News

• Winnsboro Wheat and Oat field day scheduled for April 22 at the Sweet Potato and Macon Ridge research stations
• 2024 Variety Trial Data online now
• 2025 SunShow locations and entries

Small Grains Breeding and Genetics

 

The LSU AgCenter's Small Grains Breeding and Genetics program focuses on variety development and quantitative genetics research in wheat, oat, and triticale. The climate of Louisana and the broader Southeast United States present challenges for small grains production for grain and forage use, including major pests, fungal diseases, and abiotic stresses. We work with LSU collaborators at over seven Louisana research stations and external collaborators at 10 public universities to develop varieties that produce for growers despite these challenges. At the same time, we use modern molecular and quantitative genetics approaches to accelerate the rate of variety development, predict adaptation of genetics to our target environments, and develop and track major genes for phenology and pest and pathogen resistance.

 

LSU AgCenter Small Grains breeding program develops wheat varieties that are licensed to seed companies that cover the whole Southern Soft Red Winter Wheat region. The Small Grains program works with collaborators in Texas, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia to test early and late-stage breeding program lines, evaluate the variety potential of late-stage release candidates, and obtain new breeding lines for crossing from other programs. Wheat varieties developed at the LSU AgCenter and the main lab on campus in Baton Rouge are grown by farmers across the South.

 

While LSU AgCenter varieties are grown regionally, the home of the program is Louisiana, and the focus is on supporting Louisiana farmers through the use of wheat as a rotational crop and oats and triticale for forage and cover cropping. Cooperators at the Central farm in Baton Rouge (Chris Roider), the Dean Lee farm in Alexandria (Boyd Padgett), and the Macon Ridge and Sweet Potato farms (Trey Price, Dustin Ezell, and Adam Easterling) in Winnsboro and Chase assist the variety development program plant and maintain experimental trials. Cooperators at those and four additional stations help the program run the LSU State Variety trial for Wheat and Oats, testing LSU varieties alongside other public and private varieties to determine the best-suited small grains varieties for Louisiana farmers. At the Idlewild station in Clinton, oat experimental lines are evaluated deer feeding preference, data that supports the release of LSU food-plot oats such as Buck.

Beyond the regional impact of the oat breeding program, the small grains program coordinates the USDA-ARS International Oat Nursery. Distributing seed from international cooperators to oat breeders and testers in eighteen countries allows for the rapid dispersal of elite germplasm and novel resistance genes, improving oat genetics globally. Crosses made between international oat lines made in the Plant Materials Center greenhouse complex in Baton Rouge are also distributed through this nursery, and breeders across these countries make selections out of these families to develop locally-adapted varieties. LSU AgCenter oat varieties developed for Louisiana and tested through the International Oat Nursery are being licensed and grown by farmers in countries as far away as Uruguay and Taiwan.

Field Gallery