• Improve harvestable yield.
• Reduce losses from diseases and pests, increasing yield stability.
• Produce varieties adaptable to flood irrigation and growth on heavy clay soils.
• Incorporate the soybean industries' leading and most value added traits.
• Develop soybean lines tolerant to Asian Soybean Rust.
• Specific Yield Attributes
• Development of maturity groups IV to V Roundup Ready soybean varieties.
• Asian rust tolerance.

• Flood irrigation tolerance
• Growth on clay soils/sandy soils
• Stem Canker resistance
• Phytophthora Root Rot resistance
• Root Knot Nematode resistance
• Improved seed quality
• Soybean Cyst Nematode resistance
• Aerial Blight tolerance
• Charcoal Rot tolerance
• Virus resistance · Frogeye resistance
• Narrow and wide row adaptation
• Early and late planting adaptation

To achieve these objectives, researchers work to:

• Make thousands of hand cross pollinations per cycle and maximize breeding population sizes (a cycle is one summer or winter). We "run" three cycles per year to speed the delivery of improved genetics.
• Document summer and winter breeding cycles using greenhouse and tropical nurseries (two cross pollination seasons per year).
• Advance breeding material three generations per year (winter nursery grows two 90 day crops and Terral Seed Research grows one 170 day crop).
• Develop hundreds of breeding populations or families per cycle.
• Maximize number of southern adapted lines. Terral Seed research yield tests over 100,000 unique experimental lines each year targeted at just the Mid-South.
• Conduct small plot tests at 11 locations just in the South.
• Test soybean lines at several levels.
  
  
  • Level 1 (Y1) is a single row yield test at one location on clay soil, flood irrigated with notes taken on maturity, growth habit, disease resistance, heat tolerance, plant canopy structure and plant height. At this level only about 5-7% of the lines are advanced to level 2.
  • Level 2 (Y2) is two row plots replicated and planted at four locations throughout the South. Yield is measured and notes are taken on geographical adaptation of lines within the South. Notes are continued on agronomic characteristics. About 10% of lines are advanced to level 3.
  • Level 3 (Y3) is the best of the Y2 lines. Tests are planted in multiple locations and the highest yielding most adapted lines advanced to the Y4 test.
  • Level 4 (Y4) is two row plots replicated and planted widely throughout the South. Seed is not just tested using resources of Terral Seed, but seed is sent to cooperators who plant and harvest for yield, thereby increasing testing scope greatly and assuring true results. At this level, selection of a couple dozen lines go into pilot production in a tropical or southern hemisphere nursery where lines can be purified and seed produced for strip tests and University Trials.
  • Testing does not stop there. Elite or variety tests (VT) are continued during the seed production period. If a weakness surfaces, we are the first ones to know and can prevent wide spread problems. It is not uncommon to cease production of a variety when serious weakness is found late in development. This is almost always before even one bag of seed is sold to a farmer.
  • Breeder seed is produced in only one manner. Bulk testing seed is planted to a seed plot usually a quarter of an acre. Uniform single plants are selected from that seed plot. Those single plants are individually threshed and planted one plant per row. The following cycle rows that do not match are rogued out and remaining uniform non segregating rows are bulk harvested together to form breeder seed. Usually 4 to 10 units of true generation one breeder seed is produced of each variety. This is the only way that a soybean variety can be continued true to form.
  • From there, quality, contract growers produce the seed farmers purchase. All this is handled by the production department and quality control group.