Changing wheat varieties

Washington Ag Today August 24, 2009 Suppose a wheat grower wants to plant a different variety than he has in the past. What kind of considerations should go into selecting another variety? Stephen Guy manages Washington State University’s Uniform Cereal Variety Testing Program. He says farmers see variety trials at field days and hear about the varieties but the best variety one year may not necessarily be the best the next.

Guy: “Because of the interaction of the genetics and the environment and the management that goes on to that other interaction.”

Guy urges farmers to find out as much information as they can before making a decision on the suitability of a variety to their particular growing conditions.

Guy: “Most farmers know that they have a certain amount of precipitation to deal with. I like to encourage people to look at information from similar type of rainfall and climatic zones.”

Guy also recommends looking at variety performance across years.

Guy: “Because we have a lot of variation year-to-year as well as site to site. Looking across variety information that‘s produced across what we call environments, which encompasses years as well as locations, that is the best predictive tool we have for saying what could be the best variety in the upcoming year.”

And while yield is important Guy says don’t forget various traits for quality, or disease, or emergence in certain dryland situations.

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