Perennial crop breeding
The people spending careers on the slowest question in agriculture: whether a staple grain or nut crop can be a perennial and still yield.
Notes
Almost every calorie the world eats comes from an annual, which means almost every calorie is paid for by disturbing soil once a year. The alternative has been obvious for a century and unattempted for the same reason: a breeding cycle in a perennial takes years, and a career yields a handful of generations.
The programmes here have chosen to spend those careers anyway. One took a forage grass and has pushed it through ten generations of domestication toward a harvestable grain. Another has been making inter-species crosses of hazel, chestnut and hickory since 1978 with staple-scale production as the goal.
Progress is measured in decades, and it is the kind of work that only happens inside an institution built to outlive the breeder.