Functional Grains Centre researchers, Professor Chris Blanchard, Ms Annie Riaz, Dr Asgar Farahnaky and Associate Professor Dan Waters attended the Australian Grains Technology (AGT) field day held at the Kabinga Research Centre, headquarters for AGT’s south-eastern Australian breeding program, in early October 2017.

As Professor Waters reports, it put the spotlight on wheat breeding.

Although Australian Grains Technology (AGT) has an active breeding program for a number of crops, wheat was the focus of the day. The Kabinga Research Centre assists AGT in the delivery of long season and dual purpose wheat varieties suited to acid soils. The field day was well attended by farmers, agronomists and consultants.

Plant breeders need to package many traits into new varieties targeted to a diverse range of environments and sowing windows and this means the AGT wheat breeding program is, with 250,000 plots, large and complex. AGT wheat breeders Britt Kalmeier and Russell Eastwood clearly explained how all the parts of the breeding program come together to deliver new high-yielding high-quality varieties to wheat growers. A highlight of the day was inspecting the historical wheat varieties which Ms Annie Riaz is studying for her PhD in the FGC. She has discovered modern wheat varieties are not only high yielding relative to the historical varieties, they also contain reduced levels allergenic proteins relative to historical varieties.