WSU names new winter wheat breeder

WSU names new winter wheat breeder

 

Washington Ag Today July 10, 2009 The appointment of Arron Carter, a May 2009 Ph.D. graduate from Washington State University, as the new WSU winter wheat breeder, was announced yesterday at the Spillman Field Day.

Carter has already played a role in wheat variety development in the Pacific Northwest having worked with WSU spring wheat breeder and associate dean Kim Kidwell.

Carter: “There are some great opportunities. We have some new technology that we can use in breeding to be able to quicken our release time for new cultivars and make sure we have the correct genes in there and good quality. And then some of the difficulties you could say, we do breed for a large region, a lot of market classes, a lot of concerns and disease problems out there ,so being able to get cultivars that work well across the region or individually is a challenge but we are working towards that.

Carter has no qualms about working on transgenic wheat.

Carter: “No, I look at that as just another tool that we have, so it is something that when it comes around, when the market accepts the transgenic, to look at that as a tool and how I will use that in the breeding program when that comes about. It is another tool and it can be a useful tool at certain times with certain traits.”

Carter assumes his new responsibilities July 16th. He succeeds Steve Jones who is now the Director of WSU’s Mount Vernon research center and becomes only the sixth winter wheat breeder in WSU history.

I’m Bob Hoff and that’s Washington Ag Today on the Northwest Ag Information Network.

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