Patent ID: 7403855

Claim:
A method of enhancing an experiment relating to plant breeding or advancement or genetic modification for field crop plants, wherein a part of the experiment comprises growing field crop plants from seed of known parentage or generic trait in a growing location in a field comprising: (a) at a planting time, planting a set of seed of known parentage or genetic trait in a the growing location; (b) growing plants from the set of seed so that the plants from the seed emerge from the ground; (c) during a growing time, physically attaching machine-readable identifying data on or with each of a plurality of the growing plants in the field, the data including information distinguishing each of the plurality of the growing plants from other plants; and maintaining a database including the identifying information correlated to each of the plurality of growing plants; (d) during the growing time, deriving a trait or characteristic related to selected plants from the plurality of growing plants by analysis of each selected plant or a part thereof, the derived trait or characteristic comprising information indicative of a gene present in the selected plant, the information indicative of a gene present in the selected plant comprising information indicative of a gene that affects disease resistance, height, protein content, oil profile, flavonoids, yield, maturity, herbicide resistance, or a transgenic trait; (e) adding to the database information about the derived trait or characteristic and correlating it with the plant to which it relates; (f) at a harvest time, harvesting substantially all of the selected plants, or plant materials or seed of substantially all the selected plants, from the field, including those ultimately not selected for continued use in the experiment in a manner that does not require a correlation between each of the harvested selected plants and its position in the growing location in the field, but with the machine-readable data physically attached to each plant; (g) reading the machine-readable data attached to a harvested selected plant; (h) associating the derived trait or characteristic in the database with the identifying data read from the machine-readable data for the harvested plant; (i) deciding, after harvest, on a plant-by-plant basis, whether each individual harvested selected plant and its seed will or will not be selected for continued use relative to the experiment using said association.