Q.State any two objectives of a plant breeding programme.

Plant breeding is the deliberate, purposeful manipulation of plant species to create new types that are better suited to cultivation, give higher yield and resist disease. It has been practised for thousands of years and lies behind nearly every major food crop grown today. Classical plant breeding proceeds through defined steps: collecting genetic variability (the germplasm), evaluating and selecting parents, cross-hybridising the selected parents to combine desirable traits, selecting and testing superior recombinant progeny until they become genetically uniform, and finally testing the new lines in research and farmers' fields over several seasons before release. Breeders aim to improve yield, quality, tolerance to environmental stress, and resistance to pathogens and insect pests. Because traditional farming alone can raise yields only to a limited extent, plant breeding has been the single most powerful technology for increasing food production.