Structuring an Efficient Organic Wheat Breeding Program

Abstract

Our long-term goal is to develop wheat cultivars that will improve the profitability and competitiveness of organic producers in Nebraska and the Northern Great Plains. Our approach is to select in early generations for highly heritable traits that are needed for both organic and conventional production (another breeding goal), followed by a targeted organic breeding effort with testing at two organic locations (each in a different ecological region) beginning with the F 6 generation. Yield analyses from replicated trials at two organic breeding sites and 7 conventional breeding sites from F 6 through F 12 nurseries revealed, using analyses of variance, biplots, and comparisons of selected lines that it is inappropriate to use data from conventional testing for making germplasm selections for organic production. Selecting and testing lines under organic production practices in different ecological regions was also needed and cultivar selections for organic production were different than those for conventional production. Modifications to this breeding protocol may include growing early generation bulks in an organic cropping system. In the future, our selection efforts should also focus on using state-of-the-art, non-transgenic breeding technologies (genomic selection, marker-assisted breeding, and high throughput phenotyping) to synergistically improve organic and conventional wheat breeding. OPEN ACCESSSustainability 2011, 3 1191

Plant breeding for organic agriculture: something new?

“…This can be seen as one of the elements under which the Green Revolution took place [59]: shuttle breeding, which consists in exchanging segregating generations between different environments to achieve wide adaptation or broad disease resistance. Alternation of germplasm between CF and OF at later segregating generations is considered an important component of commercially sustainable OPB programs by some authors [60][61][62]. A modality of this shuttle breeding scheme, is to only carry out selections of advanced generation progenies, developed by conventional breeding procedures, under optimum organic environments to determine their value for cultivation and use in further testing; this is advantageous, particularly when there is limitation of financial, human, and institutional resources in OPB.…”

Comparison of bread wheat varieties with different breeding origin under organic and low input management

“…Therefore, early stage selection could be based on them during organic breeding. Moreover, some studies also recommend for economic reasons to use a combined strategy for breeding for OA, selecting the material for highly heritable traits in the early generations in (mainly low input) conventional fields, and further selections should be carried out under organic growing conditions for the less heritable traits (Oberforster 2003;Przystalski et al 2008;Löschen-berger et al 2008;Wolfe et al 2008;Baenziger et al 2011). Present study showed that INC, TW, TAR (refers to vigorousness) and also GY could be among these secondary selection targets that should be kept in mind in organic system.…”

Prediction of genetic values of quantitative traits with epistatic effects in plant breeding populations

“…The 280 accessions considered in this paper are part of a population for an ongoing multi-year association study in winter wheat. Data regarding various traits for these accessions were collected in 2010 at up to nine Nebraska locations (see Baenziger et al, 2011 for a description of these testing sites). Traits considered in this paper include grain yield (nine locations), grain volume weight (nine locations), plant height (eight locations) and flowering date (three locations).…”