White Spelt

A change from barley for this post - proving that I don't have a one track mind.

Wheat can be divided and classified into groups in several ways: spring vs. winter; hard vs. soft; milling vs. feed.  A less used classification (in the UK, anyway) is grain colour, probably because nearly all the wheat in the UK is red-grained.  White-grained wheat lacks the tannins in the seed coat that can give bitter flavours to wholegrain, so is very suited to a range of healthy wholegrain foods.  The disadvantage of white wheat is susceptibility to sprouting, which was the only weakness of 'Holdfast' wheat, released by the Plant Breeding Institute in 1935, and long considered the gold standard for UK bread making wheat quality.

Holdfast wheat grains - super quality bold clean grains (from Mike Ambrose at the Germplasm Resources Unit at the John Innes Centre).

Nearly three years ago I had a daft idea that I scribbled down in my field notebook "white spelt??". 

The origins of European spelt wheat are a subject of debate, but the most likely theory is that spelt came from a chance hybridisation between hexaploid wheat Triticum aestivum (genome = AABBDD) and tetraploid emmer Triticum turgidum (AABB), as the D genome shared by modern bread wheat and spelt is identical but the A and B genomes differ.

Spelt remained in cultivation in areas around the Alps where it was better able to tolerate colder poorer soils and is now undergoing a resurgence due to its flavour and suitability for low-input growing.

My idea was that a white-grained spelt would have a unique sweeter wholegrain flavour, possibly be suited to sowing later in autumn (a practice to control black-grass, but risks sowing into wetter colder seedbeds) and perhaps the tough glumes would help protect against moisture ingress (and so help reduce sprouting) and fungal pathogens.

Spelt can be easily hybridised with common wheat by conventional plant breeding, so I made the cross between a modern white grain wheat and spelt, grew on the progeny and selected the white grain 'spelty' plants.

This is not proper science (just curiosity-driven mucking about) so will never get a BBSRC grant for it, nor is industry-led applied science - millers haven't asked for it and farmers won't be interested in growing a lower yielding crop without a market.  

Not sure about baking quality etc. as have never had enough seed - a few trial plots sown this autumn to hopefully get some grain to play with next harvest.
 
Probably be never more than a curiosity, but here are some photos:

Normal red spelt vs. white spelt

Holdfast white wheat vs. white spelt - spelt grains are longer with a keel

Spring-sown white spelt - v. late to ripen vs. spring barley, best sow in autumn

winter-sown white spelt vs. Solstice wheat - ears much longer on the spelt

uzu - Japanese barley in Shropshire

Firstly I haven't posted in a while - busy with harvest and now getting ready for the new term at Harper Adams.

I'm now using twitter for small updates and photos and this blog when I want to go into more depth than 140 characters allows.

My twitter handle is @naked_barley 

Earlier in the year I promised to explain what uzu barley is.

If you've seen The Seven Samurai (the Kurosawa original), you may remember that the villagers' plight is that that bandits have stolen their rice harvest and will come back to steal the barley, leaving the villagers to starve, hence the urgency to employ protection before the harvest.

In the double crop system traditionally used in Japan, mugi (winter corn) is sown after the rice harvest in October. Barley or rye are the preferred choices as they mature before the rainy season in June, and are then followed once more by rice.  

Most Japanese naked barley varieties grown as mugi are uzu types, which are dwarf varieties, with stiff straw, ideal for growing in fertile soils.  The uzu dwarfing gene confers insensitivity to brassinosteroids (BR), whilst Western dwarf barley uses genes such as sdw, conferring insensitivity to gibberellin (GA).

The uzu gene also causes the leaves to be short and erect and prevents the lower stems etiolating (extending) in response to shade - hence uzu barley may be suitable for high plant densities to suppress weeds.  

Grains of uzu barley are round and fat and ideal for a range of food uses.

So why not try uzu in the UK?

The problem is the lack of adaptation to the UK, especially to day length.  Anyone who's tried growing Oriental vegetables such as pak choi will have found that the long days in summer often cause the plants to flower (bolt).  Spring sown uzu barley sent to me by Mike Ambrose at the John Innes Centre when I was at Bangor did exactly this.  It produced ears very quickly without tillering (producing extra stems) and the biomass and yields were low.  Sowing in October produced better results, but Bangor's Henfaes Research Centre is near sea level on the coast and has very mild winters.  When I autumn-sowed uzu barley at Harper the Shropshire winter killed more than half the plants - back to the drawing board.

I crossed the Japanese Kitagawa Chobo with Westminster and the results were encouraging, except for a tendency for the stem base to be weak, so I crossed again onto Westminster (a backcross).

Now we can start to see the uzu trait in an adapted background.

The uzu plots are also darker green but the erect leaves let more light into the lower canopy - a more even distribution of photosynthesis.

Grains are excellent - specific weight of 80 kg/hl vs. 65-70 in 'normal' barley.

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

If you can forgive the pretension of quoting Tolstoy, we can substitute 'family' with our 'ideal variety'.   An ideal food barley variety - our 'ideotype' - would be as follows:

High yielding
Strong strawed
Competitive with weeds
Resistant to all major barley diseases
Have free-threshing golden, bright, bold grains that resist staining and sprouting in wet weather
Have a high content of beta-glucan soluble fibre.

Unfortunately the ideal is very difficult to achieve: most of my breeding populations so far are unhappy in their own ways; some are strong of straw and resist disease well, but have grey grains or don't thresh easily; others have superb grains but lodged when we had the thunderstorms last week.

One of the best compromises so far is line 90, a Lawina grandchild.  It has stiff straw like a modern spring barley but has clean naked grain and long ears from Lawina.  Its weakness seems to be susceptibility to mildew.  That's where breeding comes in. The next step was to make another cross to bring in better disease resistance from the covered variety KWS Orphelia.  I posted a photo of the F1 in the glasshouse earlier.  Now the F2 is looking good and ready to make some selections from.

The plan is to accept that the early breeding lines such as line 90 are not the finished article and to use them for further crossing - called parent building by the distinguished barley breeder Don Rasmusson.

Uploaded a short video of the spring plots to youtube.

Had an idea for an advertising campaign based on the purple colour of the ears that matches black-grass almost perfectly:

Have a black-grass problem?

Go naked to hide your shame!

Harper Adams naked barley has been carefully colour-matched to hide the dirty purple stain of black-grass on your field - if your neighbours can't see, you can pretend it isn't there! 

On a more serious note - after crunching the data, I saw that the GAI (Green Area Index) of the facultative barley in November was more than twice that of KWS Cassia, so much more competitive in autumn when most black-grass germinates.

Other reasons to grow my barley:

2-row vs. KWS Cassia

6-row with 108 grains per ear

Many farmers complain about the trend for modern varieties to be late maturing - be careful what you wish for: this will be ready in a month (late June).

Why vernalisation matters

Vernalisation, the need for a period of cold over winter before a plant can switch from vegetative to reproductive development, is sometimes seen as a bit of a nuisance. It imposes a 'last safe sowing date', meaning that seed sown in the spring will not produce grains.

However, if the vernalisation requirement is very low or non-existant, early autumn sown crops are vulnerable to precocious ear development and frost damage as seen in the ICARDA-bred barley below.  October sowing of this variety has been OK in the past, but September 20 was too early, especially with the very mild autumn we had in 2013.

Fortunately the variety bred at Harper Adams from a UK x ICARDA cross (on the left) looks better (ICARDA on the right).  Best ear I have found in this population so far is a 6-row with 18 triplets on each side = 18 x 3 x 2 = 108 grains per ear! Hope we get enough sun to fill all those grains.

   

Naked barley beats-up black-grass

Public enemy number one for many arable farmers is black-grass.

Below is a photo of the rhizotron root chambers we've set up for Cereals 2014 next month.

Spring wheat and one of my spring naked barley lines were sown along with black-grass.

The barley on the left has far more competitive shoot-growth; longer, broader leaves that sprawl over the ground to cut out light to the weeds.  What I didn't expect was the difference in root growth.  The wheat on the right is being out-competed below ground, and most of the root mass in the upper soil layer is black-grass, allowing the weed to strangle the wheat.  

The barley roots are out-competing the black-grass; but what is also interesting is that the barley plants aren't competing as strongly with each other.  The crown roots grow at 45 degrees until they meet roots from their neighbour barley plant, then grow downwards.  They do not invade each other's space or grow under their neighbour.  On the other hand, they show no such respect to the black-grass, cutting across, undermining and generally out-muscling them.

Another good reason to grow a bit less wheat and a bit more (preferably naked) barley.

Spring Trials Up!

Spring naked barley plots for 2014 have emerged.

The experiment includes a whole pipeline for finding the ideal spring naked barley variety for the UK.  There are early generation populations (F2), ready for selection, right through to F5/6 lines that have been selected and are now being purified for potential release as a variety.

Good potential in the glasshouse is of no use if a variety doesn't perform in the field.

There are also plots of uzu naked barley (will explain in a later post) and white grained spelt wheat.

Facultative barley - what's that?

In my first attempt to create winter naked barley, I used a cross using a Syrian variety, bred by ICARDA.

Sown into cold mud in November 2012, the yield was good (7 t/ha), and even better, the quality was excellent with big bold grains.

So in 2013 we sowed on 20 September (an early sowing for winter barley to maximise yield potential) and the seedlings sprang out of the ground in a week.

Autumn 2013 was very mild, and the crop marched on too quickly.

By March it was apparent that the crop was too far forward, and there was damage by waterlogging.

The reason why being forward (developing too fast) is a problem is that the ear develops inside the plant too early and begins to move upwards and so is vulnerable to frost damage in late winter.  Thankfully March 2014 was mild (unlike March 2013) so for the most part we got away with it.  A few plants showed frost damaged ears (and a lot in the comparison plots of the Syrian parent), and these were rogued out to improve the population.  

So what does this mean? It appears that the first attempt at 'winter' naked barley I have is a 'facultative' type - a winter-hardy spring barley, that unlike a true winter barley, does not need a long cold period in winter (vernalisation) to initiate flowering next spring, but unlike spring barley, can survive winter.  The lack of vernalisation requirement means that this variety should not be sown too early in autumn - probably from 10 October onwards, but will do some experiments this autumn. 

This could be very useful, with a flexible sowing window from October until April - in the USA facultative barley is described as 'plant when you can'.

For a true winter barley, for sowing in late September-mid October, I'll concentrate on the Glacier crosses.

So now I have three types to suit all situations - spring, facultative and winter.

GM Camelina

Pleased to see the field trial of GM Camelina has got the go-ahead at Rothamsted.

I grew the non-GM varieties at Bangor University and found Camelina to be a good prospect as a low input crop.  Yields were low (around 2-3 t/ha), but costs very little to grow and has very short growing season (April/May - August).  Could be an ideal crop in a rotation to deal with black-grass and provide a timely sowing for a following wheat.

Usual complaints from the antis - sadly a lot of misinformed comments - although there are legitimate concerns with some other GM crops, the Rothamsted crop is not developed by Monsanto; is not 'Roundup-Ready'; will not cause Indian farmers to commit suicide; will not kill butterflies; and will not create 'super-weeds' etc.

Of course, it may not perform in the field as it has in the glasshouse - which is why the trial must be done.  

And as someone using (conventional) plant breeding to improve the health of our food I welcome this and Professor Cathie Martin's GM purple tomatoes (developed at the John Innes Centre, but having to be grown in Canada). All adds to the debate around food and health.

  

Spring naked barley

Spring barley needs fewer inputs, so is cheaper to grow.

In the UK, its ability to compete with black-grass is especially important, as this weed is expensive and difficult to control (or attempt to control) in winter wheat.  80% of black-grass seeds germinate in the autumn so can be destroyed before spring sowing by cultivation or total herbicide, creating a stale seedbed.  Spring germinating black-grass plants are less competitive and get beaten up by spring barley which covers the ground quickly, blocking out the light and grabbing water and nutrients.

I have a couple of dozen spring crosses, and these were sown in the field last week - F2s of new crosses and later generations of selected lines from older crosses.

This one looks promising...

Winter naked barley

Winter barley is sown in autumn, and has longer to develop a good root system and tiller (produce side shoots) than spring barley.  Yield potential is higher and the grains fill earlier in the year when conditions are likely to be cooler, so tend to be larger and of better quality.

Unfortunately there are no winter naked barley varieties in the UK.

The process:

I removed the anthers from 'Lawina' spring naked barley before they matured and shed their pollen. This prevents self-fertilization.  I then dusted pollen from 'Glacier' covered winter barley.

The F1 seeds set are shown below:

The F1 hybrid plants are then grown in the glasshouse to multiply seed.

The F2 plants will be grown in he field and I'll start selecting.

An F1 plant looking very promising...

Barley is an excellent food grain, being rich in beta-glucan that can lower cholesterol and reduce the risk of type-2 diabetes.

Unfortunately all barley currently grown in the UK has grain covered by an inedible hull or husk.

Naked barley grain threshes free from the hull so is perfect for food uses.

Again, unfortunately there are no naked barley varieties bred for UK conditions - that's where my efforts in plant breeding come in.

Naked barley grains bred at Harper Adams from a cross between Lawina (a low yielding, disease-susceptible naked barley, but with excellent grain quality) and Westminster (a high yielding, disease-resistant UK covered barley).

This is a blog to record my efforts in breeding naked barley varieties that can grow successfully in the UK.