New techniques can boost yields, improve animal welfare. But are you ready?

The process of producing better food, protecting the environment and improving animal health is advancing at a seemingly breakneck pace.These advancements are driven in part by new scientific discoveries, genetic research, data science, enhanced computational power and the availability of new systems for precision breeding like CRISPR—an acronym for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats. With the new techniques, they are "doing the same things that breeders have always done, but very precisely," she said.The outcomes possible with different types of gene editing today might have seemed impossible just a few decades ago. And now, these new opportunities have strong implications for both producers of crops and livestock, as well as consumers.