08/14/08 WSU wheat breeder to participate in multi-million dollar EU grant

Farm and Ranch August 14, 2008 Washington State University wheat breeder Steve Jones will partner in a multi-nation, nine-million dollar grant from the European Commission Research Directorate. The grant funds a research project designed to improve the production efficiency of food, feed and biofuel crops. Jones, who is the only U.S. scientist participating, will focus his work on wheat while other researchers will study potatoes, corn and canola. Jones; "And the idea is that plants take up nitrogen and phosphorous of course but they don't do it very efficiently. At best maybe half of the nitrogen applied to the soil gets into the plant into the useable parts and in wheat it is the grain. We have been doing research for the past several years, and others have as well, that shows there is room for improvement there. And we think if we can improve that just five or ten percent that would be really significant for the growers economically." Jones will test for variation in nitrogen uptake in both organic and conventional farming systems. While the primary U.S. interest in this research is economic, particularly because of the skyrocketing costs of fertilizer, Jones says Europe is interested in environmental benefits too, because of their high rainfall and nutrient leaching into surface and groundwater. The EU grant will also support an exchange of graduate students with WSU students going to Scotland. I'm Bob Hoff and that's the Northwest Farm and Ranch Report on the Northwest Ag Information Network.