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WSU Receives $680,000 Grant for Organic Wheat Breeding
PULLMAN, Washington

Stephen Jones, a Washington State University wheat breeder, has received a $680,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to develop wheat varieties suited for low-input and organic agriculture systems.
The funding will underwrite continuing research in the nation's only certified organic wheat breeding program.
"There's a tremendous demand for organic wheat," Jones said. "Organic food is one of the few facets of the food industry that continues to grow."
While conventional wisdom has long held that the best wheat varieties will thrive in any production system, research in Jones' program has disproved that notion.
"There are different pressures in different systems," Jones said. "If you are growing wheat in organic systems, it isn't as protected as our traditional wheat is, there are genes and traits that these plants need to compete better against weeds and they need to be more efficient in mining the soil for nutrients. Many of these traits have been lost over the past few decades because they are not needed by plants in high input systems."
For the past five years, Jones and his students have been crossing modern wheat varieties with 163 wheats grown in the Pacific Northwest from the 1840s to the 1950s, a period of time preceding the heavy use of chemicals and synthetic nitrogen fertilizer. Jones hopes to develop varieties that will have good end-use qualities,  compete successfully with weeds,  efficiently use nitrogen and other nutrients in the soil, that are more nutritious to humans, and yield very well under no and low-input and organic systems.
"We know from Kevin Murphy's work that newer wheat varieties have less beneficial micro-nutrients in them," Jones said. Murphy is a graduate student in Jones' program.
Research on low-input and organic wheat could benefit conventional wheat growers as well.
"Traditional farmers can hardly afford to buy nitrogen fertilizer and other inputs.  Improvements in plant utilization of soil nitrogen could help them as well as organic growers by lowering their costs. There is a great interest among conventional wheat farmers to lower the amount of inputs required to grow a profitable crop."
Jones hopes to release the first organic wheat varieties from his program in the next five years.