Location: Soybean and Nitrogen Fixation Research
Project Number: 6070-21220-070-048-A
Project Type: Cooperative Agreement
Start Date: Oct 1, 2023
End Date: Sep 30, 2024
Objective:
1. Germplasm and cultivar development: a) Develop and release drought-resilient germplasm and high yielding varieties.
2. Improve drought screening and selection.
Approach:
Crosses will be made to incorporate drought tolerance traits into Maturity Groups 3, 4 and 5 elite germplasm. Each year we will develop 15 to 20 new populations involving drought tolerant lines (for example: R10-2346, R10-2436, R10-2622, N10-7404, and N05-7432) and high yielding, elite varieties with desirable seed composition, include high oleic seed. Progeny from single cross populations involving drought resistant parents will be evaluated in replicated field plots, initially in both dryland and irrigation conditions in KS, followed by evaluation in the USDA Regional Trials or the Drought Uniform Trials.
The Cooperator will continue to build on their efforts to use remote sensing technology to improve the speed and accuracy of identifying superior breeding material tolerant to drought. This will include both spectral and thermal monitoring of the soybean canopy. Also, we will use our drought breeding populations to test and further develop our genomic selection program to improve selection models based on training population data (phenotypes, i.e. yield, wilting, remote sensing data, etc.) and weather data using breeding material developed by our program and evaluated in KS environments.