CBRC National Barley Cluster: Activity 10 – Next generation barley traits for economic and environmental sustainability in eastern Canada

Objectives:

• To incorporate high grain yield, lodging resistance, and disease resistance traits into new barley varieties for producers and end-users in eastern Canada.
• To implement genomic selection to accelerate breeding for precise and faster incorporation of grain yield, disease resistance and lodging resistance traits.
• To evaluate western Canadian advanced barley breeding lines for their suitability and adaptation in eastern Canada.
• To enhance FHB resistance in barley and to perform genetic analysis to find genes/chromosome locations involved in FHB resistance.

Impacts:

• To develop new barley varieties that are specifically engineered to improve agricultural productivity and resilience. By focusing on enhancing key traits such as resistance to Fusarium head blight (FHB) and lodging, as well as boosting overall yield by 2-3%, the project will directly contribute to the economic sustainability of barley farming.
• The increased resistance to these factors will lead to more stable and predictable crop performance, reducing the need for chemical treatments and minimizing crop loss. The improved yield, along with the reduced risk of disease and plant damage, will translate into higher profitability for farmers. This will enable them to achieve better returns on investment, lower input costs, and get more consistent crop outputs, leading to greater long-term economic sustainability.

Scientific Summary:

Barley is one of the most important cereal crops grown in eastern Canada and though most of this barley is used for animal feed, some is used in malting and brewing. Recently, barley producers have faced many challenges from abiotic stressors such as unfavorable climatic conditions as well as biotic stressors, including increasing risk from pests and diseases. Yield losses due to both abiotic and biotic stresses critically limit the economic competitiveness and sustainability of barley production in eastern Canada. The Ottawa barley breeding program has an established record for developing and releasing feed barley for eastern Canadian growers.

This project aims to incorporate grain yield, lodging resistance, and disease resistance traits to develop next-generation barley varieties more quickly and precisely for eastern Canada. Three different research areas need to be addressed to make barley more of an economical and environmentally sustainable crop in this region. First, the breeding program needs innovative breeding approaches to accelerate the genetic gains in barley varieties. Even though genetic improvement has contributed significantly to barley productivity in Canada, barley breeding programs need to deliver an even higher rate of genetic gain to increase productivity and the crop’s competitiveness. Conventional breeding strategies take 10-12 years to develop new barley varieties, which means slow variety improvement and long varietal turnover. The use of rapid generation advancement of segregating populations towards homozygosity will facilitate genetic gain for key traits and rapid development of the improved varieties.

In this project, we will use speed breeding techniques to shorten the breeding cycle time from 10-12 years to 8-10 years and increase the capacity of multi-location testing systems for advanced breeding lines to help capture the genotype by environment interaction. Genomic selection tools will be used to select the early generations of breeding lines based on grain yield, test weight, protein content and deoxynivalenol (DON) levels and identify the most promising combinations of parents. In this project, we are evaluating western Canada bred advanced barley lines for their suitability and adaptability in eastern Canada and selecting suitable parents for crossing with elite varieties from the Ottawa barley breeding program based on grain yield and malt quality. The advanced lines from these crosses will be evaluated for agronomic and malt qualities. Third, Fusarium head blight (FHB) caused by Fusarium graminearum is reducing grain yield by causing sterile florets and shrivelled kernels and leads to the development of mycotoxins in the kernels called DON, which makes the barley grain unsuitable for both human and animal consumption. We are screening the breeding lines from different generations to identify the lines with lower levels of DON and performing genome-wide association and QTL mapping to identify genomic regions associated with FHB and DON content in our germplasm.    

The project will employ speed breeding techniques for faster breeding cycles and genomic selection for precision crossing, parent selection, and multi-location field evaluation to incorporate grain yield, lodging resistance, and disease resistance traits in the current varieties. We will evaluate the advanced barley breeding lines from western Canada barley breeding programs for suitability and adaptation in eastern Canada; conduct the artificial Fusarium nursery to screen the barley breeding materials from across Canada and perform genetic analysis to find genes or chromosome locations involved in FHB resistance.

External Funding Partners:

Funding for the Canadian Barley Research Coalition’s (CBRC) National Barley Cluster was provided in part by the Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada AgriScience Program through the Sustainable Canadian Agricultural Partnership (2023-2028), with industry support from the Canadian Field Crop Research Alliance (CFCRA). Grain Farmers of Ontario is a founding member of the CFCRA.