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Global wheat prices have softened since hitting a record high in 2022, and Louisiana producers followed suit by planting fewer acres this past season.
LSU AgCenter wheat breeders constantly work to develop new varieties so farmers can grow a profitable crop when market conditions are right, said Noah DeWitt, who joined the AgCenter breeding program last year.
“Wheat acres in Louisiana bounce up and down,” DeWitt said. “If there's a thing we need to make sure is there for when there is a higher wheat price — and it's really going to be economical for growers to plant wheat like it was last year — we want to make sure that we have varieties that are ready and be responsible in that respect.”
DeWitt and veteran wheat breeder Stephen A. Harrison have breeding program yield trials at the AgCenter Doyle Chambers Research Station in Baton Rouge and six other research stations around the state, mostly in Alexandria and Winnsboro. This year they planted additional breeding trials in Mississippi and Arkansas with a focus on developing varieties for northern Louisiana and the surrounding region.
This year research plots were hit with stripe rust, even in Baton Rouge, which typically sees less of the cool weather fungal disease, Harrison said. This allowed the breeders to toss out the breeding lines that were susceptible.
A resistance gene, Yr17, was used to prevent stripe rust for years, but it is no longer effective, Harrison said.
“We're using molecular markers and field resistance to select for additional genes that are effective now,” Harrison said. “That's important because anytime you can save a grower a $25 an acre herbicide or fungicide application, that affects his bottom line.”
Last year the Hessian fly was a “huge issue,” Harrison said, but not this year. Harrison and DeWitt realized that varieties may appear to have resistance to the insect in the greenhouse but not in the field, while others are susceptible in the greenhouse but show good field resistance.
LSU AgCenter Extension agent Justin Dufour inspects a wheat crop in a central Louisiana field. Photo by Kyle Peveto
“What we're trying to make an effort to do is more field-based screenings for Hessian fly to try to get a better sense of what's actually going to stand up,” Harrison said.
The wheat and small grain breeding program is supported by the Louisiana Soybean and Feed Grain Research and Promotion Board and through royalties from SunGrains, a consortium of six university-based small grain breeding programs across the southeast.
Harrison and DeWitt make hundreds of new crosses each year, and it takes years to bring a new variety to market. This year they had two wheat breeding lines increased for release at the University of Georgia foundation seed facility in Plains, Georgia, as part of the SunGrains collaborative program. These potential releases, LA17-42, which has yielded well in the Gulf Coast regions of the South, and LA18-119, a highly scab-resistant line that shows resistance to Fusarium head blight and Hessian fly, should be available to growers in a few years.
LA16022, a release from 2021 marketed as AgSouth Genetics 3022, “has done very, very well in growers’ fields,” Harrison said.
Hessian flies are a major insect pest for wheat. Photo by Noah DeWitt
The breeding team is also working on oat varieties, which are often used for deer food plots but have potential for cover crop use, and triticale, a common cover crop that has much of the utility of rye but with higher grain yield.
“It's a constant series of experiments in the breeding program,” Harrison said. “As breeding lines progress in the program, selection criteria become more stringent, you have fewer and fewer lines that are better suited as varieties.”
Another research project that DeWitt and Harrison have begun with graduate students focuses on developing wheat maturities that work well for double cropping with soybeans. They use drones to collect data to determine when different lines are flowering and drying down, DeWitt said.
“The hope is to try to develop earlier maturing lines that don't head too early,” DeWitt said. “A short grain fill duration is going to help avoid early freezes that we often get in Louisiana and allow growers to get out of the field in time to plant a profitable soybean crop.”
Harrison and DeWitt also have begun focusing on wheat genes that respond to day length rather than cold accumulation because wheat varieties that have an early, short fertilization period can be devastated by a warm winter.
“Day length is the same every year no matter what climate change does,” Harrison said. “That gives you a predictable heading date, which would be very important.”
