Image collage with nine different photos of crops and agricultural fields.

Our projects

Page reviewed:  15/06/2025

We work with both large-scale cultivated crops and niche crops in our projects. Cereals, forages foanimal feed, oil crops, legumes, potato, sugar beet, vegetables, fruits and berries are included in the project portfolio.

Here you find a list of our ongoing projects. Further down the page, we will soon also present our completed projects. Click through to learn more about the crops, their characteristics, and the methods we use to develop plant material and breeding techniques.

Current projects

  • Better Barley

    The aim of this project is to strengthen existing domestic barley breeding by introducing novel and efficient methods, in particular the implementation of genomic-assisted breeding for both two and six-row barley.

  • Breeding for disease resistant crops - phase 2

    We develop knowledge and methods in plant breeding to advance new varieties of potato, wheat, oats, sugar beet, and red clover. Our goal is new varieties with high disease resistance and strong yields, well adapted to Swedish conditions - from farm to fork.

  • Breeding of starchy potatoes - improved quality for a more sustainable use of resources - phase 2

    The overall goal of the project is to facilitate a more sustainable use of Swedish starchy potatoes. The goal is to be achieved through detailed variety analyses and development of genetic tools to produce new potato varieties of increased quality and resource efficiency.

  • Building Efficient Breeding Programs in Forages – BreedForage

    We envision building efficient breeding programs for perennial, outcrossing forage crops utilizing current knowledge for sustainable feed and food production.

  • Faba bean for future food and feed - phase 2

    Our vision is to meet Sweden’s demand for protein-based food and feed products by increasing the local production of high-quality protein crops.

  • Future Apple Varieties: Disease-Resistant and Locally Adapted Across Sweden

    The overall goal of the project is to establish infrastructure, tools, and processes that enable an efficient plant breeding process within the Swedish apple breeding program, ensuring its continued ability to deliver high-performing and climate-adapted apple varieties to Swedish apple growers.

  • HeRo - Healthy Roots: Development of tools for the selection of robust cultivars in Swedish plant breeding, with focus on the root system

    The aim of the project is to identify characteristics of plant root systems that can be used as a tool by plant breeders to select crop-resilient varieties, and to evaluate these traits from a cropping systems perspective. We identify genetic markers associated with these traits.

  • Improving the quality of rapeseed cakes for high-quality feed and food - phase 2

    The project aims to develop new rapeseed varieties with reduced levels of antinutritional compounds, thereby expanding the potential uses of rapeseed protein and increasing the value of rapeseed meal. We are evaluating rapeseed lines that we have improved through EMS-induced mutations.

  • Low cost genomic selection

    This project focuses on the development of methods for genomic selection in relation to existing commercial plant breeding programs. Particular emphasis is placed on developing models that enable cost-effective implementation of the method within these programs.

  • Plant breeding for increased seed yield in red clover

    One of the challenges in cultivating red clover for seed production is the extremely high variability in yield. The vision of the project is to make plant breeding for seed yield in red clover more efficient, as it is an important crop in forage production systems.

  • Plant breeding for optimised interactions between crops and microorganisms

    This project is about plant breeding for optimised interactions between crops and microorganisms to enhance disease management and production with reduced agrochemical use.

  • Resilient Potato

    Climate change is driving the need for crops that are more resilient. This project focuses on reducing the reliance on inputs in potato cultivation, such as irrigation, disease control, and other interventions.

  • Robust wheat: breeding for stable and robust wheat for the changing climate

    The project aims to develop robust wheat varieties that thrive under diverse environmental conditions. We are conducing field trials across Sweden evaluating for drought, flooding, and heat. We do experiments in climate control chambers and lab for molecular analyses and evaluation of grain quality.

  • Searching unique qualities from old and alien cereals for use in conventional and organic breeding

    The goal of this project is to identify desirable genes for smell, taste, nutrition, and end-use quality in ancient cereals and wheat-alien introgressions through comprehensive plant breeding-based solutions for improved selection strategies and accelerating cultivar development.

  • Towards winter wheat and oat cultivars with low cadmium uptake

    The goal of this project is to identify genomic regions in winter wheat and oat associated with reduced grain cadmium content, develop diagnostic markers for these regions, and implement the marker use into the official value for cultivation and use (VCU) testing.

  • Variety testing in horticultural field production

    Elitplantstationen has been assigned by SLU Grogrund to establish a long-term national variety testing programme for horticultural crops, with the aim of improving selection processes within Swedish horticultural production and promoting the conditions for increased commercial cultivation in Sweden.

This page is currently under construction. Links to information about our completed projects will be available here shortly.