Location: Small Grains and Potato Germplasm Research
Project Number: 2050-21000-038-034-A
Project Type: Cooperative Agreement
Start Date: Sep 1, 2026
End Date: Aug 31, 2027
Objective:
Objectives:
1. Breed winter barley for the Midwest and surrounding production regions
To insure that winter barley production is productive, profitable and resilient, new winter barley varieties are required to meet the needs of farmers and end users. Improving winter survival is a key trait to improve the stability of production across production regions suitable for growing winter barley.
2. Evaluate varieties and elite breeding lines in a national collaborative trial
Comprehensive data on the performance of current varieties and advanced breeding lines in fall-planted trials is needed to inform decisions about variety releases and to provide information to growers and end users for variety selection.
3. Characterize barley germplasm for traits associated with winter survival
Directly assessing winter survival is challenging because fall-planted trials will often have winter conditions that result in too little or too much survival and thus do not provide sufficient information to measure and select for differences in winter hardiness. Several physiological and anatomical traits have been implicated as contributing to winter survival. Thus, measuring those traits will help provide insight into winter survival and provide new selection tools that could be used in breeding to increase winter hardiness.
4. Populate centralized database (Breedbase T3/barley) with phenotype data from winter barley germplasm
To effectively use data collected from field trials and through genotyping, it is essential to share data from multiple research groups. The T3 database is designed as data sharing platform for barley researchers and has been essential to advancing breeding and genetics research.
Approach:
To meet these objectives, we will carry out field screening experiments, germplasm development, and regional fall planted yield trials to advance winter barley in appropriate production regions to increase the resilience of barley agriculture.
In the next year of this project, we will carry out our breeding pipeline to generate and evaluate new breeding lines that could be released as new varieties. We will also coordinate a national trial to evaluate advanced winter barley breeding lines and varieties from other breeding programs. We will measure important traits that contribute to winter hardiness to develop more efficient selection procedures in breeding.