Insights into engineering flowering time for breeding innovation and strategies to overcome trade-offs.

Increasing global population, reduction of arable land, limitation of cultivable conditions due to global warming became a huge challenge for sustainable food production. There is a threat that the current plant breeding techniques may become obsolete in the face of these problems. Amid this challenges, novel technologies also presenting innovative tools to face these problems. In the era of precision genome editing, classical breeding strategies are considered to be time consuming, labor intensive and in near future, it will be considered as a rudimentary way of plant breeding when compared with techniques such as CRISPR/Cas9, Prime editing and base editing technologies. Even though these tools provide an accelerated approach for crop improvement, Targets for these tools must be carefully selected and utilized for more precise plant breeding programs. However, manipulating key traits such as flowering time can entail trade-offs, including altered resource allocation, reduced yield potential, or developmental constraints. Advances in sequencing technologies provide high-resolution insights into gene functions, enabling precise identification of targets to mitigate these trade-offs. Flowering time in model and cultivated crops has been extensively studied, with numerous homologs characterized for potential application. This review emphasizes flowering time as a major trait for crop improvement under current agro-dynamics, it highlights the associated trade-offs, and it discusses strategies which include gene editing, tissue-specific promoters, and conditional regulation to optimize flowering traits and enhance productivity in food, feed, fiber, and energy crops. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11032-025-01620-x.