10/02/08 An opportunity for more regional wheat breeding cooperation

Farm and Ranch October 2, 2008 As Washington State University moves forward to fill its two vacant wheat breeder positions one opportunity it sees is to have more regional cooperation among wheat breeders. Rich Koenig is the incoming chair of the department of Crop and Soil Sciences at WSU. Koenig: "The other breeders in the northwest see opportunities for collaboration. We certainly, in these two positions, have the opportunity to make those connections, build those bridges. There is no reason why we shouldn't be. There are opportunities with winter and spring breeding to collaborate with others in the northwest and with private industry. We will try to make that focus of these positions." Koenig says an example of regional cooperation would be more open sharing of germplasm. Koenig: "A case in point would be southern Idaho an irrigated spring wheat program. Is there an opportunity for irrigated spring wheat for Washington. In exchange can Washington provide dryland spring wheat material for Idaho. Idaho doesn't have much a dryland spring wheat breeding effort. So is there an opportunity there to have an exchange essentially." WSU previously had a spring wheat breeder and a winter wheat breeder but has not determined how the program will be structured in the future. The breeders who held those positions, Kim Kidwell and Steve Jones, have taken other positions within WSU. I'm Bob Hoff and that's the Northwest Farm and Ranch Report on the Northwest Ag Information Network