Cereal breeding for organic farming:

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Cereal breeding for organic farming crop traits
related with competitiveness against weeds
Dace Piliksere State Priekuli Plant Breeding
Institute
Conference "Diversity in Plant Breeding and
Agriculture Strategies for Healthy
Lifestyle" Stende, 31.05.2012
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Introduction

• Assessing weed suppression ability of crops has
  become more important with the development of
  organic plant breeding.
• This report introduces with first two year
  (2009/2010 and 20101/2011) results of field
  experiments in the project Development,
  improvement and implementation of environmentally
  friendly and sustainable crop breeding
  technologies (2009/0218/1DP/1.1.1.2.0/09/APIA/VIA
  A/099).

The aim is to develop the methodology for an
estimation of cereal varieties and breeding lines
for their competitive capacity against weeds, to
establish more effective criteria of the
selection by significant crop characteristics in
the breeding process for organic growing
conditions.
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Material and Methods

• The investigation is carried out with spring
  barley, spring oat, winter triticale and winter
  wheat varieties and breeding lines in organic
  crop rotations at State Priekuli Plant Breeding
  Institute and at State Stende Cereals Breeding
  Institute in Latvia.
• Harrowing is not performed in the trials, to
  exclude the impact of this factor.
• Different observations
• plant density after emergence,
• growth habit at tillering and at stem elongation,
• tillering capacity,
• plant height at the beginning and at the end of
  stem elongation and before the harvesting,
• crop plant development rate in terms of days from
  sowing to such phenological phases as germination
  (emergence), tillering, stem elongation, heading
  and fully ripening,
• amount of crop yield,
• are taken into account to evaluate crop
  ability to suppress weed growth in terms of weed
  ground cover several times in the growing season.
• Linear correlation method is used for statistical
  data analysis.

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Results and Discussion
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Conclusion

• Two year investigation results show both some
  similar correlations, and some inconsistent
  correlations between different crop and weed
  traits. Therefore field experiments should be
  carried out at least one more year to examine
  observed correlations.
• Detection of the most important crop
  characteristics, which provide the
  competitiveness against weeds in cereals, is
  stressed as a desired result.

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Acknowledgements

• For great amount of data collecting as well as
  for suggestions for further work
• Vija Strazdina, Zaiga Vicupe, Zaiga Jansone
  - State Stende Cereals
  Breeding institute
• Linda Legzdina, Indra Beinarovica, Arta Kronberga
  - State Priekuli Plant Breeding
  Institute
• This study was performed with financial support
  of European Social Fund co-financed project
  2009/0218/1DP/1.1.1.2.0/09/APIA/VIAA/099
• Thank you for your attention!