Prof. David Jordan

Professor David Jordan is a sorghum breeder and geneticist with more than 25 years’ experience working in both the public and private sector. For the last decade, he has led the public sorghum breeding program in Australia which is long-running and successful research effort with a reputation for integrating across disciplines and linking research efforts from the strategic to the applied. Breeding lines from this program are widely used commercially in Australia and internationally and have contributed to the high rates of productivity gain achieved by Australian sorghum producers. In recent years David has led projects in Ethiopia aimed at improving the efficiency of crop breeding programs. 

Sorghum is predominantly grown as a rain fed crop grown over a wide range of environments from the tropics to the temperate zones.  Typically these are more marginal cropping environments characterized by extremes of temperature, water limitations, challenging soil environments and high levels of seasonal variability. Resources for sorghum crop improvement tend to be limited compared with other crops with the result that genetic improvement in many regions of the world has been low.  Climate change is exacerbating both the degree of environmental variability and the intensity of some of the abiotic stresses creating further challenges for sorghum production and improvement. In this presentation, I will discuss opportunities to increase the rate of genetic gain in sorghum through the integrated use of advanced breeding methods including advanced statistics, high throughput phenotyping, crop modelling, genomics.