From One-Hit Wonder To Lasting Success: Introducing The New Method For Longevity In Plant Breeding

In June of 1982, the band Dexy’s Midnight Runners released an album called “Too-Rye-Ay” that included a song that would come to define their group called “Come on Eileen.” By April, the song had climbed to #1 on the Billboard Hot 100, largely riding the fame of its music video, which got constant airplay on the then brand new channel, MTV, and remains one of the most memorable and beloved clips of the era. However, this was the last time the band hit it big, breaking up just three years later. In 2011, Rolling Stone named “Come On Eileen” one of the top one-hit wonders of all time.?

That very same year, another artist would have his own breakout success. John Cougar Mellencamp released his fifth album titled “American Fool,” which reached number one on the Billboard 200 and yielded two singles, "Hurts So Good" and "Jack & Diane,” which reached number two and number one respectively on the Billboard Hot 100. This album launched Mellencamp’s successful career in which he would amass 22 Top 40 hits in the United States and break the record for the most tracks by a solo artist to hit number one on the Hot Mainstream Rock Tracks chart, with seven. Mellencamp was the opposite of a one-hit wonder.?

The obvious question raised by comparing these two albums is what is it that separates consistent hit makers from one-hit wonders??

This was the question that Stanford psychologist, Justin Berg, set out to answer in his 2022 study titled “One-Hit Wonders versus Hit Makers: Sustaining Success in Creative Industries.” In the study, Berg compiled a data set of more than 3 million songs released from 1959 to 2010 and pulled out the biggest hits. He used an algorithm to analyse the songs and found that hits essentially relied on how similar they were to other contemporary music, but hitmakers who lasted over time depended on a unique characteristic that was able to be repeated throughout the artist's later body of work. In other words, fast fame is found in sameness, but lasting success depends upon a process that unlocks new levels of potential for the artist and for the music industry.?

Bringing New Methods To Our Fields

It was this idea of a new process that unlocks untapped potential which was on my mind when I attended a major plant breeders field day around 15 years ago. That day, along with displaying field plots of all of their latest plant variety trials, one of the researchers was showcasing a test that they had run using potted sorghum plants in greenhouses. The study included three sets of the same variety grown in three different conditions, one set was grown under drought conditions, one set was grown under normal conditions, and the third was grown under high rainfall conditions. The researcher then told us that as part of their study, they had their team walk up and down the rows of plants with a pair of scissors, trimming off excess leaves of the plants grown in drought conditions to improve water use efficiency.

In fact, their results were extremely positive, finding that the plants grown in drought conditions with trimmed leaves, were able to achieve better water use efficiency and were able to maintain an economic yield similar to the untouched plants grown under normal rainfall conditions. While the results were promising, there was an outspoken farmer there who asked, “Who on earth is going to run up and down the rows of their fields cutting off plant leaves with a pair of scissors?” While the idea seemed ridiculous and impractical to broad-scale farming at the time, I was hit with the idea that this type of seemingly impractical management activity is precisely the type of activity that our robots would make possible. After all, a robot has the required accuracy to perform that operation and doesn’t perceive monotonous work like trimming leaves off of a row of plants to be mundane - it just does the task as it was designed and programmed to do it. This could be a new field practice that has the potential to enable us to farm our land more precisely and more efficiently through novel processes.?

As farmers, we’re all familiar with the age-old problem of a one-hit wonder seed variety. Many times, I’ve? headed to plant breeding company field days to see a new experimental sorghum variety that has a much larger grain head, that blows away everything else in the breeding program from a yield perspective. And everyone is excited and itching to get their hands on it when it’s commercially released to market. Until the second year of variety trials when there’s a drought that causes the crop to struggle and lodge (fall over). As a result, that high yielding experimental variety of sorghum is thrown out of the breeding program and left in the genetics dustbin because it’s labeled no good, it all fell over.?

That day at the field day got me thinking, what if we’re throwing away these one-hit wonders without ever giving them a fair shake? What if we’re throwing away the John Cougar Mellenecamp’s of sorghum because we’re unable to provide them with the conditions under which to succeed? What if we could give these experimental varieties that had high yielding potential the conditions they need to shine through years of drought or inclement weather? What if our breeding programs weren’t limited by our extremely standardised equipment and the farming practices we are currently limited to??

This could radically change the way we look at our breeding programs. There is so much unique genetic material that gets discarded every year just because it doesn't fit into the field practices that we currently use to produce our crops, and we are unable to give it the conditions needed for success. Now imagine a future where you have Integrated Autonomy with attachments that can go through your fields and take into account the plant variety, the soil moisture content, and the fact that it has been a dry year and thin excess plant leaves and the number of tillers to achieve better water use efficiency and maintain the high-yielding harvest - even in drought. Now those genetics go from the scrap bin to mass adoption, and that new variety might go from being a one-hit wonder to a hitmaker that can deliver a step change in plant breeding that has been ignored for years and was never going to see the light of day. All because robots enable us to implement a process that unlocks new levels of potential for the crop and for the farmer; robotics can help us use farming methods that turn one-hit wonder varieties into hitmakers that last.?

Our Vision for the Future

Our team is on a mission to do more than just exchange one set of farm machinery for another. We’re building and enabling a whole new system of farming. A system that unlocks new potential, a system that helps us grow crops more intensively, a system that helps us find better, more sustainable ways to run our breeding programs and our farms.?

Please visit our website to get in touch with our team today if you want to learn more about the new system of farming we’re enabling - we call it Integrated Autonomy. This is a farm-centric, customised approach to autonomy that delivers more than another driverless system or niche robotics solution by putting the farmer's needs first and creating a technology ecosystem around them. Our solution provides seamless access to developers who can quickly deliver meaningful answers to specialised challenges. Contact us to learn more today!