Breeding New Feed and Forage Barley and Triticale Varieties

Background

Continuing to improve the yield and nutritional quality of barley grain and annual forages is essential to maintain a competitive cattle feeding sector in Canada. Western Crop Innovations (WCI) in Lacombe is Canada’s only crop breeding program dedicated to and making a deliberate effort to improve feed and annual forage crops. Other programs do produce feed and forage annual varieties, but they are often just new varieties that have failed to meet requirements for other end uses (e.g. beer or bread). WCI is filling an essential gap by making a concerted effort to improve the nutritional value of barley and triticale varieties specifically for livestock.  

Objectives 

• Develop varieties of barley (grain and forage) and triticale (forage) with better nutritional quality, yields, high fodder quality, fibre digestibility, smooth awn, starch, vitamin, and protein content to be more suitable as livestock feed
• Develop a genetic database for desirable traits to be used in future breeding efforts

What they Did

The overall goal of this project was to develop new barley and triticale varieties to be used as livestock feed, as well as to make barley and triticale breeding easier in the future. This was done by:

• Using KASP markers to select plants with the best traits
• Creating a genetic database of desirable traits by genotyping currently available parent lines that are already being used. This will allow future breeding efforts to choose the most desirable traits to cross
• Testing the ability to use wheat markers to predict traits in triticale
• Growing new varieties in the field and selecting for traits such as disease resistance, yield, high fodder quality, fibre digestibility, smooth awn, starch, vitamin, and protein content.
• Breeding for selected traits using 200 barley and 75 in triticale crosses per year

What They Learned

Through this project, researchers were not only able to advance the knowledge of plant breeding resulting in both improved methodologies for future breeding projects, but also yielded two new barley varieties (FB22816 [feed]), TR21665 [malting]), and one new triticale variety (T301).

Using the newly defined methodologies, this team was able to expand the number of DNA markers for the barley breeding program across 44 different traits, including disease resistance, flowering time, awn type, sprouting tolerance, early maturity, root angle, water logging, semi-dwarfism, and lodging. Similar genotyping strategies are being adapted for the triticale breeding program. These newly discovered SNP markers will be integrated into the WCI breeding program as DNA markers for Marker-Assisted Selection (MAS).

What It Means

The knowledge gained from this project not only led to the development of new varieties but will also help to speed up the development of new varieties in the future.