10-29 IAN Hulless Barley

What’s at the end of a barley crop? An ice cold beer? A hearty bowl of soup? We’ll find out that perhaps there’s more to barley than meets the eye on Today’s Idaho Ag News. Growers are taking another look at barley, these days and that may end up altering the types of varieties planted in southern Idaho. Don Obert, at the U.S. Department of Agriculture Research Service's Aberdeen laboratory is a barley breeder, and he’s working overtime on two types of hullless barley. In areas where growers still rely on surface irrigation in the Magic Valley, Don thinks hulless has potential as an alternative to malt barley.

 The key here is health in the form of a compound called beta glucan which has great fiber content that the food industry would like to extract and add to some of their products: “They have high beta glucan which is a fiber so a lot of health benefits to it.”

 Hulless barley varieties have twice as much beta glucan as varieties with hulls. Obert also says that if the application isn’t making beer, then there are disadvantages to growing barley with hulls: “When they run through the combine, they look basically exactly like wheat. You don’t have the hull on that a barley would have. The hull is good for malting but for anything else it’s pretty well waste, for human consumption we couldn’t digest it because it’s basically hull.”

 Obert hopes to release one or maybe both of the varieties sometime very soon. He is working with a private company to determine which variety will best meet their criteria.