Green and Black Gram Breeding Program Introduces Crop to Iowa

Feb 20, 2019

By Arti Singh

A new breeding program at Iowa State University is helping farmers looking to diversify their production system. The program, which is being overseen by Arti Singh, adjunct assistant professor in agronomy at Iowa State, is exploring the ways green gram and black gram can be used to accelerate productivity and profitability.

Information about the program and the benefits of green gram and black gram can be found in Iowa State University Extension and Outreach publication “Green Gram and Black Gram: Small Grain Legume Crops for the Midwestern United States.”

Green gram, also known as mung beans, have been grown in the United States and exported around the world since the middle of the 20th century, but growers are dependent on other countries for seeds.

“Currently there are no seeds produced specifically for the United States, and no breeding program to support these crops,” Singh said. “The goal of this research at Iowa State is to start a speed breeding program in greenhouses to create 4-6 generations of the seed per year in order to make fast progress in getting new cultivars.”

The two crops are high in protein and good fatty acids and can be a very high value crop. It is especially attractive to small farmers who want to receive a strong return on investment in a niche market.

“Green and black gram are very similar to soybean,” Singh said. “A farmer who wants to grow green and black gram won’t have to replace machinery to grow and harvest this crop, the most they will have to do is make minor adjustments to their combines.”

Singh’s new publication outlines the new breeding program, discussing the characteristics of the crop in detail. In the summer of 2017, approximately 3,000 accessions of green and black gram were planted to begin germplasm evaluation. These accessions came from all over the world, with seeds native to over 40 countries planted in Iowa. This allowed Singh and her team to see which germplasm lines grew the best in Iowa’s climate and begin targeted hybridizations in 2018. Her team is utilizing modern breeding and genomics tools to develop new cultivars.

“Most of these varieties aren’t suitable to be grown in Iowa,” Singh said. “We are able to weed out those who don’t grow well in Iowa and find the ones that will be best suited to grow here.”

Source:iastate.edu

Video: Wheat Yields in USA and China Threatened by Heat Waves Breaking Enzymes

A new peer reviewed study looks at the generally unrecognized risk of heat waves surpassing the threshold for enzyme damage in wheat.

Most studies that look at crop failure in the main food growing regions (breadbaskets of the planet) look at temperatures and droughts in the historical records to assess present day risk. Since the climate system has changed, these historical based risk analysis studies underestimate the present-day risks.

What this new research study does is generate an ensemble of plausible scenarios for the present climate in terms of temperatures and precipitation, and looks at how many of these plausible scenarios exceed the enzyme-breaking temperature of 32.8 C for wheat, and exceed the high stress yield reducing temperature of 27.8 C for wheat. Also, the study considers the possibility of a compounded failure with heat waves in both regions simultaneously, this greatly reducing global wheat supply and causing severe shortages.

Results show that the likelihood (risk) of wheat crop failure with a one-in-hundred likelihood in 1981 has in today’s climate become increased by 16x in the USA winter wheat crop (to one-in-six) and by 6x in northeast China (to one-in-sixteen).

The risks determined in this new paper are much greater than that obtained in previous work that determines risk by analyzing historical climate patterns.

Clearly, since the climate system is rapidly changing, we cannot assume stationarity and calculate risk probabilities like we did traditionally before.

We are essentially on a new planet, with a new climate regime, and have to understand that everything is different now.