U.S. organisation funds new wheat research project

USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) has announced a new and significant investment of public funds in wheat research work, reported Corn and Soybean Digest.

The award from NIFA’s competitive grant program, Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) is worth $25 million over five years. It will incorporate work from 56 scientists from 28 institutions, led by Jorge Dubcovsky of the University of California at Davis and Gary Muehlbauer at the University of Minnesota.

Roger Beachy, NIFA’s director, announced the Coordinated Agricultural Project (CAP) award at the University of California-Davis. 

National Association of Wheat Growers (NAWG) immediately released a statement applauding the announcement and USDA’s commitment to wheat research. 

”Enhancing public and private research is at the heart of NAWG’s strategic plan and this is an exciting infusion to our public wheat research system,” says NAWG Chief Executive Officer Dana Peterson.

“These dollars will return significant benefits to farmers by developing tools to adapt varieties planted by growers across the country, which is a significant step in the right direction as we seek to raise wheat yields 20% by 2018.”

The goal of the project is to develop methods to produce new varieties that minimize the damage to crops from stresses associated with climate change.

 The long-term objective is a 10% reduction in both nitrogen and water use in barley and wheat production, though the project will also focus on traits related to fungal diseases and low temperature tolerance.

To achieve these goals, NAWG says the AFRI project will build on the rapidly decreasing costs of genetic markers and other tools to accelerate breeding cycles, improving publicly available germplasm, standardizing methods for high-throughput field evaluation and integrating genetic and field measurements into public databases for use by all breeding programs.