News > Day Three > New barley and triticale varieties coming
Getting a new crop variety registered in Canada doesn't just happen overnight, according to plant breeders with Alberta Agriculture and Rural Development.

Busby barley, a high-yielding general purpose feed variety shown here in development plots, is now being marketed. -- Photo courtesy Field Crop Development Centre, Alberta Agriculture and Rural Development, Lacombe.

It takes at least nine years from when the first cross of germplasm is made until a variety is brought forward for registration. And in the process, it requires the evaluation of thousands of different lines and hundreds of thousands of individual plants, to select the very few that have the agronomic and quality characteristics to become a variety.

That painstaking work has produced many successes at Alberta Agriculture and Rural Development's Field Crop Development Centre at Lacombe, barley breeder Pat Juskiw and triticale breeder Don Salmon told producers at the 2010 FarmTech conference in Edmonton this week.

Since plant breeding programs were established at the Lacombe centre in 1980, some 26 barley varieties and eight triticale varieties have been registered. And several new lines are in the pipeline, with some pending registration.

The process starts with evaluating "superior germplasm" of barleys from around the world, Juskiw told producers.

"On an annual basis, lines and varieties from programs in Mexico, the U.S. and Europe, as well as other geographic areas, are evaluated in our field nursery at Lacombe," Juskiw said. "Those lines with good agronomics (maturity, plant type, and lodging resistance) are retained for crossing purposes."

In the barley program, plant breeders are involved with two-row, six-row and hulless barley types. Aside from the agronomic questions about how well they grow, level of disease resistance and yield, they also have to look at quality issues such as feed quality, forage yield and quality, and food quality characteristics.

New barley varieties include Busby, a two-row high-yielding general purpose feed barley with early maturity being marketed by Mastin Seeds of Sundre; Chigwell, a new high-yielding six-row variety being marketed by SeCan; and a promising new malt variety, H96034009, going forward for registration.

While triticale has largely been a background crop for many years, Don Salmon says new energy has been pumped into the breeding program through projects such as the Canadian Triticale Biorefinery Initiative.

Triticale, originally a cross between wheat and rye, is a multipurpose grain that can be used as feed, fodder, food and now potentially fuel.

Since the first work with triticale was started at the Univeristy of Manitoba in 1950, Salmon has registered eight spring and winter varieties from his program at Lacombe.

Using conventional cross-breeding technology, triticale lines are crossed to produced new lines. While a couple of the very first varieties had a tendency to regress in subsequent plantings to show more of the rye characteristics, Salmon says varieties developed in the last 25 years are "very stable" and remain true to the triticale characteristics.

His most recent varieties include Tyndal, a spring feed variety registered in 2006, and Louma and Metzger, near-awnless winter varieties registered in 2008 and 2009, respectively. He does have a new spring variety, T198, going forward for registration in 2010.

-- Lee Hart is a field editor for Grainews in Calgary.