Brief Summary of Minutes of Annual Meeting

Meeting Minutes

SCC80 (Plant Breeding Coordinating Committee, PBCC) Annual Business Meeting

Date: May 20, 2025

Time: 1:30-3:00 PM HST

Location: Kona, Hawaii (in conjunction with the 2025 NAPB Annual Meeting)

Facilitator: Jenny Koebernick, PBCC Chair

Attendance

A total of 35 people attended the in-person meeting, with six additional people attending via Zoom.

Meeting Objectives

1. Provide updates on committee activities since the last business meeting (held in July 2024)
2. Launch a new PBCC initiative: the development of a tool for promotion and tenure evaluation of breeding activities

Opening remarks and SCC80 Renewal update

The updated objectives for the SCC80 project include:

1. Resource Analysis
2. Best Practices
3. Education
4. Communication

Administrative announcements and reminders

• Jenna Hershberger was announced as the newly elected PBCC secretary.
• The PBCC holds four state representative meetings via Zoom each year between annual business meetings. The next two meetings will be held on August 18, 2025, and November 17, 2025. Zoom links were shared with representatives in early April, so representatives should contact the PBCC leadership team if they did not receive a calendar invitation.
• State representatives contributed to updating PBCC lists of public plant breeders, administrators, and Agricultural Experiment Station directors in their states. Participants were asked to notify PBCC leadership of new plant breeding hires or upcoming retirements at their institutions.
• All state representatives will be required to re-enroll in NIMSS for the renewed SCC80 project. A reminder will be sent once the new project becomes available.
• The PBCC is still seeking state representatives from Tennessee, Connecticut, Rhode Island. Interested individuals or nominations are welcome.

Ongoing and future PBCC initiatives

Attendees were reminded that rather than organizing the committee by objective-specific subcommittees, the PBCC will now focus on cross-cutting initiatives that address multiple objectives. Ongoing initiatives include:

• Breeding program and germplasm transitions
• The PBCC-hosted workshop on this topic last summer resulted in a white paper that was recently accepted in Crop Science.
• Plant breeding capacity survey
• Success story comics
• Two new success story comics were announced, with paper copies available during the NAPB meeting at the NPGS booth.
• Core concepts in plant breeding

• A workshop to continue to define core concepts in plant breeding was announced to take place on May 21, 2025 at the NAPB meeting.

Dr. Koebernick proposed two new concepts for future initiatives:

• A comparative analysis of royalty structures across U.S. institutions
• The development of a tool to support fair and informed evaluation of breeding activities in the promotion and tenure process

Dr. Koebernick introduced a proposed three-year cycle structure for managing future PBCC initiatives based on last year’s successful workshop and white paper on breeding program and germplasm transitions:

• Year 1 (2025): Propose and scope the initiative
• Year 2 (2026): Develop a grant proposal and host a small working meeting at NAPB
• Year 3 (2027): Publish a white paper by the next NAPB meeting

Funding for working meetings would be modeled after the ~$15,000 USDA conference grant that supported the 2024 transitions workshop. These meetings would emphasize case studies, group discussion, and stakeholder input, with modest budgets covering food and venue costs.

Small group discussions on evaluating breeding efforts during tenure and promotion

Attendees broke into small groups to discuss the main initiative for 2025: developing a framework or tool to improve the evaluation of plant breeding activities in academic tenure and promotion processes. Groups were then asked to report on their discussions. Key points shared during the large group discussion included:

1. Proposed deliverables
   • White paper describing critical evaluation points in the plant breeding process. Many participants expressed strong support for developing this deliverable through a workshop.
   • One-page visual diagram showing key milestones and outputs in a breeding program to share with university leadership
   • Guidance document for junior faculty on effectively communicating impact
2. Strategies for tenure and promotion success

Participants shared advice and examples that highlighted common challenges and successful strategies for junior faculty navigating the tenure and promotion process.

• Clarify and frame your impact
  • Tailor your dossier and narrative so that all levels of review (department, college, and provost) can understand the value of your work. Include a strong context statement and a program timeline.
  • Emphasize impact through stakeholder outcomes (e.g., new sources of resistance, improved germplasm with tangible benefits.
  • Use annotations and statements to note the importance or context of achievements (e.g., Crop Science is a flagship journal of our field, even though this may not be reflected in the impact factor).
  • Faculty were encouraged to frame expectations around "germplasm improvement" rather than "variety development" to allow broader recognition of contributions.
• Letters and advocacy
  • The department chair’s letter is critical; input from stakeholders should inform these letters.
  • Junior faculty were encouraged to seek external dossier reviews from experienced plant breeders before formal letters are requested. Multiple senior faculty expressed that they are willing to informally review dossiers for junior faculty.
  • External letters are particularly important at institutions without many plant breeding programs.
• Educate department leadership
  • Some junior faculty experience a lack of support for breeding activities (e.g., attending field days, spending time in the field in general) due to leadership being unfamiliarity with breeding. In response, senior faculty recommended that junior faculty take care to educate administrators on what they do and why it is important.
  • Consider giving annual update seminars to your department if this is not already part of your department’s expectations.

1. Additional considerations
   • UW-Madison recently developed a guide for evaluating extension work during promotion reviews that could be a useful resource both for individuals who have extension appointments but also as a guide for the PBCC as we make our own toolkit.
   • It was noted that very few plant breeders are denied tenure, but this may mask underlying attrition due to a lack of support prior to the tenure process.
   • Questions were raised about how to evaluate industry-to-academia transitions in faculty reviews, especially when new faculty coming from industry have no ongoing publishable work when they start.
2. Next Steps and Vision:
   • Participants expressed interest in drafting a white paper or toolkit not only describing how breeding efforts are currently evaluated but also proposing how they should be evaluated to protect early-career faculty time and efforts.
   • There was consensus that the PBCC should pursue this as a major initiative for the coming year.

Adjournment

• At the 2024 NAPB meeting, the PBCC organized a one day Germplasm Transition Workshop (funded by a USDA Conference Grant). The workshop had 6 participants and consisted of 8 case studies on all things related to retirements, overlap and sunsetting of public breeding programs. The executive committee spent the year digesting the information to discover that the success of the program ultimaltely falls on the breeder with emphasis on how they communicate with their administration and if they are following best practices to ensure smooth transitions to the next breeder. A paper was submitted to Crop Science within 6-9 months of the workshop and published in May 2025. 

• It was also determined that the Germplasm transition workshop and white paper timeline was a good model for future PBCC activites. A topic will be discussed at the business meeting and a workshop on that topic will take place the following year. The 2025 PBCC Annual business meeting was used to generate discussion around the documentation of plant breeding activities related to promotion and tenure purposes. It was identified as a need for the committee to organize a workshop for the 2026 Annual meeting. 

• By February 2025, there was a member for each state identified for the multistate except, Rhode Island, Conneticut and Pennsylvania. The year also brought several assistant professors to the state rep group.  

• To ensure effectiveness and avoid redundancy in achieving its objectives, the PBCC continues to actively communicate and partner with allied organizations such as the National Association of Plant Breeders (NAPB), the American Seed Trade Association (ASTA), USDA, the Seed Science Foundation, and related professional societies. Toward this end, communication channels with the NAPB have been formalized, with the PBCC Chair now attending monthly NAPB EC+ meeting and one member of the PBCC EC serving as an ex officio member on NAPB’s Advocacy Committee. In addition an effort has started to understand the linkages between different plant breeding committees to further support future plant breeders.  

• The PBCC website (https://www.nrsp10.org/PBCC) continues to be updated and improved, with links to key committee outputs, including white papers, informational resources, public breeding communication pieces, and an updated directory of State Experiment Station Directors, Deans, Associate Deans of Research, or other university administrations responsible for agricultural research at 1862, 1890, and 1994 land-grant universities. The state reps participating this spring in updating this document. 

• One more plant breeding success story was published on common bean and will be digitally available on the PBCC website within the next couple of months.  (https://www.nrsp10.org/PBCC_plant_breeding_outputs)

• A poster on the communication activitites of the PBCC were presented at the 2025 NAPB annual meeting. 

• Progress continues in developing a set of core educational concepts for training/educating plant breeders at the MS and PhD levels. Because core concepts serve as the foundation for curriculum development and assessment in plant breeding education, their identification ensures that graduate programs align with the needs of both academia and industry.  A core curriculum workshop was held at the 2025 Annual meeting with greater than 10 PBCC members actively participating. 

• The PBCC Operational Document continues to be refined and updated. The document provides transparency in how PBCC operates in the effort to ensure continuity in the organization’s work.

• A Seed World podcast online at with the Chair of PBCC, discussing PBCC thoughts and direction, and how PBCC can best serve U.S. public breeding. https://www.seedworld.com/us/2024/10/21/why-collaboration-is-key-to-strengthening-public-breeding-programs/

Hale, I., J. Koebernick, J. Hershberger, T. Rife, J. Arbelaez, N. Anderson, A. Bekkerman, M. Bohn, F. Bourland, T. Bourke, P. Chee, K. Evans, N. Fumia, M. Feldmann, K. Gasic, S. Hague, A. Heilman-Morales, A. Kemp, C. Iglesias, L. Mueller, J. Luby, R. Pratt, A. Thompson, R. Vierling, M. Worthington, M. Smith, G. Volk, M. Wolfe, M. Kantar. 2025. Sustaining public plant breeding programs across generations. Crop Science. 65 (3)1-7. Cited by 1. https://doi.org/10.1002/csc2.70094

 Pratt, R., M. Kantar, I. Hale, J. Koebernick, and K. Gasic. 2025. Plant breeding coordinating committee initatives to improve communication. National Association of Plant Breeding Annual Meeting.  19-23 May. Kona, HI.