Breeding Wheat and Much More with Dr. James Anderson
Good day and welcome to the University of Minnesota CropCast. I'm your host Dave Nicolai, University of Minnesota Extension educator in field crops. I'm here along with my co host Doctor. Seth Nave, University of Minnesota Extension specialist in soybean production. Our special guest today Seth is one of the faculty members here at the University of Minnesota Department of Agronomy.
Speaker 1:Jim Anderson, he's a professor in dealing with small grain primarily in genetics and in plant breeding. Jim, welcome to the program. I'm going to jump right in and give you an opportunity to maybe introduce yourself a little bit more in detail in terms of your own academic background and terms of that where you grew up and basically how do you ended up here at the University of Minnesota. So I know that's a mouthful but you can jump in wherever you'd like.
Speaker 2:Alright, thanks Dave, and thanks for inviting me to be on the podcast. So I am a Minnesota native, grew up on a small dairy farm near St. Peter, Minnesota, and came up to University of Minnesota here and majored in agronomy, graduated here in 1987. Went on to Kentucky for a master's degree, and then went to Cornell to do my PhD, and my PhD was in wheat breeding and genetics, and I kinda got in on the ground floor of this new technology called DNA markers, and that sort of launched my career.
Speaker 1:So tell us a little bit about your growing up here in Minnesota. I think you mentioned it was a small farm, but what what really prompted you to think about the area of agronomy and crop science?
Speaker 2:So it was a dairy farm, and we had corn, soybeans, alfalfa, occasional small grains as a nurse crop for alfalfa, and I was always more interested in the agronomy side of things. I remember going with my dad to field day talks, so corn breeders would be talking about their newest hybrids, and we went to the field day at the Waseca Research and Outreach Center, and that's that's what really kind of sparked my interest in agronomy as a career. And when I was looking around for places to to do that degree, know, U of M St. Paul campus was was, you know, top of my list.
Speaker 1:Then when, what year did you come here on staff, faculty? You mentioned you were at Cornell, and then were you looking around at that point in time? Was there an opening here?
Speaker 2:So from Cornell, let's go, I'll go back a little bit. So Cornell, I graduated in 1992, and then my first position was at North Dakota State University. I was there from 'ninety two to 'ninety six, and from there I went to the USDA ARS in Pullman, Washington as a winter wheat breeder. I was there for two years, and then I came into my current position as spring wheat breeder in 1998.
Speaker 1:Okay, and who was here at Minnesota just prior to that in areas of the breeding in terms of small grain?
Speaker 2:So Bob Bush was the spring wheat breeder. He was a USDA ARS scientist, but during that transition, USDA had decided that they didn't want to have a breeding position, they wanted a geneticist position, and the university, well, need to have a spring wheat breeder, so the university essentially added a new staff position. So that's my role.
Speaker 1:Okay, And you again came here what year?
Speaker 2:1998.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:With me, we started together. I remember you and I went on our, we did kind of a freshman tour of the state and we toured around way back when. So that's where I got to know you actually on on the CFANS and I don't even remember what our college was called at the time but there was a there was an agricultural whatever the ag college was at the time when we toured around the state went to Lamberton and visit a couple other things.
Speaker 1:So did you have an opportunity to chart your own path and so to speak you mentioned that one of the things they were looking for was obviously somebody not just in genetics but would have a handle on the breeding side as well. How much leeway does a new faculty member have when they come into a position like this, or did you were you able to chart your own course, so to speak?
Speaker 2:To some extent, I mean the position is spring wheat breeding and genetics, so that's something that was expected, and the expectation there is that you are going to develop new, improved varieties and germplasm, but also help develop the science around that. So better ways to do the breeding, or innovative ways to attack the problem. And like I said, when I graduated from Cornell, I kind of got in on the ground floor of that DNA marker technology. So that's something that I brought to the program here that hadn't been done previously. So I got involved immediately with trying to take that technology to bear on the biggest problem at the time, which was Fusarium head blight resistance, or SCAP.
Speaker 2:So we had mapped some genes, others had mapped genes, so we started using DNA markers to select for those genes. It makes the breeding process more efficient. And most of my first graduate students, what they were tasked with doing is finding resistance genes for that particular disease. And those genes that we found early on have now helped elevate the resistance level of our germplasm so that now most of our varieties are moderately resistant to that disease.
Speaker 3:So what's the timeframe in the science? So you started releasing varieties right away, but those varieties were in the pipeline from Bush's program, I assume. And so you started releasing varieties. And then what's kind of the tempo or the time frame for those varieties that you felt like you really had brought in from the very beginning? I guess some of the first crosses that you made, when did those come out of your program, and what are some of the first varieties that came out of your program specifically, maybe?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so it's about an eight to ten year timeline from when you first make a cross to when there's a release. So you're right, I inherited a full pipeline from first generation crosses to things that had been in yield trials for five or six years, and ready for a decision whether they get released or not. And in those early years it was kind of rough, because our program, as many other spring wheat programs, had been pretty ravaged by Fusarium head blight. So there was really no point in releasing something that was susceptible to that disease, so we're heavily selecting for resistance to that disease. The first variety that I would say I had any real involvement in was Oakley that was released in 02/2003, so that was a five year gap from when I came on until we had our first real variety.
Speaker 2:And then I would say the first one where I had made the cross was probably 2010, '20 '11, so there's at least ten year time period. So I was basically sifting through my predecessor's material. In the meantime we did have a really good one, RB07, grown on more than one, it was released in 02/2007, and the acronym RB, that stands for Robert Bush, so to honor his contributions to Minnesota wheat breeding, that variety was grown on over 1,000,000 acres across Minnesota, North Dakota, and South Dakota in 2011. It didn't last for very long, it was only out there for a couple of years, but it was very popular for at least 2011.
Speaker 3:And so you've released a total of 20 some varieties or
Speaker 2:something like Yeah, yep.
Speaker 3:And we still have really good traction from the public sector in varieties grown through Minnesota and the Dakotas, is that right?
Speaker 2:Yes, so that's something that I'd like to keep track of, mostly so when it comes time to promote our next variety release, or decide what we're gonna release, we know what growers are choosing, and we know what maybe should be replaced, or what we think should be replaced. So that's, when I came into the position, that's one of the first thing I asked for in 1998 was, know, wheat growers, we need a variety survey, because that hadn't been done routinely, and if you ask the National Egg Statistics Service to do it, they'll do it, but they charge a lot for it. So Minnesota hadn't been doing it routinely, so the wheat growers took that on and started mailing out a postcard variety survey. So we would put 40 variety names that we think were the most popular on there, and they would check out or write down how many acres of each, and that's been a fantastic tool for us. So we know basically by county and by region what the most popular varieties are.
Speaker 3:See I see those numbers and I've never known where those come from, so that's very interesting because of course I don't get a letter, so I guess I wouldn't know. But that's very good that you get that kind of resolution for that information.
Speaker 2:We're one of the few states that do that. Other states, they're paying the National Egg Statistics Service to do that, or most states, they just don't do it at all. So they don't know, other than seed sales that they can maybe track through their crop improvement association, but that doesn't account for saved seed. So you're only getting a small piece of the puzzle there.
Speaker 3:And so you do get numbers on saved seed as well, so farmers do report that.
Speaker 2:Yes, yes, and I guess to answer your question, yes, breeding program has had a pretty good share of that Minnesota acreage. Really in 2015, I think the variety Linkert is the one that kind of really raised the status of our program. That was the most popular variety for five years running, and now between Linkert, Shelley, M. Torgey, and MN Rossi, we're around 30 to 35% of the state's acreage.
Speaker 1:What are some of the attributes? I mean you mentioned resistance here, but I know that when Yokum Wirzma does in some of the testing, you're obviously looking at a number of other factors you're looking in terms of your program. Yield is there. Anything else in addition to yield per se, or is that still along with resistance number one and two?
Speaker 2:I would say yield is number one. Straw strength is probably number two, and that is definitely responsible for the variety Linkerts five year reign as tops in Minnesota acres, because if you look at the yields of Linkert, they're near the bottom. They always have been, even when we first released it, it was near the bottom, but it had straw strength, and it had protein, the growers can get a premium for high protein, but the more common case is they get docked if it's below 14%. In most cases, Linkert will not run below 14% protein, so they can be almost certain that they wouldn't get dock for protein. And Linkert also happens to have very good end use quality.
Speaker 2:Right now it's considered the standard for the spring wheat region, so all new varieties are getting tested against Linkerd in terms of bread baking quality. So if a variety has yield, straw strength, and protein, it's probably gonna do well. If it has some good disease resistance, that's a nice bonus.
Speaker 1:So the straw strength, just spending a little bit on time, is that from a lodging standpoint, or what other attributes are, is that why you're looking at that as a major factor?
Speaker 2:Yes, it's lodging. And what really propelled Linkert up was 2015, growers may remember that year that we had a lot of wind and rainstorms that year, and Linkert was kind of in its first big year where a lot of guys were growing it, and it stood well. And the other varieties that were higher yielding, lower protein, but weaker straw, they fell down. So it was a lot more hassle trying to get those harvested.
Speaker 3:Yeah, talk to the seed corn companies, they know when they've, you know, when you have a product that doesn't fare well, that farmers remember that. And so it sounds like you had a good year or a good time frame for the release so that they could really get some traction on it. So we want to talk about some other crops, but I want to get a question in here about winter wheat. So you work on several you're a spring wheat breeder, but you are involved with a lot of different wheat testing programs, different classes of wheat, different types of wheat. So I have a real interest in spring wheat or winter wheat.
Speaker 3:So what are your thoughts on winter wheat? And then this changing climate that we've got here is do we have a future for double cropping in Minnesota and using winter wheat?
Speaker 2:Sure. So my first job was winter wheat breeder at North Dakota State University. The acreage was low, and it never really built up again, and they actually cut the program while I was there. So that was part of the reason that I moved on to USDA in Pullman, Washington. So that gives you a little bit of the answer right there, is it's tough to grow winter wheat in the northern climates.
Speaker 2:So winter hardiness is an issue, but there's maybe a bigger issue of just how to fit it into the crop rotation. So many of the best acres in the state are in corn and soybean. Corn's coming off too late to get winter wheat planted, soybean may be in some fields, it's coming off early enough, but most guys I think are kind of too busy with harvesting corn and soybeans to mess with winter wheat, and you're probably going into a pretty dry seed bed as well, so not ideal conditions. So I think the timing is probably the biggest thing. Agronomically, it makes sense.
Speaker 2:It will out yield spring wheat, there's better weed competition, it can escape some diseases. Another possible issue, if we started having a lot of winter wheat acreage, is green bridge. So if the spring wheat isn't all harvested yet, and you've got winter wheat starting to grow, then you've got a green bridge that insects can overwinter in and you have some problems that way.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I tend to think about the challenges of that crop after what what to put in that crop after winter wheat and that double cropping situation. But I can see that your point is a lot of resistance on the front side of it around planting and establishment. And I didn't think carefully through this, but farmer timeframes and that fall timeframe and what crop you follow and then how to get that in a timely way and into a good seed bed so you get emergence would be really a challenge.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah, the acres, I think there have been around forty, fifty thousand acres a year in Minnesota, don't really change a whole lot. So I think it's just some specialty rotations, probably Northern Minnesota is where the highest concentration is, there's maybe not as much corn.
Speaker 1:So but agronomically, are the varieties that are out there or will be able to handle our winter weather so to speak. Was always concern years ago about that but you know we say for example this year we've probably had a lack of snow cover in a lot of Minnesota. Other times it's different. Mean and I was just down to Iowa over the weekend and they had Southern Iowa had 19 inches. It was just you know a lot but you know now we've got concerns about lack of snow cover over the top of alfalfa.
Speaker 1:When we is Is that a big deal in terms of trying to get this crop to survive?
Speaker 2:I would say that probably in at least eight out of ten years, it shouldn't be an issue. But that's another thing where if growers do have winter kill, that's something that they're gonna remember for many years to come, there's a pretty long memory there. And I would say in general, winter hardiness has not been a really strong target of improvement for wheat breeders. I think you could go back fifty, even one hundred years, and find just as good winter hardiness back then as you do today. So there are definitely differences in the varieties.
Speaker 2:North Dakota State did re establish their breeding program about a dozen or so years ago, and they've had some varieties that have good winter hardiness, the South Dakota materials are pretty good. But there are a few years where we have entire locations where, like you said, if you don't get enough snow cover, all of those varieties have potential to kill, and especially the ones that are more adapted to the southern locations.
Speaker 1:But we'll continue to be involved with it in the University of Minnesota in our breeding programs going forward.
Speaker 2:Yes, so Jochim Weirsma, extension agronomist in Crookston, has been coordinating our winter wheat testing program, and he's actually expanded it, so from when I was doing it. So he's testing more varieties from more breeding programs, bringing in varieties from Canada to really, you know, make sure we're testing the best of the best varieties that may be adapted for the region.
Speaker 3:Well, I'm sorry to linger on this topic. It's kind of a tangential topic here, but it's one of interest to me anyway, personally, so I appreciate that. And I was trying to make a bridge to cover crops, and I was trying to make a little connection here because you've also, as we've developed new cover cropping systems and have more interest in new crops for Minnesota, you've gotten pulled in or have jumped in either way into some breeding efforts. So can you tell us a little bit about those efforts?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so this goes back about ten to twelve years now. So this is the so called forever green suite of crops. So these are cover crops and perennials, and the idea is to get more cover on the landscape, especially over the winter. So Don Weiss has been leading this program for decades, and what was really needed, he came to that conclusion fairly on, was that we needed better materials, better crops. So not just cereal rye or tillage radish, we needed crops that growers could harvest and have some more economic incentive.
Speaker 2:So if you could harvest that winter wheat crop, now it's not just a cover crop, it's like part of the rotation. So I got into that and decided my expertise in plant breeding could be helpful here, and there was some funding available. So this was in about 2011 with Kernza, or intermediate wheatgrass, and 2013 with Pennycrest. And the reason that I said yes at that time, I had been asked many times over the years previously, I said yes really for three reasons. One is because I believe in it, you know, grown up and lived in Minnesota most of my life, you know, Minnesotans, we wanna protect our water, reduce erosion, and cover crops and perennials are a great way to do that.
Speaker 2:So that was a good motivation. The second was the new technologies that we can bring to bear on domestic heating crops, and specifically more affordable, cheaper DNA sequencing technologies. So most breeding programs around the country are using DNA sequencing technology, DNA fingerprints to help make selections and make faster gains in the program. And I thought that the timing is right here because we can use this technology and domesticate crops like pennycress and winter camelina much faster than we could even five years previous. So the timing is right.
Speaker 2:And the third part of that is there's a lot of students that were really interested in this. In fact, more than are interested in breeding wheat. So as I looked at my wheat breeding program, I can maybe have one student that I can fund in wheat breeding, but I could handle two or three students on Kernza or Pennycrest, so I'm helping develop those crops as well. And now my role, I would say, is more as an advisor. So we have a research assistant professor in the department, Prabin Bajgin, that's running the Kernza breeding program, Julia Zhang is running the Pennycrest breeding program, and Matt Odd, a postdoc, is running the Camelina program.
Speaker 2:So I'm involved in meetings and writing and editing grants and publications, but the day to day breeding activities are, they're running their own programs, essentially.
Speaker 3:And so what is your experience? I mean, you mentioned that ten years ago, you could see that these new tools were really going to push things along? And how has that worked for domestication? Have we made the gains that you expected? Or is it better than or slower than you expected for some of these early domestications?
Speaker 2:I would say it's been better than I expected, and part of that is the other scientists involved in developing these technologies. So with Kernza, almost from the get go in 2011, we started doing the DNA sequencing, and we were doing genomic predictions based on the DNA markers by 2015, and at that time we were more advanced in our use of DNA marker technologies in intermediate wheatgrass than we were in wheat, which was kind of blows my mind when I think about it now, but that's, you know, you just started out breeding this crop with this cheap DNA sequence and prediction technology, so it just seemed natural to go all in on that. So Prabin is now using that technology basically to guide selection decisions for the whole program. And I like to say they're sort of in a honeymoon period now where the gains are coming pretty fast in terms of those domestication traits. So reduced shattering, better threshability.
Speaker 2:So simple, relatively simple thing, but that took decades if not hundreds of years for our other crops. This is happening in just a few years, you know, in one generation of time. And with Penny Cross, Doctor. David Marks, was a faculty member in plant molecular, plant microbial biology department, he did mutations in pennycress, and with cheap sequencing, and knowing its relationship, the relationship of that crop and its genes with Arabidopsis, which is sort of the lab rat of plants, he could make really fast progress at pinpointing exact genes, and then we could identify the seeds that had that mutation. So now, you know, I think we have the major domestication genes already in hand in pennycress in less than ten years of research.
Speaker 3:It's just shocking to me that, you know, from a I mean, there was significant investment for sure, but this is public sector type money that's gone into this. This isn't the bears and Cortevas of the world that are invested here. This is orders of magnitude smaller than those kind of corporate investments, but yet you're able to make something such tremendous strides. And I guess especially relative to just you can actually see and compare that to what traditional breeding and crossing crossing and breeding would do for you over time is pretty fascinating.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the acres aren't there yet. There's about, I think, 2,000 acres of Kernza in Minnesota. Pennycrest is just getting started, there's a few hundred acres of Camelina, but I think the potential is in the millions in terms of the cover crops.
Speaker 1:Can you maybe pause a little bit for the our audience and I don't know if you want to use an overview or Reader's Digest version when we talk about DNA sequencing. Are the what's the mechanics involved with that is and people envision someone extracting something from a seed in a lab, but can you just review it a little bit for our audience what actually goes on when we use that term?
Speaker 2:Sure. There's kind of two aspects of it, I guess, when we look at how we use that technology. So we're, what we're doing is we're getting DNA from just a little bit of a leaf punch. That's all you need. And we're using it in two ways.
Speaker 2:The first, what I would refer to as marker assisted selection, that's when we have a DNA marker sequence that we know is linked with a particular gene of interest. So for example, our lab twenty some years ago mapped the major gene for Fusarium head blight resistance called FHB1. So we have DNA markers that we can assay and know if the plant has that gene or does not have that gene. And that's a pretty routine test nowadays using polymerase chain reaction, which is a technology that's more than forty years old now. But it's fairly inexpensive, on the order of maybe a dollar per sample to do that.
Speaker 2:And we do that for a number of genes, so a number of disease resistance genes, genes that would help give you good bread making quality, for example. The other, the more modern approach to the DNA sequencing is what I would call maybe a DNA fingerprint. So that's looking at DNA sequence differences across the entire genome. And in any one comparison between two plants, you may be looking at 4,000 or 5,000 or 10,000 differences, and then trying to correlate those differences with performance in the field, or resistance to a disease, and then you train a model based on that. So looking at those 4,000 DNA differences and the performance, you train a model, and then you're using that to predict the performance on other genotypes or other plants that you have not yet tested in the field, but you have their DNA information.
Speaker 2:So it's sort of an AI approach to plant reading. The major seed companies have been doing that for more than ten years now. Our wheat breeding program has been doing it starting about eight years ago, and just ramping up our use of the technology a little bit more every year, trying to predict as many traits as possible. And really, the bottom line, what we're doing is we're trying to use the DNA sequence information to predict what the best performing plants will be, and those are the ones we've tested in the field. If they're not predicted to be good, we haven't made much investment into them other than the DNA sequencing, which runs about $10 per plant, which in the grand scheme of things is quite cheap, we just throw those away.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so there's some simple economics that can go into this, and you can just look at the numbers and the cost of doing this lab analysis relative to doing all the screening in the field. And especially as the cost of that screening in greenhouses and field continues to go up, you know, the other costs continue to go down. And it sure leads to more and more of this kind of evaluation and pushing towards that quicker. So it's pretty exciting. I think we've seen the benefits in some of the major crops, but I can see that the real gains I can see of this domestication side is pretty cool.
Speaker 1:Can you tell us more about your staff and graduate students and maybe even teaching here at the university? Imagine there's there's technicians involved, there's there's graduate students, postdocs, but you have people coming in and cycling back out a little bit about that and maybe some other responsibilities you have here in addition to research, maybe on the teaching side.
Speaker 2:Sure, so I'll talk about my wheat breeding staff. So it's essentially three people, and that's really what I've had the whole time that I've been here since 1998. '2 are field based, and one is more lab based. And so the lab based person, Emily Conley, now has a PhD. She's been doing the marker assisted selection, and is also in charge of the genomic prediction.
Speaker 2:So anything DNA based, she's the person touching that, making sure it gets done, doing the analysis. And then the two field based positions, one, Susan Reynolds has a MS and Nate Stewart has a bachelor's degree. Currently we have two postdocs, both funded by USDA specific cooperative agreements. That's nice to have, I don't think I've ever had two postdocs working on wheat at the same time, so we're hoping to make some gains there, looking at how to use that genomic prediction technology more efficiently. Currently, I'm looking for a grad student on wheat.
Speaker 2:I'm advising one grad student on intermediate wheatgrass currently.
Speaker 1:And are you in position two where you're teaching as well?
Speaker 2:Yes, I have a 20% research or a teaching appointment. I teach a 5,000 level plant breeding class, which the last few years has been about half undergraduate and half graduate students.
Speaker 1:Is that an intro class, or is that one after the intro class? It
Speaker 2:would be one after the intro class, and I've been teaching that one since 2015. Before that I was teaching an 8,000 level graduate student only class, so with that one I saw every graduate program in plant breeding or molecular genetics that was going through the program. With this 5,000 class, I'll only see the ones that haven't had a lot of plant breeding background. Or we have students from food science and nutrition, we've had one from entomology, we always have a few from plant pathology. So it's more of a class for students that kinda wanna get a taste of plant breeding or learn the language a little bit because they see themselves working with plant breeders in the future.
Speaker 3:So I always like to ask, and we're running a little bit low on time here, but I want to always ask what excites you about your work and maybe what some of the things are that are exciting for the future. So whether that's teaching or the research side or any of the other scholarship or anything happening around this university or others? What's exciting for you? What keeps you coming back or what are you looking forward to in the future?
Speaker 2:Well, the teaching side, what I've started to do is look back at the past classes, because I've taught this plant breeding class, it was every other year, in the last few years, it's every other year, but looking at the roster of names that have gone through that class, and where they are now, and that's a really strong motivation for me to really give it my best, because I see where these students are ending up, in industry or faculty positions. So that's a strong motivator, and a sense of satisfaction as well. On the research side, that's pretty easy for plant breeding, because there's always something that you have to do that's better. And we're struggling against that now because our two most recent releases, one in 2020, M. N.
Speaker 2:Torghi and M. N. Rothstein in 2022, we're having trouble beating them. So it's a constant challenge, okay, are we making the wrong crosses, or are we selecting for the right things here? So it's
Speaker 3:a
Speaker 2:challenge, and plant breeding is a numbers game, and I think it may be the case that we just had two really good varieties, and the bar is set pretty high right now. So we'll increase our numbers and to beat them in the next few years.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's tough business to try to have to beat yourself year over year, so I really appreciate that though.
Speaker 1:Well thank you very much. Talk about closing out, we want to really thank you Jim for stopping by here for this version of University of Minnesota CropCast. So this has been with Doctor. Jim Anderson here University of Minnesota Department of Agronomy and Plant Breeding and my co host Doctor. Seth Nave University Minnesota Extension soybean specialist and I guess at this point in time any last words other than that thank you all for listening here to the University of Minnesota CropCast and we look forward to visiting with you in the future.
Speaker 1:Thanks again.
