The next revolution in agriculture—
Boosted Breeding™.
Boosted Breeding provides unprecedented improvements in crop yields that may otherwise take millennia to achieve with traditional breeding methods, which has the potential to realize unimaginable productivity gains for farmers, improve humanity’s access to calories, and reduce the global footprint of agriculture.
Ohalo’s breakthrough technology, which can be applied to nearly every crop on Earth, changes the way plants reproduce, enabling two parents to pass on their entire genome to the next generation, creating Boosted™ plants which contain all the beneficial traits from each parent plant, rather than a random half of the traits from each parent. Boosted plants are healthier, larger, and deliver outcomes not possible with traditional breeding methods.
Boosted Breeding unlocks:
The ability to combine traits into Boosted plants that might otherwise take thousands of years, or be impossible, to combine using traditional methods.
Crops that are larger and more resilient than either of their parents due to trait combinations and radically improved genetic diversity, with overall yield gains of up to 50-100%+.
Genetically uniform true seeds that revolutionize agronomic practices in many clonally propagated crops, helping to increase efficiency, reduce cost, and minimize disease and yield loss.
How it works
Building Blocks
Every living organism contains DNA, and genes are segments of that DNA. Variations in genes deliver variation in physical characteristics of the organism. We call these variations traits. Plant breeders aim to combine traits to make healthier, higher-yielding crops.
Traits and Inheritance
In biological reproduction, a random half of the genes from the mother and a random half of the genes from the father combine to form a unique offspring. This makes improvements in crop yields difficult as plant breeders struggle to find plants that have inherited the right combination of traits to better succeed in the field.
Boosting Plants
Ohalo has developed several novel proteins and techniques that switch off the reproductive circuits that cause reproduction to only deliver half the genes from each parent plant. As a result, the offspring – Boosted plants – contain all the genes from the mother and all the genes from the father, unlocking health and yield.
Improving Yield
With the entire genome from each parent, Boosted plants have more beneficial trait combinations to help them succeed in different environments and greater genetic diversity, which drives networks of gene interactions that improve overall health and growth.
Genetically Uniform Seed
Because the entire genome is delivered from each of the Boosted parent plants, every seed they produce is genetically identical. As a result, Boosted unlocks the ability to produce uniform seed that farmers can use to plant their crops directly in the ground, replacing traditional methods of vegetative propagation used in many crop systems today, saving time and money, and reducing disease risk.
The first of many crops—Boosted Potatoes and True Seed™
Boosted Breeding can be applied across many crops to improve outcomes and reimagine entire crop systems. Ohalo Genetics™ is already applying Boosted to potato, the third largest source of calories for human consumption, delivering higher-yielding, more disease resistant potato varieties that are propagated as true seed, revolutionizing the way potatoes have been grown for centuries. This step change in potato innovation has the potential to vastly improve food security for countries and people that rely on potatoes as a staple and reduce the crop’s environmental footprint.
Today, plant breeders struggle to improve yield and disease resistance of existing potato varieties due to the crop’s challenging genetic makeup. And because of the vegetative propagation of the crop, growing enough small potatoes for farmers to plant each season requires years of production, a heavy infrastructure that consumes natural resources, and causes significant crop loss due to disease.
Boosted Breeding allows us to combine two distinct potato varieties, unlocking improved yield, disease resistance, and making true seed available for the first time ever. Using the Boosted technology will bring the potato industry into the hybrid breeding and seed era, driving the kind of innovation that has historically provided substantial improvements in other crops like corn, wheat, and rice.
Boosted Potato will deliver value to every member of the value chain
Farmers
Boosted True Seed has the potential to significantly reduce disease, enhance quality, and increase yield for farmers around the globe.
Packer-shippers
Without the traditional bulk up period for seed potatoes, new varieties are deployed much faster, enabling supply chain flexibility to respond to consumer demand.
Processors
Accelerated product development delivers climate-resilient potato varieties, ensuring a steady supply to their operations around the world, with a smaller environmental footprint.
Retailers
Eliminating a multi-year seed bulk up period enables a faster, more responsive supply chain for fresher, higher quality, sustainably-grown potatoes and potato products year-round, with a lower environmental footprint.
Consumers
Vastly improved cultivation processes deliver a higher quality, year-round global potato supply, grown in a way that aligns with their desire to leave the planet better than they found it.
About Ohalo Genetics™
Ohalo helps farmers grow more food with fewer natural resources, increasing the yield, resiliency, and genetic diversity of crops to sustainably feed our population. Ohalo’s breakthrough technology, Boosted Breeding, will usher in a new era of improved agricultural productivity to radically transform global agriculture.
Much like hybrid plant breeding systems discovered in the early twentieth century, Boosted Breeding introduces another unprecedented leap forward, with the potential to unlock unimaginable yield, change inefficient agronomic practices, and decrease disease risk across nearly any agricultural crop.
Our Leaders
David Friedberg
CEO
Jud Ward
CTO
Kevin Vosen
CLO & CAO
Christy Toedebusch
VP of Product
Erik Andrejko
VP of Engineering and AI