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Hard whites and other 21st century priorities
NEWEST OF SIX globally recognized wheat classes is a hard white wheat (HWW) with a potential for yielding 1 to 2 percent more flour than hard red wheat.
Preferred for Asian noodles, hard whites also provide domestic and international consumers with whole-grain baked products free of the bitterness of hard reds. “Because you can mill the whole kernel, and the flour has a white color and a little bit sweeter flavor, all of the big millers have fast-growing product lines that use hard white wheat,” says Blaine Jacobson, Idaho Wheat Commission executive director.
At the IWC’s request, Aberdeen wheat breeder Ed Souza’s successor Jianli Chen is focusing half of her efforts on hard white wheats.
Before her arrival in 2007, Souza had already released three hard white springs—Idaho 377s, Lolo, and Lochsa—and two hard white winters—Gary and UI Darwin. “Because two-thirds of our wheat crop is planted in the fall, we could take production to the next level with a good hard white winter,” Jacobson notes.
According to Mark Samson, vice president, U.S. Wheat Associates, his organization has identified an additional 4 to 5 million tons of wheat exports that could be generated if U.S. growers produce more hard whites, “preferred for their higher percentage of flour and stronger protein level,” he says. At Aberdeen, UI Extension cereal cropping systems agronomist Juliet Windes and Idaho Wheat Quality Laboratory cereal chemist Katherine O’Brien are investigating the relative contributions of environment and genetics to the pre-harvest sprout damage that occurred in southern Idaho in 2008 and that often undermines the quality of hard whites in moister regions.
The future of the industry.
Chen says growing conditions in southern Idaho’s high desert are usually “perfect” for hard whites. She calls them “the future of the industry” and believes that Idaho will be a strong competitor in that marketplace. IDO 651—a potential 2009 release—is the first hard white winter wheat that resists damage from the grass herbicide imazamox.
Besides hard white winter and spring wheats, Chen is also breeding soft white spring wheats, hard red spring and winter wheats, and such specialty grains as waxy, low phytic acid, and biofuel wheats.
Resistance to stripe rust, dwarf bunt, foot rot, snow mold, and—more recently—stem rust and Fusarium head blight are top-tier priorities.
A new goal is developing varieties that withstand heat and drought and that will retain their competitive advantage despite global warming.
To speed her progress, Chen employs a novel technique called doubled haploid that rapidly stabilizes desirable traits and that can shave three to five years from release time. Working with the Western USDA Genotyping Center at Washington State University, she has also used molecular markers to evaluate 276 Pacific Northwest released varieties and historic lines for end-use qualities, disease and insect resistance, drought tolerance, and other important traits—an evaluation that reveals the sources of desirable characteristics and that could extend genetic variation sufficiently to produce significant hikes in yield.
Soft white wheat.
In Moscow, UI wheat breeder Robert Zemetra currently emphasizes development of high-yielding, high-quality soft white wheats using marker-assisted selection for multiple-gene resistance to fungal and viral diseases and herbicide damage. These include shorter-strawed varieties particularly for irrigated fields. Because he starts all of his plants in the Ag Biotech Wing’s growth chamber before transferring them to the greenhouse, his material has been “extremely” clean. “That may seem very mundane, but it’s a big benefit for us when we’re doing our crossing”—and it’s another reason he’s thankful for funding by wheat growers.
Boosting profits.
Today, Windes and Brad Brown, UI Extension crop management specialist at Parma, are investigating fertility practices that boost proteins in hard white wheat to the market-rewarding 14 percent level and slow- release, coated nitrogen fertilizers that could reduce application frequency.
Idaho wheat growers are also awaiting results of other UI studies with the potential to improve their bottom lines: among them Windes’ seed treatment trials for soil-borne diseases of dryland wheat, Nilsa Bosque-Pérez and plant virologist Alex Karasev’s statewide survey of plant viruses capable of attacking wheats, and UI Extension weed scientist Don Morishita’s evaluations of new wild oat and broadleaf weed herbicides.
Growers have already benefited from Morishita’s studies demonstrating the weed-controlling impacts of lower-rate herbicides, improved stands, and more competitive varieties. For jointed goatgrass—a weed whose similarity to wheat makes it especially difficult to selectively control—CALS’ Clearfield wheats are delivering a knock- out punch, he says. “They’re so effective that some growers have significantly reduced goatgrass populations.”
Economic concerns.
In Plummer, former IWC commissioner Sam Tyler says CALS faculty researchers have long responded to growers’ economic concerns. “You try to lower your inputs and raise your outputs, and the university has done an excellent job in this, in my estimation.”
A study by college agricultural economists identified unacceptably high variability between cash and futures prices when growers cross-hedged white wheat—for which there is no viable futures contract— with classes of wheat that are traded on the futures market. Research by UI’s Larry Makus and Paul Patterson documented the availability of wheat straw residue for such alternative uses as strawboard and ethanol, while other CALS agricultural economists calculated the economic impacts of wheat and barley crops in Idaho.
Has the day come for wheat with biotech traits?
What IWC commissioner Joe Anderson of Potlatch would like to see next is a steep climb in yields.
“Quality is important, but we make money when we have yield,” he says. “We have not had a home-run hit in the genetics of wheat yield improvement since we went to Gaines and other semi-dwarf wheats in the 1960s.”
Around the world, wheat is competing for acreage with genetically modified corn, soybeans, and cotton, Anderson notes. “When you can grow 200 bushels of GM corn in southern Idaho and on that same land you can grow 80 to 90 bushels of wheat, which one can you grow cheapest on a per-unit basis? You can sell corn for less money and still make a profit on it—just because of yield.”
Samson says south Asian buyers have been softening their positions against wheat with biotech traits, particularly in recent years when demand for wheat outstripped production. Now, they’re “privately saying if it will reduce prices, if it will increase production, if there’s a benefit to consumers, then we would take a better look at it.”
Zemetra maintains a small research program in genetic engineering. In the early 1990s, before the marketplace froze out biotech wheat, he was a pioneer in transforming soft white wheats with barley yellow dwarf virus (BYDV) resistance. Now, with signs of the marketplace thawing, Zemetra, Bosque-Pérez, and Karasev are building a nucleic acid sequence from BYDV into the plant so that the plant will recognize and destroy it.
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