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After more than a decade, the LSU AgCenter is preparing to release a new medium-grain conventional rice variety to farmers. Researchers at the H. Rouse Caffey Rice Research Station plan to launch the new variety next year.
“This variety is an improvement over the current varieties in cultivation right now, which are Jupiter and Titan,” said Brijesh Angira, an assistant professor and head of the medium-grain rice variety program.
The new variety, tentatively called Venus, will be a new conventional medium-grain rice variety. Angira hopes that the new variety will finally be able to take over the dominance that Jupiter, also an AgCenter variety, and Titan, a variety from the University of Arkansas, have had since they were first released in 2005 and 2016, respectively.
The new variety has shown an ability to produce a greater yield and earlier harvest time than the Jupiter rice variety. The grain length of the new variety is between Jupiter and Titan. Like Jupiter, Venus does not have any major gene for blast resistance, Angira said.
Like all varieties released by the AgCenter, the Venus variety has gone through years of research to ensure that it will be an improvement on the varieties in use today on most rice farms.
This will also be the first conventional medium-grain variety release the AgCenter has had since 2011. That variety was named Caffey, after Rouse Caffey, one of the former Rice Research Station directors and the namesake of the research station.
The University of Arkansas has also released a new variety recently, named Taurus. First issued in 2023, this variety also shows potential to out-yield Jupiter and Titan.
The LSU AgCenter and the LSU College of Agriculture
