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.

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...

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).