New Bean Cultivar. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture.
Beans. They have been a staple food all over the world for centuries and come in a variety of types, red, black, pinto, navy, white and one called cranberry. Phil Miklas, research geneticist with the USDA's ARS Vegetable and Forage Crops Research Laboratory in Prosser, Wash. says they have developed a new cranberry dry bean cultivar.
MIKLAS: Cranberry beans are grown and consumed quite a bit in Italy and there they are referred to as Roma or Roman beans. The cranberry beans are grown, Michigan is probably the largest producer of these but there is some grown in Idaho and definitely the seed that the growers would grow in Michigan or anywhere else in the country would get their seed from seed grown in the west which would be mostly Idaho, Washington grown seed.
Miklas discusses the issues that they have been working on with this particular bean.
MIKLAS: So the major problem for cranberry beans that are grown for seed out here in the west is curly top virus. It's vectored by a leaf hopper and most cranberry beans are super susceptible and growers continuously have problems trying to grow cranberry cultivars that are in existence now so this line we developed has resistance to curly top and this resistance is conditioned by a major gene.
In addition to the curly top, Miklas says they have developed another resistance.
MIKLAS: And then it also has resistance to another virus problem which is bean common mosaic virus and that is a virus that is seed borne so when you are producing seed here that is definitely a virus you don't want to have in your plants that would then go into seed and then when you export the seed to other states or countries it would take the virus with it and when they plant the beans then the virus would come into the plant.
Part of that breeding process that Miklas says has taken some 15 years to complete is a greater yield.
MIKLAS: It's also a little bit higher yielding than some of the checks that we compared it to. Seed size is just as good as the standards but it seem to be yielding better. There seems to be some excitement for this in Michigan and then Ontario. And one of the parents that traces back into this bean, this cranberry bean we just released is a Pompadour. It had higher yield than all the other Pompadour.
Test plots are being planted this year with limited availability of seed but Miklas says the new cranberry bean should be available for most growers next year.
That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.
