Innovative crop varieties hit market
Horsham-based Grains Innovation Australia is starting to make a name for itself in the cropbreeding scene.
A group of passionate growers, breeders, agronomists, seed, grain and marketing experts from north-west Victoria, and the mid-north and Yorke Peninsula regions of South Australia, founded the private breeding company in 2013.
With a suite of varieties released or just hitting the market this year, GIA leaders hope growers across Australia will soon benefit from the business’s innovative ideas.
GIA’S Dr Michael Materne said a farm-based team approach had ensured the company was breeding variety solutions that growers wanted and needed for their modern farming practices and systems.
He said the company’s broad expertise and enthusiasm had resulted in a change of focus on lentils to breeding pulses, oats, wheat, barley and canola.
Dr Materne said a key to GIA’S success was ‘working with the best partners to transform each idea into a variety for growers in the most efficient and fastest way possible’.
GIA’S first variety, Kingbale, bred by Dr Materne, is the world’s first IMItolerant oat.
“Kingbale’s IMI tolerance offers new options for weed control and also
is an excellent option where there are residue concerns from imidazolinone use in previous crops,” Dr Materne said.
“It was developed in collaboration with Intergrain and Nufarm. Nufarm recently announced the exclusive registration of Sentry® Herbicide to use on imidazolinone, IMI, tolerant oats, according to their label directions.”
GIA has also released a new barley variety, Commodus CL, which the company bred and developed collaboratively with Intergrain.
“It’s the high yielding, vigorous, Imi-tolerant barley that growers have been wanting for low-medium rainfall areas, and on lighter sandier soils to compete with weeds,” Dr Materne said.
GIA Leader is the company’s first lentil variety and offers growers an imidazolinone-tolerant lentil with the best disease resistance.
“The variety is a mid-late season type so suited to more favourable growing areas and seasons, where its yield is comparable to current IMI lentil varieties,” Dr Materne said.
GIA partnered with Wimmera seed company, Pbseeds – which has extensive expertise with lentils – to bring the variety to market.
Pbseeds
Pbseeds commercial manager Janine Sounness said the company had produced ‘quality assured’ Kingbale, Commodus CL and Leader seed.
“Growers have been quick to order Commodus CL seed, which has already sold out, and Kingbale seed looks like it will sell out in the next month,” she said.
“We have been getting increasing orders for Leader over the past month as well.”
South Australian seed Agschilling Seeds, has strong orders for Kingbale.
It also released GIA’S world-first Imi-tolerant field peas, GIA Kastar and GIA Ourstar, to market last year, with seed still available for 2021.
Dr Materne said both varieties had improved tolerance to common incrop and residual IMI herbicides for more effective weed control.
“GIA is proud to have developed varieties of great value to growers, as evident by the demand,” he said.
“We all live and work locally and want to contribute to seeing our farming communities thrive.” • People can visit www.aglife.com.au for more information. partner, also had
Farmers across the Wimmera are busy preparing their land for the coming winter-crop season, following a ‘bumper’ harvest in 2020-21.
Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences estimates Victorian winter-crop production will be the highest on record, increasing by 27 percent in 2020-21 to 9.5-million tonnes.
The bureau’s February report shows winter crops in Victoria are almost complete, with the exception of some rain affected areas in the south-west of the state.
Natimuk grain and sheep farmer Brian Klowss is among primary producers across the state who finished the harvest season with ‘well above average’ results.
He said he was now busy preparing his broadacre cropping operation in the lead up to western Victoria’s sowing season.
“We’re undertaking a bit of planning for what our winter cropping system will look like this year and we’ve finished about half of our fertiliser program,” he said.
“We’re still looking fairly tied up in grain marketing at the moment too, because we’ve still got a lot of grain to sell or deliver from harvest.”
Mr Klowss said sowing season would likely start in late March or early April.
“If we could receive some rain soon, then we’d be into sowing all our early crops for grazing,” he said. “And then when we get into the first week of April, we’ll start with clover, vetch and then closer to Anzac Day will be when we start with crops like canola and wheat.”
Mr Klowss said he was hoping for some early rain before the sowing season started to boost his soil-moisture profile after a dry summer.
“Our sub-soil moisture is at about 20 percent across my property and would be excellent ranging down to poor on some of our heavier country that didn’t get summer rain,” he said.
“We plan to put some moisture probes out in the next week.”
Mr Klowss said he hoped 2021 would continue with favourable cropping conditions his farm had experienced in recent years.
He said yield and quality for his wheat, barley, canola and bean crops after harvest far outweighed his expectations after he finished harvest late last year.
“It was a good, above average season. Some of our crops got touched up with a late frost, but it wasn’t major. Some of our lighter soil types actually yielded better than what we anticipated,” he said.
“We had a dry July and August in winter – that knocked a bit of the barley around, so it was surprising to see how much we actually yielded in the end.
“However, we had an ideal spring, that was the big turnaround for the season.”
Agriculture Victoria senior research agronomist Jason Brand is the toast of Mallee Sustainable Farming after winning its 2021 David Roget Award for Excellence.
Mallee Sustainable Farming executive officer Lachie Sutton presented Mr Brand, a familiar figure in the Wimmera-mallee broadacre farming industry, with his award at a Mildura Mallee Research Update earlier this month.
Mr Sutton said Mr Brand had won recognition for his work leading a Southern Pulse Agronomy Program and providing services to regional growers.
“He has been recognised for approaching this extension work in a balanced way and has developed management packages to help farmers achieve optimal results with what are now key cornerstones of modern farming systems,” he said.
The David Roget Award for Excellence recognises an individual, business or group who has made a significant contribution to dryland-farming production systems in the Mallee Sustainable Farming region.
Mr Brand was nominated for the award for the role he has played in the development and extension of the Australian pulse industry and also for his work in attracting young people into grains research as graduates, PHD students and technical staff.
Mr Brand said he was honoured
to receive the award and having the opportunity to work with growers, agronomists and researchers.
“I really enjoy collaborating and sharing knowledge out in the field and working alongside groups like Mallee Sustainable Farming and Michael Moodie from Frontier Farming
Systems to achieve all we have in the pulse industry,” he said.
Mallee Sustainable Farming created the award to celebrate the work of the late David Roget.
Mr Roget was a principal research scientist with CSIRO at the Waite campus, Adelaide, before he retired
in 2005. He was renowned for developing and promoting the concept of farming-systems research by bringing together multiple disciplines and grower input, particularly through the Mallee Sustainable Farming Project.