OSU's Dr. Carver Looks Back At 2015 Wheat Crop, Excited About The Future Prospects

Aug 25, 2015

Mother Nature threw all types of curve balls at the wheat crop this year. The Southern Plains crop experienced both drought conditions along with flooding. In looking back at the 2015 crop, Oklahoma State University Wheat Genetics Chair Dr. Brett Carver said he was very satisfied how the OSU developed wheat varieties handled the conditions.

“We were really hurting for moisture for most of the year and we’ve had a lot of emphasis put on drought tolerance, you know, in our breeding program, so the varieties we have are fairly good on those conditions,” Carver said.

However, no one was quite ready for the monsoon rains that arrived in May. Carver said it's been a long time since they were able to see how the crop would handle heavy rain during the finishing period.

“Some of the varieties didn’t do as well as I thought they would have, but then you know this is the first good opportunity we’ve had since 2007 to look at those kind of conditions,” he said.

The other big curveball was the onset of bacterial diseases, which played a big role in the outcome of this year’s crop. Carver said unfortunately they don’t address bacterial diseases directly.

Mother Nature also threw stripe rust at the crop this year. Carver said he felt like they were prepared for its arrival. He said the strip rust pathogen looked similar to the 2012 pathogen, but was slightly different. Carver said they were seeing injury on varieties that were not badly affected in 2012. Overall, he felt most of the OSU germplasm handed the 2015 stripe rust well.

At the Oklahoma Wheat Review held last week at Redlands Community College in El Reno, Dr. Carver told Radio Oklahoma Ag Network Farm Director Ron Hays about the future of the OSU wheat breeding program. Click or tap on the LISTENBAR below to listen to the full interview.

In looking at future varieties, OSU has been able to speed up advances in developing new varieties with the use of doubled haploid breeding technology. With accelerated breeding, Carver said they are able to produce inbred lines in 16 months instead of seven years. He said they are really speeding up the breeding clock in using this technology. He said they are able to evaluate the grandsons of Duster at the same time they are evaluating the sons of Duster, something they have never been able to do before.

“By making gains quicker you are going to get to the endpoint quicker,” Carver said. “The endpoint being higher and higher yields.”

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Video: Moving Ag Research Forward Through Collaboration

BY: Ashley Robinson

It may seem that public and private researchers have different goals when it comes to agricultural research. However, their different strategies can work in tandem to drive agricultural research forward. Public research may focus more on high-risk and applied research with federal or outside funding, while private sector researchers focus more on research application.

“For me, the sweet spot for public private sector research is when we identify problems and collaborate and can use that diverse perspective to address the different aspects of the challenge. Public sector researchers can work on basic science high risk solutions as tools and technologies are developed. They then can work with their private sector partners who prototype solutions,” Mitch Tuinstra, professor of plant breeding and genetics in Purdue University’s Department of Agronomy, said during the Jan. 10 episode of Seed Speaks.

Public researchers they have the flexibility to be more curiosity driven in their work and do discovery research. This is complimentary to private research, which focuses on delivering a product, explained Jed Christianson, canola product design lead for Bayer CropScience, explained during the episode.

“As a seed developer, we worry about things like new crop diseases emerging. Having strong public sector research where people can look into how a disease lifecycle cycle works, how widespread is it and what damage it causes really helps inform our product development strategies,” he added.

It’s not always easy though to develop these partnerships. For Christianson, it’s simple to call up a colleague at Bayer and start working on a research project. Working with someone outside of his company requires approvals from more people and potential contracts.

“Partnerships take time, and you always need to be careful when you're establishing those contracts. For discoveries made within the agreement, there need to be clear mechanisms for sharing credits and guidelines for anything brought into the research to be used in ways that both parties are comfortable with,” Christianson said.

Kamil Witek, group leader of 2Blades, a non-profit that works with public and private ag researchers, pointed out there can be limitations and challenges to these partnerships. While private researchers are driven by being able to make profits and stay ahead of competitors, public researchers may be focused on information sharing and making it accessible to all.

“The way we deal with this, we work in this unique dual market model. Where on one hand we work with business collaborators, with companies to deliver value to perform projects for them. And at the same time, we return the rights to our discoveries to the IP to use for the public good in developing countries,” Witek said during the episode.

At the end of the day, the focus for all researchers is to drive agricultural research forward through combining the knowledge, skills and specializations of the whole innovation chain, Witek added.

“If there's a win in it for me, and there's a win in it for my private sector colleagues in my case, because I'm on the public side, it’s very likely to succeed, because there's something in it for all of us and everyone's motivated to move forward,” Tuinstra said.