agribusinessreview.comJULY - AUGUST 20258 opinionIN MYLidea is a French seed company ranked among the leaders in the European and international markets. With 8 production sites in Europe and 19 research stations across Europe and Latin America, its turnover is 414 million. The French company, headed by Olivier Paul, operates in the entire value chain; research, breeding, production and marketing of seeds. It has invested over 38 million in research and industrial development. It offers a wide range of seeds, with 6 million hectares worldwide sown with Lidea varieties.The coming challenges regarding food security, biodiversity and climate change highly rely on seed science and an accurate prescient view of both agronomic and operational future production conditions.Seed business efforts to research and development are directly dependent on sectors' value-bringing (vegetables, flowers and field crops) innovation is continuously present at all stages of the process from selection to final product.Genome understanding and selection technologies have incredibly increased the efficiency in go-to-market with high-quality seeds; marker-assisted selection, CRISPR, Cas9 and now Cas12, gene editing, gene silencing and genetic modification traits. All the way through, agronomic research and process excellence have deployed constant efforts to increase yield and quality control and Lidea Seeds has all the innovative processes from field to bag.The whole natural machinery that seed growers have to deal with (soil, water, temperature, and solar radiation) combined with genetics to be crossed has become one unique approach (genetics by environment), supported by machine learning and modeling all growing areas regarded to inner crop needs at their key development stages helping plantation and yield prediction. The access to plant transcriptome data (genotype to phenotype/ SeedGerm platform) and the omics approach is a crucial pillar for seed companies to better monitor the key attributes such as gemination, illustrated by the recent research on DOG1-Like (delay of germination) genes which teaches about the origins of dormancy mechanisms that plants and seeds have experimented through the evolution process and recorded in their genome. This is where the seed business is shaping a new era: putting all intelligence together. The incredibly dynamic seed research deploys 360°programs to control the whole pipeline and target the perfect match between genetics (traits) and environment (crossing conditions). Along with the powerful AI tools that INNOVATION IN SEED PRODUCTIONBy Cécile Dumais-Louys, GLOBAL Corn Crop Manager, Lidea Seeds
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