About Dryland Genetics
Dryland Genetics was founded in 2014 by two professors from Iowa State University and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln who have extensive research experience in plant genetics and phenotyping as well as successful entrepreneurial track records in the ag space. Dryland Genetics' goal is to take crops already adapted to growing on marginal lands where other crops cannot grow without irrigation water and increase their yields and agronomic performance using genetic and statistical breeding techniques that have previously been successfully applied to major crops such as corn, soybeans, and cotton.
Our first target crop is proso millet (Panicum millaceum) which requires less water than any other cereal to produce a harvest. This makes it an ideal crop for the arid great plains of North America, as well as for drylands in Australia, and northern China. Proso millet is grown on hundreds of thousands of acres in Nebraska, Colorado and South Dakota, yet this crop has missed out on the breeding revolutions which have allowed other crops to increase their yields per acre 4x or more over the past century. Using innovative genotyping, breeding, and selection strategies employing natural genetic diversity in proso millet collected from around the world, Dryland Genetics is already seeing significant yield improvements relative to the best lines currently on the market in trials conducted in Colorado and Nebraska.