About Us

History acknowledges as a great agricultural country, Cereals (barley, wheat and sorghum), legumes (faba bean, fenugreek, lupine and chickpea), oil crops (safflower and sesame), flax, berseem clover and onion have been cultivated for thousands of years, At the beginning of the twentieth century, an exponential increase in population and escalating demand for food captured the attention of policy makers, Efforts were undertaken to develop crop produc-tion and cropping systems.
Activities in field crops were initially included in the plant Breeding Section (1903-1910), the Agriculture Department (1910-1958), the Crop Research Department (1958-1972) and later in the Field Crops Research institute (1973 until the present). The 1980s saw intensified research and extension activities and a shift towards privatization, close cooperation with international agricultural communities, and active participation with a number of development agencies, in particular USID, which cosponsored two large projects, EMCIP and NARP, In the course of the institute’s history, more than three hundred cultivars have been released and introduced into Egyptian agriculture, The ultimate goals of the institute were, and still are, to increase productivity of major field crops through breeding for high-yielding varieties, produce basic seed of improved varieties, research major constraints of field production, provide suitable recommendations for agronomic practices, and undertake extension activities throughout the country .