Soil-building wheat

Out of curiosity I grew some Rampton Rivet alongside the Holdfast shown in a previous post.

Rivet wheat (Triticum turgidum sbsp. turgidum) is a tetraploid wheat, related to durum (T. turgidum sbsp. durum) and was grown up until the Second World War.  Another name for it is English Wheat, although it appears that common or bread wheat (T. aestivum) was always the most important (Bell, 1948).

Rivet was recommended for "clay soils of low fertility", whilst the high yield and quality bread wheats such as Holdfast are suited to "land in good heart" (Stapledon and Davies, 1948).

Rampton Rivet was an improved selection from the Rivet landraces of Cambridgeshire, and was very much last of the line.  Rivet is no longer grown commercially in UK, except on a very small scale.  

Having seen differences in rooting between modern wheat and spelt, and reading about Rivet's suitability for clay, I expected the root system to be better than modern wheat. I was still shocked by the contrast.

On the left is Skyfall, a modern variety; on the right is Rampton Rivet.  Both were sown at the same time and grown in the same glasshouse.  Skyfall is a superb modern variety, with a yield to match barn-filling feed varieties, high quality grain and a good agronomic package.  Rivet on the other hand is a machine to pump carbon into the soil, with thick, deep scavenging roots and a mass of fine roots.  The straw is also very coarse, therefore a good source of the lignin that feeds beneficial soil fungi that are often deficient in our soils.

Have we lost something here?  Is there a place for crops that help keep the soil in "good heart"?

References
Bell G.D.H. (1948). Cultivated Plants of the Farm. Cambridge: CUP
Stapledon R.G. and Davies W. (1948). Ley Farming. London: Faber
http://www.dovesfarm.co.uk/resources/whats-new/interview-with-archaeobotanist-john-letts/

Breeding the 'perfect' naked barley

I've been lucky to be allowed some time to indulge in unfunded hobby breeding at Harper Adams, but why isn't this work being done by a proper plant breeder?  The answer is that nearly all plant breeding in the UK is done commercially,  paid for by breeders' rights and and so breeders get paid for every tonne of seed sold or saved on farm.  Therefore it simply isn't economic to breed niche crops like naked barley or spelt - far better to go for the next barn-filler feed wheat.

My system is simple and low-tech:

1. Choose parents and make the cross
2. Grow the F1 plants in the glasshouse to get as many F2 seeds as possible (2000-3000 ideally).
3. Grow a plot of F2 in the field
4. Select the best naked grain ears and keep a sample of the remainder
5. Grow 10-20 of these selections over-winter as F3 in the glasshouse
6. Bulk the selections back (discarding any 'rejects' and keeping any really promising back for single-seed descent
7. Sow a plot of the F4 selections and a plot of the bulk F3 to allow further selections - don't want to discard too much too soon.
8. Mass select the F4 plot - e.g. remove talls, weak plants, diseased plants and repeat mass selection in following years.

By doing this, I've now got several mass-selected, fairly uniform populations for replicated yield trials plus some pure lines derived from single plant selections.

The photos are of some of the mass-selected plots in 2014, looking fairly uniform and an ear of a pure line coded S9.  I'm quite hopeful about this line as it has fragile pales that release the grains easily when threshed to give a very clean sample.

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).