Abstract:High-yield and high-quality forage varieties are the key to sustainable development of grass-based livestock husbandry in China. However, the forage breeding was started late in China, and the progress is very slow, and the forage varieties of independent intellectual property rights are seriously lacked. Forages generally have self-incompatibility, natural allogamy, polysomic inheritance, and marked inbreeding effects. Subsequently, it is difficult to characterize agronomically important complex traits, resulting that the breeding technology is still in the 2.0 era of hybrid breeding. The molecular design-based breeding is a fine strategy to speed up the breeding process, however, there is a lack of theoretical and technical system for the molecular design-based forage breeding. Recently, the Chinese Academy of Sciences has launched the strategic priority program "Establishing Scientific and Technological System of Ecological Grass and Animal Husbandry", to dissect complex forage genomes, establish a new molecular design-based forage breeding technologies, and breed high-yield and high-quality forage varieties with independent intellectual property rights.