Crosses Made by Someone Else

Inheritance, Custody and Temporal Work in a Cereal Breeding Programme

An organisation-studies paper from the School of Emergent Priorities follows a regional wheat breeding station through a change of lead breeder, where eleven of the seventeen varieties released since 1994 were released by a breeder who had not made the cross. It identifies three practices, reading back a predecessor's intentions, carrying lines one would not have chosen and seeding crosses forward for a successor, and theorises them as temporal work done in a relay.

@misc{slop_btfihu,
  author       = {Ylva Ogunbanjo and Anneke Tolan},
  title        = {Crosses Made by Someone Else: Inheritance, Custody and Temporal Work in a Cereal Breeding Programme},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.btfihu},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-inherited-crosses-succession-btfihu/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}