Researchers with the University of Manitoba report progress in the development of new winter wheat varieties tailored to meet the needs of the ethanol industry.
A multi-disciplinary research effort being undertaken by the University of Manitoba is developing and testing the agronomic and end use characteristics of new lines of winter wheat.
Winter wheat breeder Dr. Anita Brûlé-Babel notes the ethanol industry requires a reliable source of high energy, high yielding feed stock similar to what is needed by the livestock feeding industry.
In our program we have been sourcing materials that have been identified as high yield, high starch content, materials from Europe and from North America and some from Asia as well that we’ve incorporated into our program.
In particular we’ve been looking for large seed size characteristics along with good yield potential and also high starch content.
From, a breeding perspective it’s a fairly long term commitment.
We have one line that was approved for registration in the general purpose class last year and we’ll have two more that we’ll propose for registration this year.
These are kind of early materials.
They are high yielding but not much higher yielding than what is currently available.
Right now they have a much better disease resistance package than what’s currently available and that will ensure at least that the kernels are plump and that producers are able to produce the crop with minimal fungicide applications, those sorts of things.
But further down the stream we’ll have other materials that are specifically for the ethanol industry.
Unfortunately a breeding program is not a fast program so it takes probably eight to ten years before we really see the results of re-directing some of the work specifically to ethanol.
Dr. Brûlé-Babel points out researchers started working on alternative classes of winter wheat a few years back and they’ve been working for some time on incorporating fusarium head blight resistance into winter wheat.
She acknowledges the improvements have been small but, they will go a long way toward ensuring the availability of good feed stocks for the industry.
Source: Farmscape.Ca
