Host: The following presentation is part
of the Agronomy and Horticulture Seminar Series
at the University of Nebraska Lincoln.
Marc: So good afternoon, everyone.
Welcome to this UNL Department of Agronomy and Horticulture
Seminar Series.
My name is Marc Libault.
I am an associate professor
in the Department of Agronomy and Horticulture,
and I direct the Single-Cell Genomics Core Facility at UNL.
So I'm very happy to introduce Dr. Stephen Baenziger
who is currently across Colorado.
We are working together on some maize cultivars.
Stephen has degrees from Harvard and Purdue Universities.
And before joining the University of Nebraska,
he work eight years for the USDA ARS,
and during three years with the Monsanto Corporation.
He's currently a professor
in the Department of Agronomy and Horticulture at UNL.
And he's also the presidential chair
of the Nebraska Wheat Growers.
Stephen research focus on improving
the agronomic performance and winter hardiness
of small grains like winter wheat, barley,
and triticale, and is very much interested
on developing other new breeding methods.
His accomplishments in term of research
are really outstanding
and includes 294 peer-reviewed articles,
32 presentations and symposia articles, 16 book chapters.
He has also co-released 64 cultivars
and 36 germ plasm lines or populations.
His teaching and service activities encourage education,
and he does a lot of outreach activity
related to plant breeding and genetics.
He has leadership roles in numerous scientific societies
as division chair and president of the Crop Science Society,
and also as an associate editor and editor-in-chief
for "Crop Science."
Stephen is also a fellow
in the American Society of Agronomy,
Crop Science Society of America,
and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
And so today Stephen is going to talk to us
about his entire career working on small grain crops.
And so his talk is entitled,
"The Summing Up: One Person's Life with Small Grains."
Stephen?
Stephen: Thank you very much.
What I would like to say is the title, "The Summing Up,"
this is in honor of David Holding.
It's a book by Somerset Maugham,
an English author of the early 20th century.
I always liked that title.
And then "One Person's Life with Small Grains"
is a takeoff from a book by H.V. Harlan,
"One Man's Life with Barley."
So that's the title.
The topics I wanna talk about will be
the varieties or cultivars I've released
over the past 34 years,
a little bit about the science,
a little bit about the team and the legacy, who's next,
and then a thank you.
So in the first 16 to 17 years of my career here,
I released 22 wheat varieties.
They're all listed here.
Don't worry, I won't go over all of them.
And then in the next 17 years
I released another 22 cultivars, and they're listed here.
And of those, the ones that I would call the hits,
the ones that were the major ones, are these 16.
And I'll give you a little background on each of them,
why they were important,
but I don't want to bore you more than I probably will.
The first wheat I ever released was Arapahoe.
And it's a little bit unfortunate in that
it may have been actually my best wheat.
It was grown on 30% of the acreage in Nebraska,
well over a million acres in the Northern Great Plains.
Tremendous winter hardiness, tremendous disease resistance,
beautiful end-use quality.
And was grown everywhere from Nebraska
all the way north to Canada.
Alliance was the fourth wheat.
And it was really an interesting wheat
because it had the best root rot and crown rot
of any wheat that I've ever released.
And when you plant into sandy soils,
you cannot get the soil-to-seed fit that you want,
and that's where you get your crown rots.
And Alliance was the first wheat
that growers ever actually came up
and thanked me for releasing.
And it was grown on about 20% of the acreage.
Millennium was obviously released in 2000,
and it was a wheat that was the most forgiving wheat.
So if you had a crop that was at one ton per hectare,
or a crop that was at six tons per hectare,
Millennium was always in the top three,
and never let you down.
And that was a tremendous thing.
Arapaho was one of the parents of Millennium.
Robidoux is a wheat that was named after Robidoux Pass.
Most of you in the east probably don't know about it,
but it's a pass between Wyoming and Nebraska.
This was co-released with Wyoming.
It's an excellent dryland wheat; still is.
And it also does extremely well under irrigation.
And what we learned was that to be a really good
irrigated wheat, and Nebraska being the number one
irrigated state in the nation, you actually need to have
a little bit of drought tolerance 'cause quite often,
growers turn off the water just a little bit too soon.
And so a good irrigated wheat really should
be able to finish under drought.
The next wheat was Overland,
and this was an absolutely stunning wheat.
It was the most winter hardy wheat since Arapahoe.
It was grown everywhere between Nebraska
all the way to Canada.
Again, beautiful disease resistance, test weight,
high protein wheat, good agronomics.
The difficulty with it was it was minimally adequate
for end-use quality.
And so when we released Overland,
we almost immediately released Camelot,
which didn't quite have the same agronomic potential
as Overland, but was far superior in quality.
And we were hoping that Overland and Camelot,
if they were grown in the state, you would end up
with pretty good end-use quality on average.
And so that's why Camelot went out.
Camelot also became one of the greatest parents
we've had in our program.
The next wheat was Freeman.
Freeman was the only wheat after probably five years
that could top Overland in our state trials.
It was an absolutely brilliant wheat for the north.
Again, just like Overland, a little lower in test weight,
a little lower in protein, but better in disease resistance.
And it was released, as you might imagine, in 2012.
That was the 150th anniversary of the Homestead Act.
Freeman is ideally suited for the Beatrice area
where the first homestead was, and Daniel Freeman
was the first homesteader.
Now there's a bit of a hidden name in this one also
in that 1862 is also the pre-Emancipation Proclamation.
Lincoln told all the states in rebellion
that the next year he was going to free all the slaves
if they stayed in rebellion.
So we gave them a year to change their minds.
And so Freeman also was in honor
of the Emancipation Proclamation,
meaning that it would be for free people.
Now Alliance was a parent of Freeman.
Ruth is probably the most commonly-grown wheat
of mine right now; most widely grown wheat.
Just absolutely spectacular quality.
It's named after Ruth Miller Moore,
who was our greenhouse manager.
Historically, you never name a wheat after someone's living.
And Ruth was one that we released
shortly after Ruth passed away, unfortunately far too young.
And so we asked if it'd be okay to name a wheat after her,
and the family said it was okay.
Outstanding quality, really broad adaptation.
Whither thou goest, I will go.
It can be grown anywhere in Nebraska.
Beautiful test weight, excellent disease resistance,
everything you'd want in a wheat.
And so that's Ruth.
Our next wheat is LCS Valiant.
And that sounds a little strange.
We bred it, but it's marketed by Limagrain Cereal Seeds.
The reason for that is the line does really well in Nebraska
but it's also very early, and it does extremely well
in western Kansas, and our seed growers can market wheats
well in Nebraska, but we don't have really good
marketing potential in western Kansas.
So we opted to partner up with a company that
can take this wheat to where it belongs.
Now we are the people's university,
and we release wheats
for all the different types of production that is needed.
And so the wheats I've shown you before are the semi-dwarfs,
or the Green Revolution wheats.
These are the tall wheats.
They're long coleoptiles.
They don't have the semi-dwarfing genes in them.
And they're grown in our drought-stressed,
Western environments.
The first one was Pronghorn,
which came out of Senterk and Centura.
The next one was Goodstreak.
And if you look at Goodstreak,
you can see how it stands like soldiers in a row.
The advantage of that is when you put a large head
on a very long stem, the leverage is always
to have the wheat lodge.
Goodstreak has much better straw strength than Pronghorn.
And if you get a little more moisture,
first of all, it won't fall down,
and then secondly, it also has a bit
of a better upend potential.
So we released Pronghorn and then we released Goodstreak,
and Goodstreak is one that will give the growers
better opportunities if they get lucky.
Now, the last tall wheat is Panhandle,
and this is a remarkable wheat
because it actually is a semi-dwarf.
It's as tall as Pronghorn and Goodstreak.
It's the tallest semi-dwarf we've ever released.
But it has the straw strength of a semi-dwarf,
the higher yield potential of a semi-dwarf,
and then thanks to Mary Gutierri,
she identified that this line was the first bread wheat
that had low cadmium accumulation genes.
Low cadmium accumulation was well-known in Durum wheat,
but had never been found in aestivum or the bread wheats.
And she found this.
So this is a one that if you ever have toxic soils,
Panhandle is the wheat that you would grow.
We've also released herbicide-resistant wheats.
Infinity CL was our first.
It was grown mainly in southwest Nebraska.
Settler CL is one that was very broadly adapted.
It was grown anywhere from Colorado to Wyoming,
co-released with Wyoming.
Nebraska and South Dakota didn't have the access
to the technology, so it was widely grown
in South Dakota also.
These wheats are resistant to our herbicides
due to a mutation that can take out
some of the common grass weeds,
and weeds such as jointed goatgrass, downy brome,
cheatgrass, those type of things.
Finally, we are the largest irrigated wheat-producing state
in the country, so we've had to breed irrigated wheats.
Wesley was named after my predecessor,
John Wesley Schmidt.
Was developed by my good friend, Jim Peterson,
now of Limagrain.
It was a wonderful irrigated wheat
widely grown in Nebraska, but actually very widely grown
in South Dakota where they loved its straw strength.
Our next irrigated wheat is NE15420.
We just released it.
If you look at that, it may not be obvious to you,
but you can see there's rows.
That means it has excellent straw strength.
You can see that it has large heads.
It's not too tall, which in irrigated production,
they don't like a lot of straw
because it gives them too much residue.
And so this is the next impact-irrigated wheat that we have.
Now, I wanted to give you just an idea
of what the impact of a program can be.
So I did this in 2010.
I can update it, but basically
the crop was a little bit larger.
The value of the crop was good.
So it's a good estimate.
But in 2010 we produced in Nebraska
about 4 billion pounds of wheat.
And the value of that wheat was
about half a billion dollars.
Now breeders can't take credit for all of that
'cause a lot of things go into the end yield.
But if you look at the lines that were released in 1966,
and you looked at the lines released in 2010,
the difference in their yield,
which would be only due to genetics,
was about a 20% improvement.
So you could realistically say breeders
of that half a billion dollars
added about a hundred million dollars
to our farmers' profitability.
Now I can't take credit for that
because farmers grow varieties
from all kinds of different sources,
but the project at UNL and USDA
had a 66% market share in 2010.
So if you looked at that roughly $108 million
that breeders had added to it,
our program added $71 million to our farmers.
Now, the state and the USDA were putting in
probably between three and $4 million a year.
And our growers were getting a $71 million
return on investment.
So I think if you gave $3 and you got 71 back,
most people would think you had a pretty good investment.
Now I want you to understand
that I really like our growers being profitable.
I like them being successful.
But that's not why I got in this business.
If you look at that same, roughly 4 billion pounds of wheat,
and you look at the average American eats
about something like 157 pounds of wheat per year,
our crop feeds roughly 20 million people.
And again, breeders can't take credit for all of that.
But if you took the 20% that was due to the improvement,
we could easily justify that 4 million people are fed
because of what breeders do.
And again, our market share was 66%.
So that roughly 2.7 million people got all of their wheat
from what the project at the University of Nebraska
with the USDA has done.
And so if you're familiar with the common prayer,
"Give us this day, our daily bread,"
I want you to understand that there's a project
at the University of Nebraska working 24/7,
365 days a year to have that prayer come true.
Now, I don't want you to think everything was a success.
That would be foolish.
I'm not that lucky.
I am lucky, but not that lucky.
We did have some misses.
Siouxland 89 was a wheat released by Texas A&M.
Siouxland, the original one,
was polymorphic for vernalization.
They never could certify it in Texas,
so they selected the low vernalizing types,
which is what Texas would need.
Siouxland, in its heyday, had the best leaf rust resistance
of any wheat in the Great Plains.
You could literally drive down the road at 60 miles an hour;
if the field was green, it was Siouxland;
if it was anything else, it wasn't.
But by the time they released it, the rust had broke.
The resistance had broken.
So it never went anywhere.
Rawhide was a wheat that the year before it released,
we had extreme heat, 42, 43 degrees C at North Platte,
over 104 degrees.
And the wheat yielded about 3.3 metric tons.
And the next best wheat there
yielded 2.3 metric tons per hectare.
And so we named it Rawhide
because it was as tough as rawhide.
Well, the year it got released
we had 60 degree Fahrenheit on January 31st.
The high on February 1st was 32 degrees.
The high on February 2nd was zero degrees.
And the high on February 3rd was minus 10.
Rawhide broke dormancy and completely froze out.
We'd never seen that in the 12 years of development,
but you only have one chance to make a first impression
and Rawhide's first impression was not very good.
Culver never lived up to its data,
which was a strange thing.
Windstar was a beautiful wheat,
and it got its name because in growing wheat,
especially in western Nebraska,
you can have what they call blow outs
where there's wind erosion
that literally blows the wheat out of the field.
And I went out to a nursery
and there was one corner of the field was completely missing
except for the four rows of Windstar.
And then the three rows next to it
that Windstar had protected,
because it was unbelievably tolerant to wind erosion
But it's also the most photoperiod-sensitive wheat
that we have ever had.
So that means
the temperature didn't change its growth habit,
only the day length.
Normally our wheats flower about May 24th,
and so it was a perfect wheat for that.
The year it was released
we had the earliest year in history up to that point.
We were flowering on May 6th to May 10th.
All of our wheats were flowering then except Windstar.
It was waiting for the proper day length.
On May 24th it went ahead and flowered.
We were cutting our wheat on June 10th.
16 days from flowering, to finish, to harvest
just was unacceptable, and the yield completely collapsed.
It just absolutely was worthless.
And then the last wheat was a two-gene Clearfield,
one of our really high-yielding,
still is an outstanding high-yielding wheat,
but it's soft and we're a hard wheat market.
So you can't release a hard wheat in a soft wheat market,
or can't release a soft wheat in a hard wheat market.
So that's what happened to that wheat.
So we've had some misses, just so you know.
Now I've also released 13 triticales.
Triticales have tremendous grain and forage yields.
Very hard to combine both of them in the same line.
We do have one that comes pretty close.
They can be used as a feed grain.
Basically, if you're a feed grain-deficient
part of the state, and you can grow small grains,
triticale is a great opportunity.
Could be used as a food grain.
If you do that, you have to watch out
for a disease called ergot.
Ergot is a very nasty mycotoxin.
It can be used as a forage or a silage,
and then it can be used as a cover crop.
Personally, I prefer triticale to rye
in any cover crop situation.
Mainly because rye volunteers so much
and triticale not so much.
Has outstanding disease and insect resistance.
It's virtually immune to all of the rusts,
most fungi, many of the viruses, many of the insects.
Its Achilles heels are that it's susceptible
to bacterial streak.
And it's also ergot.
It's not as winter hardy as wheat,
but it has ample winter hardiness to be grown in Nebraska.
And it is better than winter barley.
The future of triticale, and we discovered this mutation
in our field, is awnlessness.
The reason for that is that the awns,
when an animal eats it,
it's like eating needles, and they will puncture the cheek,
and they can become infected.
And the animals don't like eating needles.
So you want to remove the awns,
and we're now working very, very hard on that.
We've released seven barley varieties.
Most recently, NB15420.
Barley can be used as feed.
As a hulled grain it's very good for animals.
It's forage actually, it's a softer leaf tissue
than wheat, and wheat is softer than is triticale.
Many of you knew barley can be used in malting.
We are working on that.
That's relatively a new part for us.
If you take the hulls away, then you get what's called
the hull-less or naked grain, and that's used for food.
And again, it makes a very good cover crop.
It used to be that barley was a very small market.
So we had one producer that had exclusive rights
to all of our material.
That was really good right up until he went bankrupt
and we almost lost all of our barley germ plasm
for seed anywhere in the Great Plains.
So we were able to recover that
thanks to some tricks he did,
as well as he eventually sold his business.
We now have it open.
The biggest improvement in barley
is we now test in Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma.
And in Nebraska, we work with Dipak Santra,
Cody Creech, and Amanda Easterly.
And then in Kansas with Guorong Zhang,
and Do Mornhinweg with the USDA in Oklahoma.
If you're unfamiliar with barley,
there's really a kind of a cool thing.
The maltsters want two-row malting barley.
They want a big, fat seed full of carbohydrate
'cause protein clouds your beer.
The feed people want six-row because that's something
which gives you a very generally higher yields.
So that's very important for them.
And they don't care about the kernel size as much.
And if you have the awn gene,
there's a second gene called the hooded gene
which will take the awn gene and convert it into a hood
looking just like the hood on a cape
so that you get this very soft, leafy tissue
that the animals can really eat.
It's not like eating needles, it's like eating a salad.
And so that's where we're moving with our forage barleys.
So that gives you an idea of our cultivars.
I do wanna talk to you a little bit about our science,
and of course, you know,
we always like working on the hard traits.
So we wanted to understand grain yield.
It's a complex trait, it's controlled by many genes
can be difficult to identify differences,
especially if you're working
in relatively low-yielding environments
and Nebraska isn't; it's rain-fed crops.
We're usually 2 1/2 metric tons when I first came here.
Now we're between three and 3 1/2 metric tons.
Has huge environmental effects.
And you need really effective tools.
Now this graph's a little bit difficult to understand,
but it's a very important graph.
And I want to honor Rosalind Morris
who developed this material.
And this is very close to International Women's Science Day,
and it's part of Women's History Month.
And Rosalind Morris was a spectacular cytogeneticist.
The best proofreader of any article I've ever seen
with the possible exception of Steven Wegulo
in plant pathology.
First fellow of the American Society of Agronomy
that was a woman.
First woman fellow of the American Society of Agronomy.
She spent her whole life creating
an unbelievable genetic series of materials.
This one is Cheyenne, which is the founder wheat
for all of the Nebraska wheats.
Wheat has three genomes: the A, the B, and the D.
Each genome has seven chromosomes.
And so you have 21 chromosome pairs.
And what she did is she substituted one chromosome pair
from Wichita into Cheyenne, one by one.
So if you look at this, and then we evaluated this
because this material was waiting here for us to use,
you could see that chromosome 3A increased grain yield,
chromosome 6A increased grain yield,
and chromosome 3B drastically reduced it.
And we were interested in this
because there were two theories of how yield occurs.
One is an infinitesimal model where you have
an almost infinite number of genes, all with small effects.
And the other one is where you have very large effects
of major genes.
And if the infinitesimal model was correct,
you would assume that probably you wouldn't see chromosomes
having huge effects.
And Rosalind created this material,
took her whole lifetime to do this.
By the way, Rosalind's still alive.
She just turned 100 this last year.
And she did that.
But the other thing she did, she did the exact same thing
with Wichita, and chromosome pair by chromosome pair,
she put the Cheyenne chromosomes in.
And again, if you look at it, Cheyenne 3A in Wichita
drastically reduced yield.
Cheyenne 6A in Wichita drastically reduced yield.
So if you take Wichita, you put in Cheyenne,
you increase yield.
You take Cheyenne, put it in Wichita, you reduce yield.
The chromosome I wanna draw your attention to is 3B.
In the previous one, 3B, when it was put into Cheyenne,
the line winter-killed; had a catastrophically low yield
which meant that 3B had the gene for winter hardiness
in Cheyenne, but in Wichita it didn't.
So when you put the Cheyenne 3B
with its winter hardiness genes into Wichita,
you see no difference,
because Wichita had its winter hardiness
coming from other chromosomes.
And so therefore adding more winter hardiness
didn't do you any benefits.
Now, once we had this, we were curious to see
if it was a lot of genes on a single chromosome,
or a few really major genes that affected yield
on a single chromosome.
And through elegant cytogenetic work
that Roslyn was able to do,
and we had a wonderful research assistant professor
at the time doing this work,
we were able to partition the chromosome one at a time.
And what we discovered, and there's two key things here:
the blue line is the aggregate data of six environments.
We found one very important QTL.
We found one significant QTL,
but in no individual environment could you find it,
only in the aggregate.
This one you could find it and told us a lot about QTLs.
It was present in the aggregate.
It was obviously present
in three out of our six environments,
almost present in the fourth,
and unaffected in the fifth and sixth.
We were able to map it.
Now at the time, we didn't have really good markers.
So I want people to understand that's why we did
all this side of cytogenetic material.
We originally used RFLPs,
and then gradually we got a few SSRs to do this,
but we had to use the tools we had at the time.
And we found out that the locus was pleiotropic.
It affected grain yield, days to flower, plant height,
grain volume, weight (indistinct) and kernel weight,
those types of things.
The interesting question was if you found a yield QTL,
which we did, how can you use it in breeding?
And so the Wichita allele versus the Cheyenne allele.
And you can see everywhere the Wichita is better
than the Cheyenne allele, and that's a breeder's dream.
It means it never hurts you.
You can always use it, and the only thing it can do is help.
Now, a couple of things you need to see.
This part of the curve was highly significant.
So the high-yielding, the right side of that slide,
is very high-yielding.
And that's where the QTL really showed.
In the low-yielding environments,
the Cheyenne and Wichita alleles
are functionally equivalent.
A different type of thing,
and this is for plant height, not for yield.
We did look at a lot of different traits.
This is what drives breeders crazy.
In this case, in the high-yielding environments over here
you can see that the Cheyenne allele makes the wheat taller,
but when you get in the shorter environments, I should say,
you can see the Cheyenne wheat
actually makes the wheat shorter.
And the Wichita is taller in the short environments
and shorter in the tall environments.
So if a grower comes to you and says,
"I'd like a wheat that's tall," and you say,
"Gee, should I put the Cheyenne or Wichita allele in it?"
it only makes sense if you know
what kind of environment it's going to end up being.
And we can't predict environments in Nebraska.
That's one thing we've learned very well.
So this crossover interaction is what drives breeders crazy
when you have to make recommendations.
But one of the things we then wanted to do
is we said, "You know if we've had 50 years,"
Wichita was released in 1954, Cheyenne in 1933,
you had 50 years of breeding.
We've got a QTL which always helps you, never hurts you.
Do we make use of it?
You know, did breeders do their jobs?
So we took a lot of historic wheats
and a lot of modern wheats.
And we said, which one's got the Cheyenne QTL
and which one has the Wichita QTL?
Now, when we thought about this, we thought,
"Oh my gosh, we should have had only the Cheyenne
"in the historic wheats."
And that wasn't true.
And we should have had Wichita
in some of the historic wheats,
Wichita was a historic wheat, and all the modern wheats.
And what happened was we looked at these
and both alleles are still present,
and it made me think,
"Geez, are breeders not doing their job?"
But when we looked at where the Cheyenne allele was present
its predominantly cultivars, its modern cultivars
in western Nebraska, where the Cheyenne allele
didn't really differentiate from the Wichita allele.
And in our higher-yielding wheats
in the higher-yielding environments,
that's where the Wichita allele is mainly found.
And so it ended up being yep, breeders after 50 years
got it right.
And of course, because we do a lot of germ plasm
besides Cheyenne and Wichita,
there was completely new alleles found
in many of our lines.
Now I showed you the very sparse maps we used to use
in the past.
This has worked with Vicass,
and this shows you what we're doing now.
We do genotype by sequencing.
Routinely we're getting hundreds of thousands
of markers per genome.
And so we're looking at, say 120,000 now, maybe 200,000
with our imputations, very, very dense maps.
That allows us to take all of our single markers
and convert them into alleles based on these dense maps.
So we now, when we do our dense mapping,
we can see where our soil-borne mosaic virus resistance is,
where the Green Revolution reduced height genes are,
the semi dwarfs, where the translocations that give us
leaf, stem rust, and stripe rust resistance are,
where our best genes for glutenin,
which is end-use quality-related are.
And so when we do this now, every time,
all of our preliminary observation lines, which are usually
somewhere between 13 and 1,700, are genotyped,
we can first of all look to see how diverse they are,
because we have to maintain variation in our program
for future progress.
And then if it's blue, it says the gene is present.
If it's yellow, it says the gene is absent.
We can see how we're doing.
So we have a lot of translocations to give us
the stripe rust resistance YR17.
SR6 is a huge gene for stem rust in our program.
It's virtually in every line.
A gene we're trying to put in our wheat
is FHB1 for fusarium head blight.
Pretty rare.
If you go down to the GLUT1,
which 'cause it's such an important for quality,
virtually every line has it.
And almost all of our wheats are semi-dwarfs.
That's the Rht-B1b.
And then you have these two translocations
which are well-known to give you excellent abiotic stress,
but they also harm quality.
And so even though the stress is important,
the stress tolerance, we've bred them out
because it's too difficult to get really superior
end-use quality from them.
Now that led us into genomic selection.
And I wanted to show you how a breeding program's evolved
over 34 years.
On the X axis we have the best linear unbiased predictions.
This would be your phenotypes.
And if you look, this red rectangle is your top half.
On the Y axis, you have your genetic estimator
breeding values.
That would be based on the genes
or the alleles that you have,
what are the lines that should be the best?
And so the best top half of those
would be in the blue rectangle.
So we started creating priority groups.
Again, this is work by Vicass.
Priority group one would be great estimated breeding values,
great phenotypes.
Priorities 2.1 would be great estimated breeding values,
not as good phenotypes.
2.2 is great phenotypes,
not as good estimated breeding values.
Three is sort of mediocre in both.
And then four would be if you only used phenotypic breeding
what you would also select.
You have no idea what the estimated breeding values,
but they're, in fact, low.
So what we did is we took our nursery in 2012.
We had all this information.
This slide may look a little confusing,
but every dot, square, plus sign, square with an X in it,
represents our preliminary yield trial; 270 lines.
Anything that's a red dot didn't get advanced.
Everything that is a triangle got advanced
to the next nursery.
If it got advanced to the nursery after that
it went to a green square.
If it got advanced to the nursery after that
it got to a blue plus.
And if it was still in after the next year
it got the square with the X in it.
And what you really see is that despite the diversity,
these are all good-yielding lines,
everything eventually ended up in this upper quadrant.
And that's what's important.
Now, if you look at this
we actually released one line, Siege, out of that.
And you say, "Well, wait a minute.
"That's not outstanding for phenotypes,
"and it's not outstanding for estimated breeding value.
"Why?"
Well, this is statewide averages,
the statewide predictions.
Siege is a narrowly adapted line
ideally suited to eastern Nebraska.
And so because of that
its statewide average wouldn't be high,
but its regional average would be very high,
and it did extremely well.
And also a lot of lines that are really good for yield
may not be good for quality, may not be good
for the disease resistance that we would expect.
Now, if you want to understand plant breeding
what you need to recognize is
that plant breeders never replicate their protocol,
or very rarely.
We've done it once.
Bill Compton did it once.
What we do is we replicate the outcomes of our selection.
And that's how you tell differences.
Was this different than that ones
because you replicate the outcomes.
But to really understand whether the selection is working,
you should either replicate the protocol
or you have to look for patterns and similarities.
So I showed you the 12 to 2016 data.
This is Vicass again, showing the 2016 data.
And so now in '17, we selected in '16
21 lines in the high category 2.1,
the high estimated breeding value,
lower phenotypic value all 18 in this category
which has high phenotypic values,
high estimated breeding values.
And in this quadrant we selected 21
that had the high phenotypic values
and not quite as good estimated breeding values.
The next year they went from 21 to nine.
We kept all 18 of that.
This one went 21 to 18.
There were a few other lines which are tall
which we can't predict well because they're so rare.
The following year,
whoops, the following year
out of this quadrant, not a single line got advanced.
The reason being out of 60 entry trial,
they ranked from 28 to 60th.
In this trial, we selected eight.
They ranked from first to 24th.
In this trial, in this quadrant,
they ranked from second to 19th and we selected seven.
And we kept a couple of the ones down here
where we had no data.
Following them again, looking at the pattern.
This eight went to four.
They were ranked one, three, and 32.
32 is probably for a very good
wheat streak mosaic virus gene,
which is known to hurt yield.
This line we selected two out of the seven,
and they were ranked fifth and six.
You look at it again.
We selected three lines out of here.
They ranked two, 12, and 28.
We selected one and it was ranked third.
And what it tells you is that everything, once again,
gravitated to that very excellent quadrant
that we were looking at, okay?
And so that's what we ended up.
Now we've changed our breeding program, actually,
to account for that knowledge, and how we do our testing.
But again, the pattern is very clear.
Estimated breeding values by themselves are not perfect,
but estimated breeding values
added to the phenotypic values are extremely powerful.
I wanna give you a short history of hybrid wheat.
And the reason for that is because
it's the thing we're working on right now,
and have our largest grants in.
When I started breeding in 1976, and I'm that old, okay?
There were very active hybrid wheat programs
in the Great Plains.
But by the 1990s virtually every hybrid wheat program
in the Great Plains had stopped,
and anywhere in the country.
Now at the same time, hybrid rice,
facing similar challenges, continued for 30 years.
In the wilderness.
They were told that you're not gonna find heterosis,
that you can't make a self-pollinated crop
and a cross-pollinated crop.
All the things that we're told,
all the reasons why it wouldn't work.
And they were right,
right up until they were wrong.
And after 30 years in the wilderness, two groups,
the Chinese who stuck with it,
and the International Rice Research Institute,
who stuck with it, developed a system that worked.
And now there's 17 million hectares of hybrid rice.
And there's 100,000 hectares of hybrid wheat.
And I've always wondered where would we have been
if anybody, public or private,
had stayed with the research for the 30 years
that the rice people had put in?
Would we be better off?
Now, the reason for starting this project was pretty simple.
You've all heard that in 2050
there's gonna be 9 billion to 10 billion people.
They often don't tell you that due to prosperity
they're not gonna eat like nine or 10 billion people today.
They're going to eat like 12 billion people
equivalents would eat today
because they're gonna have better diets.
They're gonna expect more food.
In order to meet that, you're gonna need to have
rates of gain of 1.4 to 1.7% annually.
In the Great Plains the rate of gain is about 0.9%.
And so really the question comes up
if you don't have a plan to raise grain yield
by 1.4 to 1.7%, if you're satisfied with 0.9,
you don't have a plan to succeed; you have a plan to fail.
And I told you, I got into this business to feed people.
I didn't get into this business to fail.
So in agriculture, failure can't be an option.
So we have an extensive collaboration
with great colleagues in Germany.
We have an extensive collaboration
with colleagues at Texas A&M and with also Kansas State.
And our German colleagues developed a really,
really clever model
called the balance missing crossing design
where in our case,
Texas A&M and we each contributed 25 males,
so we have 50 males.
We each contributed 50 females.
So we have a hundred females.
If you made all possible combinations with 150 lines,
you'd have 11,175 hybrids.
And that's way more than I can test.
We're a large program, but we can't test 11,000 hybrids.
But then our colleagues in Germany came up
with a really slick method where if you use
the genotyping tools that we have available
you can create 700 hybrids
and estimate the remaining 10,475.
And so that's what we did.
Now the way that's done is we took 25 males.
And then each of those males is crossed to 14 females
out of the hundred.
They're not the same 14, but it's 14 unique to each male
so that all 100 females are represented.
We have that, and then so does Texas.
And we do that so in case there's a catastrophic event
at one of our crossing blocks, we're not losing everything.
And even if we lose one crossing block
we can still estimate 7,750 hybrids.
This is what genomic predictions can do.
This is what a very clever mating design can do.
We test them in the three major ecological zones
in Nebraska.
We test them in two major ecological zones in Texas.
Just gonna show you some of the data that we have
from our hybrid trials here.
Again, now remember, you wanna think that we have
no background history of heterosis in our material.
There's no reason to believe there should be heterosis
in wheat other than 'til you're gonna breed for it.
At Alliance, we had nine hybrids were better
than the best line Freeman.
I told you it was a great wheat.
At Lincoln we had 18 hybrids better than Gallagher.
That's actually an Oklahoma wheat
that just did very well that year.
We have 10 checks.
North Platte, 200 out of 700 hybrids
did better than the best pure line.
Why?
Hybrids are known to be far more climate resilient
than our pure lines.
And there was stress at North Platte.
15% heterosis, sort of the magic number,
and 200 hybrids were better than pure lines
because of climate resiliency.
Next year, Freeman had a spectacular year again at Alliance,
no hybrid beat it.
North Platte didn't have the stress.
There were seven hybrids; Lincoln, 10 hybrids.
Again, if you haven't bred for heterosis
you shouldn't expect to find it.
This is the money slide.
This is the slide where Vicass used the predictions
to generate where you have 150 parents across the top,
150 parents across the side,
and these are all possible hybrids; 11,175.
Anything in red is predicted to be high.
Anything in blue is predicted to be low-yielding.
We're now validating our predictions
to see if this method actually works.
Now, I wanna come back and say
I've shown you the varieties I've released.
I've shown you some of the science we've worked on,
but my legacy will always be the people.
We've had great graduate students, and postdocs,
and technicians, and visiting scientists,
and summer crews that have really helped us out.
I wanna stop here just for a second.
These are special-ed children who worked
cleaning our seed for us.
And for a long time, we were a worksite
for the Lincoln Public Schools to give them training
beyond sort of the normal education.
They've since closed the program,
but we still remember these young scholars very, very well.
And I've always been pleased to think
that at a university of higher education
where we had some of the very best graduate students,
and postdocs, and other people come through,
we also had room for our special-ed students
to give them an opportunity.
And I just love these kids to death.
They worked their heart outs for us,
and we enjoyed them right up until the program stopped.
Again, we have lots of colleagues,
lots of great summer students that have helped us out,
and our harvest crews.
Done wonderful things for us.
And most of the time we've had pretty good fun.
Now, a couple of things that I've learned along the way.
Best advice I ever got as a grad student was to do your job.
You know, there's only one small grains breeder
hired at the University of Nebraska,
and if I'm not doing my job, there's no one to cover for me.
So do your job.
My goal was always to work hard enough
and be successful enough that it would easier
just to let me be me than to question or hassle me.
And I think generally that's worked.
If you have job you love, you never work a day in your life.
If you're successful in wheat,
they will let you work on wheat and barley.
You want to treat your employees
like you want your supervisor to treat you.
When I went to the USDA, the first thing I did
was I was given a supervisory course
and they asked us, "What would you like your supervisors
"to work with you?"
And we came up with this magnificent list, okay?
And at the end of it, the instructor said, "Great.
"Do you do all that for your employees?
"The ones you supervise?"
And the answer was, "Oops, maybe not."
If you have to have something done, do it on time.
There's no value in waiting.
I'm extremely proud that the barley project,
Hatch project, was 002 'til they changed their numbering.
And the wheat project was 055.
No one ever had changed that.
We've always got our patch project renewals in on time.
We never lost our number.
If you enjoy the opportunities that are given you,
and if given an opportunity, make the best of it,
be grateful, and leave graciously and respectfully.
Everybody tells you about how to be a young scientist,
how to be a successful mid-career scientist.
And nobody talks to you about what it's like to retire.
And the point is leave graciously and respectfully.
In breeding, it's easy for the breeder to sort of
want to bask one more minute in the glory
of being the lead breeder.
When you have a new breeder here, let them be the breeder.
My predecessor, I asked him, I had 14 days on the job.
I had to go out to western Nebraska
and talk about varieties.
And I said, "John, do you wanna come out and do it?
"You've bred them all."
And he said, "Nope, I'm not gonna do it."
And I said, "John, you won't hurt my feelings about it."
He said, "No.
"The biggest problem that breeders have
"is they get in the way of the new one.
"If I go out, they'll ask me the questions.
"All the questions from here on out belong with you."
And he was right.
And that's the way I want to leave, too.
Life is short and enjoy it.
Just wanna give you a few things,
and then I'll be close to finishing up.
This is the great Citadel in Aleppo.
Right across was a police station.
I wanted to hop the fence where all the Syrians were
getting a better picture of the Citadel.
But before that the police station,
everybody's out on their smoking break,
I convinced them to take a picture.
They thought I was a good guy.
Everybody thought when I went to Syria
it'd be a hostage situation.
In fact, it was a wonderful trip.
After they figured I was okay, they let me hop the fence.
I got my great picture.
This is Palmyra in Syria,
now totally destroyed due to ISIS,
but I gave one of my better lectures there.
You can see the attendance was spectacular.
This is a printing press.
Doesn't look very important
but this is in the great Library of Alexandria.
The greatest library of ancient times
Egypt has built one of the greatest modern libraries here.
I went to Peru two times, and on the third trip
finally decided it was time to see Machu Picchu.
This slide is Hellfire Beach in Western Australia.
The colors don't do it justice.
The sand is as white as flour that you buy.
The water is clearer than what you see in your bathtub.
It's Christmas Day.
I didn't take a sabbatical in my 34 years,
but I did take a change of duty station
which is a mini-sabbatical.
It was four months in Australia.
I recommend that everybody do it.
I had to give a talk in Burundi,
or had to go to a meeting in Burundi.
I always wanted to do a safari.
This is in Kenya, Masai Mara.
The giraffes and the wildebeests.
If you ever go to CIMMYT, their headquarters in Mexico City,
this is the Pyramid of the Sun.
It's right outside of their headquarters.
Been to India four times, the Taj Mahal twice.
This is right at sunset.
The colors are spectacular.
Take advantage of your opportunities.
I want to introduce who's next: Catherine Frels.
She'll be outstanding.
Really pleased to have her be my successor.
And I'm also very proud that UNL, in the midst of a pandemic
and budget cuts filled this position.
You probably haven't met Dr. Jeff Boehm yet.
He's the new USDA ARS scientist.
He came in the middle of the COVID pandemic.
Hasn't been on campus much.
He replaces Bob Graybosch.
There'll be another USDA, ARS scientist
specialing in wheat and barley genetics coming soon.
So they'll have three geneticists breeder,
which is what it was like when I first came here.
And I'm thinking of all the good work that Catherine,
Jeff, and the new scientist will do together.
It'll be fantastic.
Anytime you see a turtle up on top of a fence post,
you know he had to have some help.
And I want to give you this slide.
When I was in Syria,
there were people that were just magnificent.
They took us from our hotel, to ICARDA
where we were doing our program review,
helped us with the clerical work,
helped us get to the airport,
helped us get through customs, all those types of things,
made our meals and whatnot.
And at the end of the trip, I asked them and I said,
"Would you mind, could I get a photo?
"Because you've been so kind to us."
They treated us like prince and princesses.
And they said, "Sure but we're gonna wait a day."
I said, "Okay, whatever you want."
And the reason was the next day they came
and they didn't wear their work clothes.
They wear their clothes for getting a photograph.
And they told me at the end of it
that no one who'd ever visited ICARDA
had ever asked for a photograph with the staff
that so graciously supported them.
And I bring this up because you need to remember
if you want to differentiate yourself,
saying thank you's a good thing.
And for that, I want to end here.
For 34 years I've had the honor and privilege
of stewarding the Nebraska Small Grains breeding effort.
I've had unbelievable cooperation from growers,
seed dealers, millers, bakers, the USDA,
university colleagues, wonderful technologists,
graduate students, postdocs, visiting scientists,
research assistant, associate professors,
and student helpers.
They're all listed here.
I can't give you all their names,
but I really wanna thank them.
They made this program what it was.
Not a variety that I've released
wasn't touched and made better by them.
But I also wanna thank the great farm and facility crews,
the clerical people, the budget people,
and the personnel help.
I mean, they kept me out of trouble
in more ways, and I make more mistakes before breakfast
than most people make in a day,
and they helped me immensely.
But most of all,
I wanna thank the University of Nebraska for supporting me.
And now my successor.
They allowed me to be the scientist that I wanted to be,
to be the person I wanted to be.
And for that, I am eternally grateful.
I'm proud to be a Husker.
I work for Nebraska.
And thank you.
Marc: Thank you very much Stephen.
From Chet Frances, he's asking
what is the process you follow to propose, vet,
and then name the new variety?
-: Well, I laugh at that because I like breeding them;
I don't like naming them.
I don't think I'm particularly good at that.
So I usually ask my colleagues
what the wheat name should be.
And they usually give me great names,
and then we sort of debate it, and negotiate it,
and we go from there.
The name Ruth, which I think is a spectacular name
in honor of Ruth Miller Moore,
that was suggested by Mary Gutierri.
Alliance, I think was suggested by one of the growers.
We released a wheat called Harry,
and that was in honor of one of the greatest seedsmen
that I ever worked with.
We would have liked to name one Fred.
We couldn't because that one had already been used,
because there was another great seedsman
that totally deserved a wheat named after them.
We did name one McGill
because he was the first barley breeder here.
We wanted to honor Dave McGill.
And so we named one that way.
Marc: So you plant interesting information about
of course the breeding program.
GWAS was quite interesting to me.
I was wondering about your opinion
impacting characterizing the mechanisms under the control
of the genes that has been identified by GWAS.
How do you see that as a potential strategy to
continue to improve crop performance?
-: Well, okay.
That's an excellent question, Marc.
And so the one thing that always bothers me
is when we look at breeding, we say it's a numbers game.
And it really annoys me
because everything we do is actually a numbers game.
Statistics is a numbers game.
And so what you really want is to have an understanding
of where to ask the questions.
I think Einstein had a question once, which,
the highest form of intelligence is vision, not wisdom.
And what he was saying is if you ask the right question
that's more important, perhaps,
than having all the knowledge.
And so to me you have to have the underlying knowledge
to think about how things work.
And the reason for that is there's a thing in breeding
called the happy home for a trait.
And so you may discover a trait,
and let's talk about the Green Revolution wheats.
The Rht genes were well-documented,
and specifically one that's not as used as commonly,
Rht8, was commonly used in Italy in the 1920s.
But they didn't have fertilizer.
They didn't have a lot of other things.
So no one thought that gene was any value.
But as soon as they needed strong straw
because they started using fertilizer to feed the plant,
then that gene became extremely important.
And so now, if you look at it, people are now looking
at the semi-dwarfing genes and saying,
"What can I do to get away from the shorter coleoptile
"which is a pleiotropic effect of that trait?"
And that's where CRISPR/Cas9,
as well as the natural genetic variation becomes huge.
So that to understand the molecular mechanisms
with the tools we have available today
becomes absolutely critical.
Now, did that answer your question?
Marc: Yeah.
I mean, yeah.
Thank you very much.
From Esten Mason...
-: Esten Mason is the new breeder replacing Scott Haley
at Colorado State.
I gotta give a shout out to Scott Haley.
He and I have worked together for most of my career.
And Esten'll be a wonderful new breeder at Colorado State.
So Esten, what's Esten's question?
Marc: Esten asks what is the hardest trait to breed
throughout your career?
-: The hardest trait to breed
has probably been fusarium head blight.
And you can use major genes, which we have done,
but it's a very low heritable trait,
and it's very environmentally sensitive,
and it's very difficult for us to actually work with.
Winter hardiness is great to work with.
I mean, if the plant dies, you can't harvest it.
It's wonderful to get rid of winter-tender material.
Yield is difficult,
but you have the resources to go after it well.
The other traits we look at are end-use quality,
and you can see that we've fixed almost all of our lines
to have the better alleles for end-use quality.
So that's fairly well taken care of.
And then the last one that we work on
that's absolutely obligatory for us is stem rust
because when it comes, it comes like a scythe.
It's a devastating disease, but we have multiple genes
that are available, multiple major genes,
and our assays are extremely good.
Stephen Wegulo and Julie Stevens have just been fantastic
at screening that.
We work with Bob Boden, and we work with Yue Jin
and Matthew Rouse up in the Cereal Disease Lab.
Those we can all handle.
The ones that are tough are the ones
that are low heritable trait,
you don't necessarily have great variation,
native resistance does work.
I would say another trait that's really hard to work with
is bacterial streak.
They don't see that very often in Colorado,
but we see it here.
And that's a really nasty one to do.
If you're looking at triticale,
triticale always has a head that looks like
it should yield 150 bushel,
or that would be 10 metric tons per hectare, or more.
And it never does.
And it's all seed fertility.
You know, the (audio distorts) set the seed.
That's a trait that just drives me crazy.
Marc: Suzanna.
Do you have a favorite variety, and why,
or is the newest one always the one?
-: Well, I guess I've always felt lucky.
So Arapahoe was the first impression.
You only get one chance to make a first impression.
And it was so outstanding.
I've always liked Overland.
I've always liked Settler.
Robidoux is a remarkable wheat for our state, I would say.
I've always liked Alliance
because of its root rot potential.
So there are wheats that are favorite.
Are my new ones necessarily the favorite?
It's a little bit like when the baby is first born
you're not quite sure how it's gonna grow up.
So you get to be pretty humble.
I mean, like if I told you my newest one was Culver,
or my newest one was NHH14913-3, and it was my favorite,
both of those completely failed,
that would not be a good thing.
So you kinda gotta get a little perspective on them
before you do that.
And usually it's the growers that make them successful.
Mark: I would like to bounce back
on a different type of question.
Very lucky from a PhD student.
How do you transfer from a PhD student
to wheat breeder/geneticist after graduation?
Could you provide any advice?
-: You know, what I would do.
Okay, so, first of all,
I was extremely lucky in my career.
I went to the USDA,
and they don't have the very strict tenure requirements
that the university does, and they have better funding
if you go into a well-funded program.
And so it was a great place to start.
But you can get hobbled in there a little bit
with some of the administrative aspects.
And so from there, I went to Monsanto,
and from there I came here.
And I came here as an associate professor with tenure.
So I didn't have to go through all the hassle
that young students would have to do.
But the first thing I would do is
plant breeding is based on continuity.
And what I would recommend is you talk
to the previous breeder, if they're still there,
and ask them the types of questions
that Esten is asking now,
because I'm sure he's asked them to Scott.
Okay?
And then what I would do is look at the program
and think about what you'd wanna change,
but not make the changes.
And the great story of that is Norm Borlaug,
Nobel Laureate, and then developer the World Food Prize,
but for peace.
He went down to Mexico.
And everybody flood irrigated the fields,
and then they planted wheat.
And Norm looked at that and said,
"This is the dumbest thing he's ever seen."
You know, you get ready to plant your wheat,
then you put water on it, which means you got a delay
'cause you gotta let the fields dry out, and then you plant.
So he planted straight into the field, okay?
And what he discovered was that every insect in that ground
ate his wheat.
And so he then flooded the field,
killed all the insects that were in the soil,
and then he planted.
And learn from your previous person,
and particularly the technicians that are still with you,
'cause they're the corporate wisdom, okay?
They know why things worked and didn't work.
They're the boots on the ground.
You can't give them enough credit.
And the farm managers and people like that.
And after you see that, and you learn what they have done,
and what worked and didn't work,
then you start making your modifications.
But be careful; don't make them too quickly, okay?
And the programs that I've seen that have failed
are where the breeder never talked to the previous breeder,
and threw out germ plasm
not knowing how good that germ plasm really was.
You know, it takes 12 years from a cross to finish.
If you use double haploids, it takes seven years.
You know, you don't get the chance,
you always come in midstream,
so don't throw out things
that you don't know enough about why they're valuable.
Marc: I just want to ask one more question
from the audience before maybe we close.
And they are related questions.
Does wheat need to change to fit into this model of ag?
What trait procedures might be needed?
And the second question related to that
is what are the main hurdles for progressing hybrid wheat,
and how do you think they'd be overcome?
-: The regenerative agriculture, I guess to me,
I'm not sure I know the definition well enough
to give a good answer.
But I do feel that wheat is
the most widely-grown crop in the world.
It has the greatest flexibility of all crops in the world.
I mean it can take brutal winters,
and at the same time it's grown in irrigated deserts,
things like this.
So clearly it has a place in the world
when it comes to regenerative agriculture.
When I know more about exactly what they mean,
then I think we should look at it.
I also think that the related crops: triticale, and barley,
and oats, and other things also have a place in there.
And we need to not only look at variation within a genus
and a species, but also within the tribe, you might say,
that they're part of.
And what are the main hurdles for progressing hybrid wheat,
and how do they be overcome?
It's pretty clear
that the biggest hurdle is the production side.
I think we're gonna be able to find heterosis.
That's gonna be easy, I think.
The difficulty will be finding a way of scaling it up.
And that's really where the companies are looking at it
the most right now is they can find heterosis.
They've got all the tools, but you know,
it's not like hybrid corn where you can manually detassel.
There's a lot of things that the crops that were built
to create hybrids, or to prove that hybrids are good,
just can't be used in a perfect flower, you might say.
Marc: Thank you again for your talk.
And I hope we will see each other again
in the next few months.
-: I hope so.
And again, thanks to the seminar committee for inviting me.
It's a great honor to be here.
And thanks to all my friends and colleagues
within the university and outside the university
who've been so gracious to me.
Thank you.