Traditional plant breeding aimed to develop varieties with limited regard for crop integration in a complex agribiosystem. This old plant breeding paradigm was meant to serve the dominant monoculture, a highly specialized system of crop production.
While this paradigm gave the world dramatic improvements in individual crop productivity, it fails to exploit the full potential of the individual crop as well as that of the other components of diversified farming systems.
Traditional plant breeding is associated with objectives uch as adaptation to biotic and abiotic stresses, and breeding for adaptation to photoperiod and temperature. These objectives consider the environment as a challenge to be overcome.
