Legume Generation

This report sets out the progress that has been made up until August 2024 in Legume Generation in boosting the breeding of pea.
The Pea Innovation Community (PIC) was established to address pressing challenges in pea cultivation while unlocking the crop’s potential for sustainable agriculture and protein diversification. Since its launch, the PIC has made substantial progress in building a coordinated research community, generating genomic and phenotypic resources, and establishing the community infrastructure required for pre-breeding. In particular, we have made progress in:
(i)
community building with active engagement across academic, public-sector, and commercial partners;
(ii)
characterising the Pisum diversity panel, consolidating genomic data and establishing a reference set for trait discovery;
(iii)
delivered multi-trait phenotyping across various environments, generating robust datasets on key traits relevant to climate resilience and yield; and
(iv)
established a pipeline linking phenotypic data with genotypic information, enabling preliminary trait–genotype analyses and preparing the groundwork for marker development, thereby creating new opportunities for integrating pea into both public and private breeding pipelines.
In the next steps, we will focus on expanding and integrating the multi-location trial datasets, advancing trait–genotype association analyses using pangeome approach, and developing new collaborative partnerships to extend the reach of PIC resources. These activities will support the generation of markers and pre-breeding lines for deployment within partner breeding programmes. The collaborative model has fostered new academic–industry partnerships, training opportunities, and international exchanges that will strengthen innovation capacity in legume research beyond this project.

The purpose of this position paper is to provide an agenda for the development of European Union Horizon call topics relevant to legume breeding in Horizon Europe. It has four parts:
1. It all starts with a seed: what is plant breeding?
2. Further public investment in legume plant breeding.
3. Priority traits for publicly supported plant breeding.
4. Fostering efficient and focused ‘Horizon’ projects.

Plant breeding is a powerful technology. It is a cornerstone of competitive sustainable farming systems. The seeds we use today incorporate all the improvement plant breeders have made since our crop species were first domesticated, cascaded through the generations. In addition to directly benefiting farmers, the genetic progress in new improved varieties gained by a breeder in Europe is usually freely available to all competing breeders for their own further breeding. This free access fosters innovation and gives most plant genetic improvement a strong public-good character. However, as is typical for public goods, there is under-investment in breeding for most crops due to biological constraints on the revenue from breeding. This is especially so for minor crops such as the grain legumes. Grain legumes in particular are easily reproduced on farms without paying royalties and their minor crop status means that the market for their seed for multiplication by agents is limited. The overall result is sub-optimal investment in legume breeding from both an agricultural and wider societal viewpoint. This market failure applies to all relevant agronomic and quality traits, including crop yield.