We introduce a strategy to produce exotic rational and elliptic ruled surfaces, and possibly new symplectic Calabi-Yau surfaces, via constructions of symplectic Lefschetz pencils using a novel technique we call breeding. We deploy our strategy to breed explicit symplectic genus-3 pencils, whose total spaces are homeomorphic but not diffeomorphic to the rational surfaces ސރ 2 # ސރp 2 for p = 6, 7, 8, 9. Similarly, we breed explicit genus-3 pencils, whose total spaces are symplectic Calabi-Yau surfaces that have b 1 > 0 and realize all the integral homology classes of torus bundles over tori.