PERENNIAL WHEAT

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLIII, Issue 20672, 10 March 1937, Page 4

PERENNIAL WHEAT

A CANADIAN DISCOVERY MAY MAKE NEW FORAGE CROP Perennial wheat has been found. Just what the discovery means to Canadian farmers is not yet certain, but it opens up a wide range of possibilities which will be tested out by plant breeders on {he Dominion Experimental Farms in the next few years, says a writer of “The Canadian Press.” It is possible but not probable a farmer may be able to seed a field to wheat and harvest crops of saleable grain from it year after year without the annual labour of ploughing, cultivating and sowing. A more likely outcome is the establishment of a new forage crop which may restore to productive use large areas of drought-ravaged land in Western Canada. Plant breeders have developed a plant with the seed of ordinary wheat and the long-lived roots of grass. They did it by cross-breeding ordinary strains of wheat with agropyron, a perennial grass closely akin to the common couch grass of Eastern Canada and the crested wheat grass of Western Canada. About half an acre of it. representing many different crosses and varieties, will be sown in experimental plots next spring. Seeds of the hybrid plants so far are smaller and lighter than wheat and scientists doubt if a perennial wheat suitable for bread making can be obtained. In any case annual wheats probably will be always superior to perennial wheats in Western Canada. If a good perennial wheat were obtained it might be useful in a country with abundant moisture, perhaps in the Maritime Provinces. Optimism centres in the prospect of a vigorous new, leafy, perennial forage plant with large wheat-like seeds. The seeds would add to the forage value of the crop and their large size would permit the seeding down of dry lands where small-seeded grasses cannot be made to take root. Small grass seeds must be sown close to the surface of the soil and attempts to seed dry prairie lands to grass have failed because with the drifting of the top soil the seeds are carried away. Large seeds, such as wheat, are drilled into the soil and are thus more or less secure from soil-drifting until they germinate. A perennial wheat could be sown successfully on such land just as annual wheats, can be and its spreading roots would soon bind the soil and put a stop to drifting. It would produce grass year after year and might return a good yield in pasture or hay. Cross-breeding was accomplished by fertilising the flowers of wheat plants with pollen from grass flowers.