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Cereal grain production needs to double in the next 50 years"Will wheat beat the heat," Braun said. By Doug Rich The United Nations and the international wheat breeding community would like wheat yield to reach 4 tons per hectares or about 60 bushels an acre by 2020. "China, Mexico, and Europe are the only countries above that 60 bushel per acre level right now," Rollie Sears, senior development manager at AgriPro-Coker, said. Sears and Hans-Joachim Braun, director of the Global wheat Program at CIMMYT, an international research center in Mexico, made presentations at Commodity Classic on 21st Century wheat research. "The issue for the next several years is global food security," Braun said. "World cereal grain production must double in the next 50 years." Right now all of the major wheat producing areas including North America, Argentina, Australia, and Kazakhstan all have very low yields. Equal to or below the world average, so there is plenty of room for improvement. "But it will require a lot of research," Braun said. "The worldwide average in 2006 was 42 bushels per acre and that needs to increase to 56 bushels per acre by 2025. The challenge is tremendous." Improvements in wheat varieties have come in stair-step fashion and not in a smooth progression, Sears said. Major improvements in wheat over the last 100 years include semi-dwarf genetics, day length sensitivity that allows producers to manipulate when the wheat heads out; the emergence of new market classes like hard white winter wheat; improved resistance to disease and insects; and germplasm exchange. From a breeder's perspective Sears said one of the big improvements was the increased use and mechanization of small plot combines which allowed them to harvest more wheat and measure yield more accurately. The utilization of computers has improved the process, as well. One of the keys to increasing wheat yields will be speed to market for new varieties, Sears said. Using molecular markers can speed up the process of getting new wheat varieties from the initial cross to a variety ready for planting. "Done on a large scale it is faster," Sears said. "Prediction of performance at seeding stage is possible and it is more reliable because I don't have an environment that interferes with the interpretation. It is a lot cheaper for me to take a leaf tissue sample and run it through a lab than plant thousands of rows of material in a field at various locations to get the same information." "Because of the emphasis and dollar investment at Syngenta in molecular markers with other crops, wheat has been able to capitalize on that investment," Sears said. "We get a bigger bang for our buck by linking with other crops." "We have known for a long time that there are certain chemicals that can tweak the wheat plant, but we have never been able to measure it consistently," Sears said. "Now with some of the molecular tools we have available today I think there is a growing opportunity to get that done." "By 2025 farmers will need to produce 3 billion tons of cereals to feed the human population of 8 billion," Braun said. "That is against a backdrop of increasing temperatures and declining land available for agriculture in much of the developing world." Braun said one of the biggest challenges for wheat in developing countries will be climate change. "Will wheat beat the heat?" Braun asked. "CIMMYT has explored a lot of material concerning this trait," Braun said. "We have identified some traits that are very promising. This is one of the highest priorities for the future to develop heat tolerant cultivars. Heat is one of the leading limited factors to increasing wheat yields." CIMMYT has a unique database collected from their many wheat growing nurseries. From every single cultivar they have tested they have seed in the gene bank. "This will allow us to analyze and genotype the cultivars and identify gnomic regions with important traits," Braun said. "At the end of this project we can link phenotype to the genotype and when that information is available I think that will revolutionize wheat breeding efficiency for improving traits." Another challenge for wheat breeders is developing stem rust resistant varieties. In the 1950s stem rust destroyed as much as 40 percent of the spring wheat crop in North America. Breeding for stem rust resistance has been a low priority since that time but it is now near the top of the list. A new stem rust race has emerged in Africa. This new form of stem rust has jumped from eastern Africa and is now in Yemen in the Arabian Peninsula. "We need to develop resistant cultivars very fast," Braun said. Long-term research is looking at moving the immunity of rust in rice into wheat. Genetically modified organisms like this could provide a durable solution to rust resistance in cereal grains. Braun said. "Wheat in the U.S. is just a crop but in many countries it is truly their daily bread," Braun said. "Wheat provides in many countries in central Asia, the Middle East, and Northern Africa 40 to 60 percent of all daily calories consumed by humans. In these countries wheat is not just a crop, it is part of their national security." Doug Rich can be reached by phone at 785-749-5304 or by e-mail at richhpj@aol.com.
B 3 3/19/07 6 Star Midwest Ag Date: 3/14/07
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