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.
