Rice Breeding Program Update – Post-Event Summary
As we move into the second year of our rice breeding program, we’ve focused on consolidating the new approaches introduced last year while striving for continuous improvement. Our goal remains to make the program bigger, better, and faster. Below is an update on our progress and plans for the future.
Key Program Focus: Enhancing Profitability through Breeding
- We’ve built upon the foundations of the previous program, refining key breeding targets to maximize profitability for growers.
- We’ve made significant progress, especially with our focus on five main grain quality classes, with medium-grain being the primary focus, aligning with the Rice RD&E Plan.
Grain Quality Targets:
- Progressing from the ARP (Advanced Rice Program), we’re focusing on traits that will deliver the greatest impact on profitability.
- The majority of our efforts remain focused on medium grain varieties.
Key Traits for Selection: When assessing the suitability of a line, we consider 30 different characteristics. However, our primary focus is on traits that will deliver the most value for growers:
- Cold tolerance
- Lodging resistance
- Yield
- Grain quality
- Maturity
- Disease and pest resistance
- Establishment success
- Adaptation to aerobic (non-flooded) systems
Cold Tolerance – A Transformative Focus
- Cold tolerance remains essential for achieving consistent grain yields across all seasons.
- We can now screen for cold tolerance efficiently in glasshouses, enabling faster progress.
- This focus promises significant advancements in the near future.
CY24 Crop Results:
- While no new lines surpassed the performance of Matilda (VO71), 15% of other lines showed promise in outperforming existing varieties within specific quality classes.
- However, lines from the previous breeding program are not meeting current performance expectations.
Looking Ahead to CY25: We’re scaling up our operations to further increase our evaluation capacity:
- Yield evaluations will expand to include ~6,000 plots.
- Short row trials will increase to 15,000, with hill plots growing to 15,000-25,000.
- We’re also increasing evaluations in non-flooded systems to ensure we’re breeding for the future of rice production.
Summary:
- The RBA (Rice Breeding Australia) program is delivering consistent results.
- The improvements made over the past two years will begin to show their full impact in the next 4-5 years.
- For more information, please feel free to contact myself at 0484 109 778 or Georgie at 0428 953 045.
Mark Your Calendar! RBA’s first field day will be held in February 2025 – more details to come.