06/29/06 Organic wheat breeding grant for WSU

Washington Ag June 29, 2006 Washington State University wheat breeder Stephen Jones has received a 680-thousand dollar grant for the USDA to develop wheat varieties suited for low-input and organic agriculture systems. Jones says the competitive grant is for four years. Jones; "And we are going to hire two Phd students and one post-doc to develop wheats that will work under less inputs and become more efficient with nitrogen use and things like that. The trend is very active right now in terms of organic, but it is important to know that we also just deal with the low input of end of wheat production." That means conventional wheat growers could benefit from the research too. Jones: "So, yeah any type of work we do helps out the conventional grower, whether its disease resistance or lower inputs or end use quality or something like that." While conventional wisdom has long held that the best wheat varieties will thrive in any production system, research in Jones' program disproved that notion. For the past five years he's been crossing modern wheat varieties with varieties grown from the 1840's to 1950's, an era preceding the use of commercial fertilizers and other inputs. Jones hopes to release the first organic wheat varieties from his program in the next five years. I'm Bob Hoff.