Heritable has processed data from some 14,000 samples taken from field trials it or its customers have run in Nebraska, Wisconsin and California with seven different crops.
The project is a field trial, which has been approved by America's Environmental Protection Agency, the EPA. But the way the technology is regulated has provoked concerns.
We can take them out of field trials without getting any of those sorts of permissions and can take them all the way through to commercialisation which is fabulous.
Plant geneticists must decide which traits they are looking for, cross plants which appear to possess them, run a series of field trials and wait to see if their new plants are an improvement.
So, to get the best possible data on these older wheats compared to the newer ones, the team conducted field trials at four different locations in Germany -- by growing 75 different varieties of wheat in each place.