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Developing Perennial Crops from Annual Crops

CANADA - Researchers with the University of Manitoba are working to develop new perennial agricultural crops from the relatives of some of the annual crops being grown in western Canada, writes Bruce Cochrane.

Annual crops are generally seeded in the spring or fall, harvested after maturity once and a new crop is seeded the following year, whereas perennial crops survive more than two years and provide annual harvests over a number of years.



The University of Manitoba's Faculty of Agricultural and Food Sciences has kicked off a long-term research program aimed at developing perennial crops from some of today's annual crops' wild cousins.



Dr. Doug Cattani, a perennial crop breeder with the Department of Plant Science, notes because perennials are established once, establishment costs and the risk of establishment failure are reduced and perennials are able to make use of available nutrients year-round.

Dr Doug Cattani-University of Manitoba

The goals are essentially to develop a number of different crops that can be used as perennial crops.



Some of the crops are going to be a wheat-like crop.



One of the wild relatives is intermediate wheat grass which we grow for forage purposes or for cattle feed.



Now what we'd like to do is develop it for its grain properties so, instead of feeding the animal the vegetative matter from the plant, what we'd like to do is harvest the grain and the harvested grain can be either human or animal feed.



Some of the changes that we are going to be working on are selecting within the natural variation that we already have within the species for greater seed set, larger seed.



Those are just a couple of the early things we'll be looking at in intermediate wheat.



Once we get to that point then we can start looking at some of the grain quality characteristics like protein, bread-making quality and things along that line.



Dr Cattani says once plant breeders have a product that has relevance in the marketplace, agronomists will look at how best to culture it to maintain yields over the time the plants are in the fields.

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