A U.S. agricultural technology company has entered into an agreement to commercialize a new type of non-genetically modified, herbicide tolerant wheat.
Arcadia Biosciences Inc. is providing the wheat lines to Targeted Growth Inc., which will develop and commercialize the product.
“The discussion about this has specifically included marketing plans in Canada,” said Eric Rey, president of Arcadia.
The lines were identified through mutagenesis, a breeding technique that enhances crop mutations through the use of chemicals.
Thousands of wheat lines were screened using the technique and several were identified that displayed either a natural or chemical-induced genetic variation that made them tolerant of an unspecified herbicide.
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Those lines have been given to Targeted Growth, which is crossing the varieties with one another to create plants with multiple instances of the desired genetic variations to get even higher levels of tolerance.
Until now, the herbicide tolerant varieties have only been tested in a laboratory setting.
“We think some wheat lines will be in the field within 2009 and will be sprayed in the field,” said Rey.
It will be a while after that before Targeted Growth will have any commercial varieties available to growers.
“I wouldn’t expect anything to be coming out of this within the next three or four years. But some time after that,” said Rey.
The news release announcing the joint venture said it would be the first herbicide tolerant wheat on the market.
“Considering that wheat is the world’s largest acreage crop and that herbicide resistant varieties are not yet commercially available, we see a significant opportunity to help wheat growers increase farm yields and profitability while minimizing overall environmental impact,” said Rey.
However, BASF already has a herbicide tolerant wheat on the market. Clearfield Wheat has been sold in Canada since 2005.
Rey acknowledged they got that fact “a little bit wrong.”
Arcadia is also developing nitrogen use efficiency technology. Field trials with canola varieties genetically modified to display the trait have consistently shown farmers could either reduce their need for nitrogen fertilizer by 50 percent or increase their yields by 20 to 25 percent.
The company has signed an agreement with the Australian Centre for Plant Functional Genomics and the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization to develop the nitrogen use efficiency trait in wheat and barley.
The trait has yet to be field tested in those two crops but it has been in rice, which showed similar results to what was displayed with the GM canola. That gives researchers hope that it will work in other grassy crops like wheat and barley.
Wheat uses more nitrogen fertilizer than any other crop, accounting for approximately 30 percent of global use.
Rey thinks the research partnership could be conducting field trials on wheat and barley as early as 2009, with commercial varieties on the market by 2016.
He doesn’t know when nitrogen use efficiency canola will be available. That decision will be made by Monsanto, Arcadia’s commercialization partner on that project.
