Agricultural diversification combined with emerging technologies is increasingly seen as central to resilience and food security. This 1-year concept project will characterise and pilot automation across core elements of the variety development process (VDP) — from breeding and variety testing to regulatory and certification. Built on Swiss and EU stakeholder networks and long-term crop variety trial datasets, the project targets five objectives:

1. convene an expert network for a technical horizon scan of how to automate VDP;
2. build a VDP database by combining existing and newly digitised long term variety trial data combined with climate and genomic metadata;
3. pilot a Bayesian forecasting VDP prototype based on the database.

The concept combines expertise from established networks (e.g., SwissPatate, swiss granum, Swiss Plant Phenotyping Network, UNECE) with targeted application of cutting-edge technology (embedded sensors, AI architectures, remote sensing and drone phenotyping).