well we really appreciate you taking the time to visit with us a little bit about the program here. You've been at the University of Minnesota a number of years but let's go back in time a little bit and talk about your education. Where you first are in terms of developed your interest in in corn and in other genetics and so forth. But maybe go back to the beginning in terms of where you went to school and how you came to the University of Minnesota.
Speaker 2:Well, I was born and raised in The Philippines and my both my parents were in the academe. My father was actually a plant breeder and my mother an entomologist specializing in host plant resistance to insect pests. And they never pressured me to go into agriculture, but they would talk shop and we'd have books at home and I go, wow. This is quite an interesting field. And that's how how I started studying agriculture and plant breeding specifically.
Speaker 2:I obtained my bachelor's degree in The Philippines on in a college that's right in an island and our house was, oh, 200 yards from the beach itself, from the water. And you walk to the other side and you see mountains. And I got my undergrad degree there, started working on a sweet potato breeding program. So I was a sweet potato breeder before I became a corn breeder. Then decided to go to graduate school in The United States was the most logical and I thought best choice.
Speaker 2:So I started applying to different schools in The US. I ended up at the University of Illinois and got there and instead of beaches and mountains, I saw corn and soybean and acres and acres and acres of it. And I go, okay. I'm not in The Philippines anymore. I got my PhD degree at the University of Illinois.
Speaker 2:And then I started working for a private company, Limograin, right at the outskirts of Urbana Champaign in East Central Illinois. I worked there for nine years, then decided to switch careers. All this while I had in mind that I might wanna do some teaching, become a professor. And an opportunity opened up at Purdue University, so I was at Purdue University for three years. And then decided, well, I was recruited to the University of Minnesota.
Speaker 2:And I've been here since the year February, so twenty four years now, almost twenty four years. It's been quite a ride. It's been I've enjoyed my work in all the places I've worked. And it's been a privilege to work in this area of plant improvement. In corn specifically, but also branching out or getting involved in some way in other crops.
Speaker 3:I am. Thanks for thanks for coming in today, Rex. I I'm really excited about our conversation here today. I am really interested to hear about corn breeding specifically because from the very beginning, we when when you were hired, and I was actually here already, when you were hired, you came in and you made it clear that you were going to be a modern corn breeder and and and look at things a little bit different than some of our historical crop breeding at the university. And so maybe maybe walk back twenty three years and and tell us what why you came to some of those conclusions about public corn breeding and and how that first maybe maybe part of your experience within the private sector, how that informed you about what a public corn breeder like yourself might have the how how they could have the most impact, I guess, is the question.
Speaker 2:My time in the seed industry has always colored all of the research that I do. In fact, a wonderful friend and colleague at Purdue University once said, Rex, we can take you out of the seed industry, but we can never take the seed industry out of you. And I think there's some truth to that even today. When I interviewed at the University of Minnesota and I was hired here in Saint Paul, I was specifically told that I should not be breeding any corn. They said we don't want you to develop any lines or hybrids.
Speaker 2:In a way that poses an extensionalist kind of question to a corn breeder in a university setting because you start thinking, well, if I'm not going to breed any corn, what am I going to do? And I decided that perhaps I would have the most impact if I focus on two things, and one would be graduate student education and training. And the second would be doing kinds of research that would be meaningful to the breeders, mainly in the private sector, who are actually developing the parental lines of the corn hybrids that farmers would be doing today. So if I were to describe the type of research that I am doing, I would call it as better ways to breed better corn. In essence, trying to determine with all the new technologies that we have at our disposal today, how can we use these new technologies and develop breeding schemes that would lead us that would lead to better ways to breed better corn.
Speaker 2:If you think of corn breeding today and breeding in many crop species, it's like a factory really, Where in a factory setting, well, you have a manufacturing process, you have well, you have a design process, first of all. Then you have a manufacturing process, and then you have a quality control, and then you have release of a product, some widget, whatever that product is. In the same way, really, is in corn breeding that you start with a design in mind. Well, what are my breeding objectives? Then there's sort of a manufacturing process in corn breeding in which the breeders would develop the parental lines Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And then cross them to have different kinds of hybrids. And there there's a testing process involved like in any any industrial process, and in the end, there's a product release. And a key difference, of course, is that instead of working with steel or wood or plastic, well, you're working with a biological material. And you cannot quite control the entirety of how cells divide and how gametes are formed, and yet much, still much of that process, I think, we have a fair bit of control today. So, again, just just to to wrap this rather lengthy answer, it really is looking at corn breeding as a process, sort of a manufacturing process, and trying to see how can we optimize this process to the best extent possible.
Speaker 3:Beautiful. I love the description. I think that the manufacturing analogy I think is a really good one that helps me understand things a lot better for sure. But even, you know, for some of us that are ignorant to the details of this, think about, in my mind, I think about corn breeding as the art of, you know, making these crosses and finding these plant types that are suitable for you, and then moving those through the system. And I know there was a lot of advancement beyond this very crude way that I've described.
Speaker 3:But you're a real early founder or earlier pioneer in this area of genomic selection. Is that fair to say? And corn especially?
Speaker 2:I think that is fair to say. It's been a wonderful journey working in that area for a few decades now.
Speaker 3:And when you started in this area looking, instead of selecting by this visual plant type and actually looking at the genes, did you think that this was the far future? Or was this an incremental kind of a discovery that you made along the way that informed you that this was this is the way that corn breeding was going to eventually move to in the future, is is through looking at actually looking at those genes directly?
Speaker 2:I think I I wasn't that farsighted back then. So I started working on this procedure in 1994. Wow. That's a long time now. But let me take even a step back and see and tell you how it fits in the context of breeding.
Speaker 2:I like to liken breeding, plant breeding in any species. It's like a game of Survivor. Many of us are familiar with the Survivor reality series in which you have, I don't know, 25 contestants. I've never really watched the show. But then these 25 contestants are they go through a series of tests.
Speaker 2:And then from 25, the numbers decrease until in the end, you only have one winner, one survivor and that's the champion. And plant breeding really is in a way it's like one huge big game of survivor. But instead of having 25 candidates, you could have, oh, thousands of candidates. Thousands of individuals. And these individuals, they come from different families.
Speaker 2:And so if you're one individual, you'd be competing with your brothers and sisters and cousins and just a whole set of individuals. And instead of having survival skills in the wild, well, plant breeders would determine which are the best candidates just by a series of screens. So the first screening would be, you know, maybe from let's if you start with 2,000, maybe from 2,000, you pare that down to, let's say, 500. And then 500 to maybe 200, two hundred to 100, to 50, to 20, to 10, to five, and to one. And in each of these screens, they become more and more intense, and we we begin to use more and more information.
Speaker 2:And part of this information could be performance out in the field. It could be how the plants react to a disease in a greenhouse. And it could be wide testing, growing the corn or soybean in five, ten, fifteen, twenty, fifty, hundred locations, seeing how they perform, or it could be looking at DNA markers. And so DNA markers, they are they are DNA fingerprints. They just tell us differences in the DNA of of the individuals.
Speaker 2:And and the way I try to explain genomic selection is trying to first see how do dairy farmers, how do dairy breeders evaluate the milk performance of a dairy bull? As we know, a dairy bull does not produce any milk, but it has genes either for good milk production or poor milk production that would pass on to its female progeny. And the way breeders, dairy breeders evaluate the milk potential of a dairy bull is they look at the performance of the relatives. They look at the mother, the half sister, the female cousin. They weight all that information and then make a prediction of how much this bull would yield in terms of milk yield if it had the physiological, physical capacity to produce milk.
Speaker 2:And, again, a key point is having these data on the relatives, but also knowing how much information to weight. So more information is given to the mother's performance than to a cousin's performance just because of the closer relatedness. And so we can look at relatedness based on pedigree, but a more accurate way is to look at DNA markers. And essentially that's what genomic prediction does. You look at data on relatives.
Speaker 2:You look at you look at DNA fingerprints to estimate how related are these relatives to the individual we're interested in, then we create a prediction model, and then we proceed accordingly. So now it is not uncommon that individuals, corn, soybean, wheat, be selected without initially, even without any field data. Just because you had a bunch of field data from prior years and marker data, DNA fingerprint data has become so cheap these days. In corn, it's about o six, seven, eight times cheaper than evaluating in the field. So this changes the playing game because now with cheaper marker data and more expensive field data, then we try to emphasize marker data quite a bit more than field testing as in the past.
Speaker 3:For sure. I it's there's so many parallels to other you had a nice analogy with with manufacturing earlier, and I think what you're describing is a lot of what we're looking at even societal wise. And I think the one that comes to mind obviously is AI, because everybody's talking about AI. And the investments that have been made in AI and in some ways, there's a lot of direct parallels, but I think there's indirect parallels as well, is that we've, as a society, we've invested in data. And a lot of scientists have told us for years how valuable data was.
Speaker 3:And a lot of us thought, well, let's prove it to me. And I think that you're one of those that has now begun to prove it to us and has really helped show the value of it. And along with it, as you mentioned, the economy of that switchover has also benefited the technology. And I think that wasn't an accident, that you knew that genotyping was gonna become less expensive over time because
Speaker 2:Well, I actually did not know that. I I I was convinced by others that I need to think into the future of how the technology and how the cost would change, because I I did not know that. To your point, Seth, about data. Yes. When I was with the seed industry, our data we we we'd run our yield trials and then we'd have the data in these large 11 by 17 tractor feed dot matrix printouts.
Speaker 2:And we'd look at the data and then we'd use those data only to make decisions, selection decisions on this trial. Then after that, those decisions were made, well, those data, those sheets were put on a shelf. Right? And and our thinking has changed because now we look at data not only for the here and now, but we look at data, how can we use these how can we leverage these data for other purposes in in the future? And talking about technology, it was actually my PhD professor who told me to think of how changes in the cost of DNA fingerprinting might change the way we do things.
Speaker 2:My first experience in DNA fingerprinting is our adviser called us to the field, said Rex, we're going to collect leaf samples for DNA analysis today. And so we were out there sampling corn leaves by hand, And then the corn leaves were put in a cooler. They were driven to the local airport in Champaign, Illinois where there was a chartered plane waiting to take those samples to a lab in Ankeny, Iowa. And I said, my goodness. If I if we need to charter a plane each time, this is really, really expensive technology.
Speaker 2:How can this work? But my adviser told me, no, Rex, you need to think of the day when the cost of data point for a DNA fingerprint is about the cost of a paper clip we use to pollinate corn to attach the bag on the tassel. And in my mind that day, again, that's never gonna happen. But we are beyond that point today where the cost of a data point is cheaper than the cost of a paper clip. And so, you know, to your point, yes, we we we're in the here and now, and oftentimes we look at the new development.
Speaker 2:We look at the new technology. And my immediate reaction is to see how things are now. And I've had to train myself over the years. Okay. I need to be a bit more futuristic and think in the future, how might this be a game changer in the way that we do plant breeding?
Speaker 3:Well, I've always thought of you as a futurist, and so I appreciate your humility and explaining that you may not have always thought of yourself in that way. But we've always we've seen that here in the department. I've certainly noticed that in the department and the way you look at your projects. Tell us, as long as we're talking about other stuff, you've had some forays into other breeding. You've you've worked with some horticulture folks, and you've you've you've brought your experience into some other other crops as well.
Speaker 3:Is that is that true?
Speaker 2:That is correct. I've worked with others more in a collaborative fashion, obviously. But I was involved with a big US Day project on breeding rosacea species, such as apple, such as strawberry, peach. And I learned a lot. I mean, I think my experience in sweet potato helped me because sweet potato being an asexually propagated species and the way you breed corn and sweet potato or apple are are are quite different.
Speaker 2:And so that helped me and that was a wonderful opportunity to learn about challenges in plant breeding, in other species other than corn. And as I mentioned, corn is kinda like a manufacturing process, not so much with other species, horticultural, species. I've started working with some students on breeding some vegetables here, on campus. So again, learning about different plant species has been a wonderful experience. I mean plants are amazing, aren't they?
Speaker 2:To me, I never cease to be amazed that plants let you know, they they they require relatively little care and they take energy from the sun and water from the soil and nutrients and and they they take the air and they produce useful things. And if we could manufacture if we could create an artificial plant that would be if anybody would create an artificial plant that would be so efficient, that person would probably get a Nobel Prize. But then you think, well, why do so when we have already natural plants to do many amazing things?
Speaker 3:I've I've I've got lots of questions. I'd like to go a lot of different directions, but I this might be a good opportunity to talk about your sweet corn.
Speaker 2:Ah, yes.
Speaker 3:Tell us tell us about your sweet corn and how you how you arrived at that particular idea, and and tell us the opportunities that it's provided for you.
Speaker 2:Yes. I've been working on a sweet corn that I have dubbed gopher corn. Gopher corn because it has maroon and gold kernels, obviously. Maroon and gold gold being the colors of the University of Minnesota. It started out as a little science project with my youngest son.
Speaker 2:My youngest son has autism spectrum disorder and so I said I need to find a kind of science project that is tangible that he can relate to. And he's a big sports fan too. So we started working on this gopher corn, well, on sweet corn and I figured we figured, well, what's another yellow or bicolor corn? That that wouldn't mean a thing. So I said, David, let's start working on developing a sweet corn, one with the Minnesota Vikings colors, purple and gold, and two with the gopher colors, which is maroon and gold.
Speaker 2:And in the end, we were more successful with breeding the maroon and gold. And so we that's what we have is now a maroon and gold corn. And I found that this has been a wonderful vehicle for visibility as well as public education. So I've started using having Gopher Corn Yupik days last year. Yes, I could say last year now.
Speaker 2:Where I invited the public to come and I'll talk to them about plant breeding, how it is how it's done in general, why it's important. I showed them the maroon and gold parent, really puny looking, and how when you cross these two you get a hybrid that is actually vigorous. And then the the folks who come get to pick their own gopher corn and bring them home with them. And so it's been a wonderful tool, for visibility. The university president has tasted a few years.
Speaker 2:Some board of regents members have had a few years. And so, again, it it's nothing. This product is nothing compared to, say, an important wheat variety or soybean variety or apple variety. However, I see it as sort of a mascot for plant breeding work that I'm I'm I'm learning about communication. And well, you you have to have a story and something that people would easily relate to and that's what I'm finding out about this gopher corn.
Speaker 3:Beautiful. Beautiful. So I as long as we're kind of on this education angle, let's I wanna hear a little bit about your teaching career and and some of the historical courses that you've taught as well as some of the newer, courses that you've developed in the in the last couple years.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you, Seth. As I mentioned, teaching was a and is was a reason that I decided to switch from an industry career to an academic career. And when I was hired I was given responsibility to teach an advanced plant breeding course. So one of the courses I teach is an advanced plant breeding course for masters and PhD students. And typically it would be perhaps the last plant breeding course that is taken by our students.
Speaker 2:So we go into details of how to design and implement a breeding program for corn, for soybean, for apple, for other species. Then over the years, I've thought of other courses that I could teach. And one year, I just I asked my former students, what are things you wish we taught you in graduate school but we did not? And the answers were quite interesting because they were not technical things. They were things like, how do I make a budget?
Speaker 2:How do I deal with conflict? How do I run a meeting? So how how can I communicate with different audiences? And so soft skills that are vital for professionals and scientists to function well in today's modern workplace. So I developed a course called Professional Skills for Scientists.
Speaker 2:We start out looking at the life cycle. I call it the life cycle of a scientist of how one starts out depending on others, then contributing independently, then contributing through others, and then perhaps towards the end providing leadership to the institution. We talk about personal differences, how one is wired differently from another person, and I use the StrengthsFinder assessment to great effect actually, if I may say so, because it opens these eyes of students. Oh, this is why my office mate or my lab mate works in a different way or or sees things sees things differently the way I do. We talk into managing your boss, managing employees, hiring, making budgets, communication.
Speaker 2:Again, a whole suite of non of us professional skills that are needed. And then we were asked last year to consider teaching at the undergraduate level, so I developed a new freshman seminar course called coffee from the ground up. And so this is looking at coffee as a vehicle for introducing college freshmen to food and agriculture. We talk about the history, geography, culture. We do a lot of brewing experiments.
Speaker 2:There's a brewing competition judged by a panel, and so we declare who the winner is. And so I've taught it one more one time, and it's been a fun course to teach, and I look forward to teaching it again.
Speaker 3:So again, the theme there is you're using coffee similar to your, you know, your go for corn is
Speaker 2:In a way, yes. Yes.
Speaker 3:As a as a way to to just start the conversation. Beautiful. I'd I'd I really You should come sometime. I'd would love And I I what I really like about your your teaching philosophy is that you're willing to take on courses that that may be uncomfortable for you. And, you know, I think the reason why we don't have a lot of courses on communication for scientists is because all of us are such bad communicators that we're most of us are unwilling to try to stand in front of students and help them with things like that.
Speaker 3:So I I really really appreciate that you're willing to, to go out and and take one for the team, I think.
Speaker 2:You know, I'm a I'm a coffee aficionado, but for this course, I actually had to take some online courses to learn about coffee. But talking about communication, I've trained myself to watch, some seminars I give once in a while. In the early days, I would cringe because I'd see myself doing this and that. And I go, oh my goodness. What am I doing?
Speaker 2:And you're unconscious doing it, of course.
Speaker 1:Well, we certainly want to also talk to you a little bit about yourself in terms of that. We understand that you hold what's called in a university setting an endowed chair. So for our audience, we'll have to explain a little bit about that. We're not talking about an office chair in your office, but an endowed chair. And then also your capacity as a director of the University of Minnesota Plant Breeding Center.
Speaker 1:And and third, I'm just gonna throw this out so I don't forget. I think you've also had an opportunity to help author some textbooks. So if you can remember those three things, let's
Speaker 2:go through Right. Well, you might have to I might have to ask you again. Alright. What was the first one again? Yeah.
Speaker 1:The chair
Speaker 2:you're Endowed chair, yes, yes. Well, when before I came, when the professor of corn breeding and genetics retired, the position essentially was not filled by the college. That was my understanding.
Speaker 1:And do you remember who that was?
Speaker 2:It was John Gettleman then it passed to Bob Stucker. Right. I believe. Uh-huh. So after that, a group of industry lead leaders in the corn seed industry here in Minnesota.
Speaker 2:It was back then it was Pioneer Hybrid and Northrop King. They just they they they got they organized themselves and they said it is not right that the University of Minnesota would not have a professor of of breeding and genetics for the most important crop in the state of Minnesota in terms of economic value. So they got together and they put their their money behind what they wanted to do and essentially contributed to a fund. Each of these companies contributed to a fund, which is an endowment. So there's an endowment.
Speaker 2:It earn earns interest. It helps support the position. And so really, that's all it is. It's, again, it's it's a it's a large fund, and the proceeds, help support the position. And we're seeing, I think, this day and age of, less less and less support from the public or from the state, we're seeing more and more endowed chairs or endowed professorships come to the fore.
Speaker 2:Your second question had to do with the Plant Breeding Center. So the Plant Breeding Center was formed during the pandemic, and the objective of the center is to elevate plant improvement in Minnesota and beyond. The thought is that we certainly have had a strong history and ongoing effort in plant improvement in many species. And yet, we could do better in terms of having a one stop place, so to speak, for communication, for visibility, for collaboration. And so the goal of the Plant Breeding Center is to elevate plant breeding in Minnesota and beyond through enhancing collaboration among plant breeders on campus, as well as collaboration between plant breeders on campus and outside the university.
Speaker 2:Enhancing building community, community building among our plant breeders here, professors, students, and postdocs. Continuing education. As we have talked about, there's a lot of new developments in the field. And so there's a need for continuing education of professionals as well as students in other universities, particularly in places where they might not have the same amount of expertise that we are blessed here at Minnesota. And the last is promotion and visibility.
Speaker 2:And so it's been a pleasure to work with the faculty in plant breeding, graduate students in plant breeding who have been very engaged in this group effort to build this plant breeding center to elevate again, elevate plant breeding on campus and beyond. And over the years I've also authored two textbooks and I'd like to say, and it's true, that I wrote the first textbook because I was a lazy lecturer. And I said, okay, if I'm looking at a 20 plus some career at the university, I don't wanna be saying the same thing year after year after year. So I said, maybe I can write a textbook and tell the students, okay, for a class tomorrow, read pages 30 to 40 of the textbook and we're going to discuss it. And that's in a way how I've conducted my class over the years.
Speaker 2:And little did I know that eventually that's what's called a flipped classroom format. Of course now with a flipped classroom, that's not a textbook, but you'd have probably videos or audio clips. But the same principle that you do a lot of your, lecture quote quote unquote and then you do your homework actually when you get to the classroom.
Speaker 3:So I'll wrap kind of all of these things up into one. I wanted to ask you a little bit about some of your experience. You've done a number of sabbatical type visiting scientist roles, visiting professor roles throughout, mostly in Europe, is that right?
Speaker 2:That is correct.
Speaker 3:Over time. But you also do quite a bit of education through the plant breeding center and other vehicles to do teaching. And you're continuing to work with industry. So I don't have a very formal question for you, but I guess I admire that you have all of these connections globally and both with industry and the public sector all over. And so maybe you could expand on that.
Speaker 3:Is this just part of your global nature? How did this come about? And it seems like this is something that is very important to you. So you've definitely you've you've definitely put resources and time into into maintaining those relationships. So maybe you can just expand a little bit on them.
Speaker 2:Sure. So I talked about this StrengthsFinder assessment that I give in my class, and I took that myself. And one of my top strengths is learner. And by nature, I like to learn. I like to learn about new things.
Speaker 2:It could be something in academics. It could be, like, learning to play the drums, which I've started to do. And so I just like to learn, by nature. And how do you learn? Well, you talk with other people.
Speaker 2:You see what they're doing. You you learn from them. And all these connections that you've talked about, Seth, they they they have really expanded my view of plant improvement in the global context. With industry, for example, the industry, they've provided me with access to resources and data sets to allow me and my students to investigate questions that we could have never investigated if we were limited to doing our experiment in, say, two locations in two years. I mean, there's a lot of value to that.
Speaker 2:We do that type of experiment, but again it just broadens the possibility of what we do. And then talking to or making building bridges or connections with colleagues, in Europe, and other places around the world, again that has expanded the way of my thinking of how breeding is in different species, how it's different in corn, what might be some, cultural aspects that would make plant improvement different in The US and another place around the world. And so to me that has been a great joy of being in the academe is this this capacity and the opportunity to learn, to pursue our science, to learn new things, to see what's out there in the horizon. And in a way, make that in some way our own by seeing, okay, I'm gonna put myself here, and given all these that I'm observing, what can I contribute, to the broader field? And I'd like to end if I could with by sharing a quote, again, going back to my graduate school days, that that I remember from my p h PhD adviser's office.
Speaker 2:And the quote says the following. In times of change, learners inherit the earth, but the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists. And I think that is so true, that the world around us is changing so much. And if we consider ourselves as learned, that we've learned everything we can, we would find ourselves as experts to function in a world that would no that's no longer exists. And so you and I, we need all of us need to keep learning about new things and be able to function well and contribute to society that would be different today and tomorrow from what it was yesterday.
Speaker 3:Well, clearly, you're, you're living your you're you've been living this this quote. You are certainly a learner, you're a leader for us all, an example. So we really, really appreciate you coming in today, Rex. We this has been a really fun conversation. I can I these conversations that lead on to other questions are the my my favorite shows that we do?
Speaker 3:So I've I have several other ideas for thinking about the future. I think you're one of these people that can help us think about the future. Maybe we maybe for those of us that are learned, maybe you can help us think about some things for the future to consider. So with that, I think Dave can wrap it up.
Speaker 1:Well, we certainly appreciate, again, taking time to visit with Seth and myself here as we get into 2024. So let's hope that, you know, 2023 and 2024 keeps on being as productive as they have been in the past and it certainly sounds like you have an additional opportunities for yourself and for your program and graduate students to keep on learning and I think that's that's really the take home message. So again this has been Dave Nicolai with the University of Minnesota podcast Minnesota CropCast along with my host Doctor. Seth Nave, University Minnesota Extension soybean specialist and our guest today has been Doctor. Rex Medardo.
Speaker 1:He is professor and endowed chair at the in corn breeding and genetics at the University of Minnesota Department of Agronomy and Plant Genetics and thank you very much for listening and we'll see you again next time.
