Utah State University Small Grains Research

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Utah State University Small Grains Research

Winter wheat and winter barley cultivar development. Agriculture Research

10/17/2023

😍🥹

10/11/2023

Planting with a view 😍🍁🚜

09/29/2023

Planting till sunset 🌅🚜🌾

09/28/2023

First seeds are in the ground 🚜🌱

07/17/2023

When we’re not in the field, we rely heavily on statistical programming and data analysis in order to understand what’s happening when we are in the field. Today we’re fortunate to have Dr. German Vargas, plant ecophysiologist and Climate and Global Change Postdoctoral Fellow from , leading a hands-on workshop for using the R statistical programming software 🧑🏻‍💻📊🌾

07/14/2023

We can’t thank enough for having us out to visit their malting barley breeding program and research facility today. 🌾 Graduate student Dalton Jones and I met Dr. Bob Brunick, head of barley research for Molson Coors, last year at the North American Barley Researchers Workshop, and we learned the Molson Coors breeding program is right in our backyard in Burley, Idaho. Bob graciously invited us out to learn about their operation. Molson Coors’s supply chain is fully integrated. They develop new malting barley varieties that work well for their beverage brands, and they then contract with growers in several regions of the Intermountain West to produce them. One aspect of Bob’s program that really impressed us is how his group manages several large volume seed lots for plant-scale evaluation. The logistical challenge of keeping experimental lines separate as they’re loaded and unloaded from multiple grain bins and rail cars as they move through plant-scale malting and brewing evaluation is no small feat. 🤯 The students also appreciated seeing how a private breeding program operates differently from ours and learning about what kinds of careers may be available to them in the future. Attention undergraduates! 🚨 Molson Coors hires a student intern for barley research each summer. The internship is based in Burley and includes orientation and concluding programming at the company’s cooperate offices in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Thanks again for a fascinating visit. Cheers! 🍻

07/11/2023

We ❤️ Utah high school students! Alongside the Forage and Range Research Laboratory, we hosted several northern Utah high school students from the Biotechnology Summer Academy this morning to showcase our research and talk about career opportunities in the plant sciences. During the program, these students spend five days on the campus to learn about on-going biotechnology projects. Graduate students Claire Spickermann and Dalton Jones demoed one of our aerial drones to show how we collect remote sensing data to aid crop improvement. For more information on the Biotechnology Summer Academy, check out the Center for Integrated Biosystems webpage 🧬🔬🌱

07/07/2023

The west is the best! Thanks to Jason Cook, Suchismita Mondal, and for hosting this year’s Western Wheat Workers. WWW is a fantastic opportunity for western public and private wheat breeders, pathologists, and researchers to get together and discuss our collaborative testing nurseries, new research, and the regional wheat industry. Thanks also to and for hosting field and equipment demonstrations in Bozeman. Can’t wait to see everyone again next year in Walla Walla 🌾

06/23/2023

This week, Ph.D. student Claire Spickermann presented her research on intermediate wheatgrass breeding at Kernza Con in Minneapolis, MN. Claire is jointly advised by Dr. Steve Larson at the Forage and Range Research Laboratory. Intermediate wheatgrass is a perennial relative of wheat that is being developed as a sustainable dual-purpose grain and forage crop. Development efforts were initially spearheaded by in Kansas, and within the last five year the Dr. Larson started up a breeding program in Utah. Because of its perennial growth habit, the crop has the potential to provide considerable benefits to soil health, and its extensive system of deep roots helps it to perform under severe drought. Kernza Con brought together growers, breeders, geneticists, agronomists, plant pathologists, food scientists, applied economists, and sociologists to discuss the development of the crop and its supply chain. During the conference, we were fortunate to visit to learn about their intermediate wheatgrass-based snacks and other food products. We also visited the Kimber Contours farm to see intermediate wheatgrass agronomy trials conducted in collaboration with . In addition to food, intermediate wheatgrass is also being used to make beer! 🍺 It was a special treat to try lagers and ales brewed with malted intermediate wheatgrass at in St. Paul, MN after the conference 🌾

06/15/2023

This week, MS student Will Krause and I had the opportunity to attend the 22nd International Workshop on Bunt and S**t Diseases of Cereals in Tulln, Austria 🇦🇹 This meeting marked the first time the international bunt and s**t community has been able to convene in-person since before the pandemic. Will gave an oral presentation on his efforts to predict levels of resistance to the dwarf bunt fungal disease in wheat using genomic data 🧬 The dwarf bunt disease screening nursery that we sow and evaluate annually in Logan, UT is the only nursery of its kind worldwide 🌎 For decades, .usu has evaluated breeding and research material from collaborators around the world for resistance to the disease. The unique environmental conditions in Logan make it possible to reliably achieve high levels of infection year after year 🌾❄️🦠 Midway through the conference, the organizers from .vienna indulged us in an excursion to the beautiful medieval Wachau Valley to try some local agricultural products 🍇🍷

05/30/2023

The barley moved fast over the long weekend 🌾

05/12/2023

Thank you so much and for taking the time to show us around the Research and Extension Center in Aberdeen, ID yesterday. Program technician , undergraduate students and , scholar .dominguez92, and I made the drive up to Aberdeen to check out the USDA National Small Grains Collection gene bank, the University of Idaho cereal quality lab, and Dr. Jianli Chen’s wheat breeding program. We learned how pup loaves and cookies are prepared to assess wheat baking quality 🍞🍪 how tens of thousands of seed samples of wheat, barley, and their wild relatives are stored in the gene bank and distributed to researchers worldwide 📦 and how Dr. Chen and postdoc Guriqbal test wheat for resistance to the common bunt fungal disease in the greenhouse 🦠 It’s always fun to learn about what’s happening with wheat up in Aberdeen 🌾

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1670 N 800 E
North Logan, UT
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http://wheat.usu.edu/

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