By Calen Moore
Kansas is an important “breadbasket” state because of its massive wheat production, but in recent years that’s been changing. With poor profits and drier climates, wheat has been harder to manage. New innovations could rejuvenate the economy and production of the wheat state.
It was 1874 when a large influx of Russian immigrants settled in Kansas bringing with them a hard red variety of wheat.
This wheat variety grew well in the harsh summers and dry winters.
Hard red winter wheat swallowed the Plains, and when you drive across Kansas in June you see it turn the land gold. Kansas has even been known in the past as the “breadbasket of the world.”
Today, Kansas embraces its wheat identity, and still is one of the top wheat producing states. But wheat acres have continued to trend downward, falling away to other crops like corn and sorghum.
For over a century, wheat hasn’t changed too much from when it first took over. Other crops have been improved and hybridized. But scientists now think hybrid varieties will create a new wheat era.
Agronomist Logan Simon wipes his brow with a cloth as he walks through test plots used to experiment with corn, cotton and wheat just outside Garden City.
The success of Kansas agriculture relies on research like this.
“It gives us some greater optimism as we move into a potentially drier future,” Simon said.
Hybrid varieties can bring better bread to your stores, healthy livestock that you eat and biofuels for your cars. And it is becoming increasingly crucial as climate change produces challenging environments for Kansas farmers.
These hybrids usually take good traits from different varieties of a crop and combine them to make a plant that’s healthier, hardier or produces more, even in harsh environments.
But it hasn’t been so easy with wheat. Scientists have racked their brains trying to make better wheat hybrids. The plant's physiology makes hybridizing wheat difficult.
Katherine Frels has worked for years in wheat breeding at the University of Nebraska. She said people witness the scientific success of agriculture without even realizing it.
“Whatever crop they're looking at as they go to church, go to the grocery store. Someone had to develop that variety,” Frels said.
Farmers have had innovations in corn hybrids since the 1930s. Soybeans followed shortly in the 1940s. Since corn was hybridized, farmers’ yields have increased about 700%, going from 26 bushels per acre to 183 bushels.
But even with the advent of fertilizers and pesticides, wheat has barely doubled its yields in that same time.
With corn, to make hybrids simply cut off the tassel at the top which produces pollen and plant it with another variety to cross the two.
The problem is wheat pollinates itself, which has made creating hybrid varieties nearly impossible.
Frels has worked on a lot of potential solutions, like chemically sterilizing the plant. She said from their research, out of 1700 wheat hybrid variety trials, there is a yield increase on average.
Universities aren’t alone. Seed companies are also diving in as well, studying how to make enough hybrid wheat seeds so it’s consistently available.
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