At PURIS, delivering high-performing soybean varieties starts long before seeds reach the farmer's field. It begins with disciplined breeding, rigorous evaluation, and a commitment to accelerating innovation without compromising quality. One of the most powerful tools for enabling this progress is our winter nursery program in Costa Rica.
The PURIS winter nursery plays a critical role in advancing our soybean breeding pipeline, allowing us to make meaningful genetic progress even when the traditional U.S. growing season is on pause.
Why the Winter Nursery Matters
Soybean breeding is inherently constrained by photoperiod sensitivity, temperature requirements, and frost risk. In the Midwest and across most of the United States, field-based programs typically operate on a single summer growing season. As a result, breeders generally advance only one generation per year, creating a structural bottleneck in the genetic pipeline
By enabling off-season generation advancement, the winter nursery serves as a cycle-time accelerator, a genetic pipeline optimizer, and an improved data-to-decision flow for our soybean breeding program. It allows us to advance breeding material outside of the standard growing window—effectively turning one growing season into two, and in some cases, three.
This approach significantly shortens the overall breeding cycle and accelerates the development of new PURIS soybean varieties, without sacrificing the rigor required to identify truly high-performing genetics.
Advancing Genetics with Precision and Purpose
Each winter nursery cycle begins with a structured seed analysis, ensuring that only viable, genetically valuable material is planted for advancement. The promising material is planted, managed, and evaluated under controlled conditions that promote rapid, consistent growth. The entire winter nursery operation, including emergence, plant health, early vigor, and phenotypic uniformity, is closely monitored by our breeding team.
Every plot represents a step forward in our breeding pipeline. Some lines move on for further testing, others are selected for crossing, and a small number will ultimately progress toward becoming future PURIS soybean varieties. This disciplined process ensures that only the strongest and most promising genetics are advanced into our commercial pipelines. In this way, the winter nursery functions not only as a cycle-time accelerator but also as a high-resolution selection filter, ensuring that the most promising genetic material is moved into yield testing & commercial evaluation.
Doubling—and Sometimes Tripling—Generation Turnover
One of the most powerful advantages of the winter nursery is its impact on generation turnover. By combining winter and summer growing cycles, we are able to:
- Double annual generation advancement
- In select cases, achieve three generations in a single calendar year
This accelerated timeline allows us to identify and refine desirable traits, such as yield potential, agronomic performance, and consistency, much faster than traditional breeding timelines would allow.
The result is a more efficient, data-driven breeding program that keeps pace with the evolving needs of growers and end markets.
Delivering Value to PURIS Growers
The winter nursery isn’t just about speed—it’s about delivering better outcomes for PURIS growers. Faster breeding cycles allow us to respond more quickly to:
- Agronomic challenges in the field
- Market demand for identity-preserved soy
- Opportunities to improve yield stability and quality
By accelerating the path from early genetics to commercial-ready varieties, we help ensure that PURIS soybeans continue to deliver strong performance and reliable value across the supply chain.
Looking Ahead
The work happening in the winter nursery is a foundational part of PURIS’s year-round breeding effort. Alongside field trials, data-driven selection, and close collaboration across teams, it helps ensure that every new soybean variety is built on strong genetics and proven performance.
As each cycle advances, so does our ability to deliver the next generation of PURIS soybean varieties—developed with intention, precision, and growers firmly in mind.
