Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Page 14 Page 15 Page 16 Page 17 Page 18 Page 19 Page 20 Page 21 Page 22 Page 23 Page 24 Page 25 Page 26 Page 27 Page 28 Page 29 Page 30 Page 31 Page 32 Page 33 Page 34 Page 35 Page 36 Page 37 Page 38 Page 39 Page 40 Page 41 Page 42 Page 43 Page 44 Page 45 Page 46 Page 47 Page 48 Page 49 Page 50 Page 51 Page 52 Page 53 Page 54 Page 55 Page 56 Page 57 Page 58 Page 59 Page 60 Page 61 Page 62 Page 63 Page 64 Page 65 Page 66 Page 67 Page 6860 INDUSTRY NEWS Designed for seed professionals, Industry News delivers the people, industry, business and product news you need to know. Submissions are welcome. Email us at news@issuesink.com. INDUSTRY NEWS The Alberta Wheat Commission (AWC) is calling on the Canadian Grain Commission (CGC) to modernize the Canadian grading system in line with international market demands to improve long-term profitability for wheat farmers. A market-based system aligned with universally measured grain specifications would better position farmers to maintain competitiveness and receive fair market value for the grain they produce. “We have observed an evolution in the way wheat is marketed to Canada’s customers,” said Kevin Auch, Alberta Wheat Commission Chair. “International buyers aren’t looking purely at CGC grades anymore — they’re looking at universal quality specs. Modernizing our grading system is a necessary move to ensure Alberta’s farmers receive the maximum value for the quality of wheat they produce.” The governments of Canada and Manitoba have invested more than $365,000 in five new research projects in Manitoba. Manitoba Agriculture Minister Ralph Eichler and Member of Parliament, Terry Duguid on behalf of Federal Agriculture Minister Lawrence MacAulay recently announced this new funding at a dairy farm near Rosser. Funded projects include $180,000 to XiteBio Technologies Inc. to determine whether bacteria living near the roots of wheat and barley can be used to help control the damage caused by fusarium head blight, a serious fungal disease that affects crop yield and quality and $50,000 to CanaMaize Seed to develop and perform yield trials on a non-genetically modified soybean that is high-yielding and suitable for Manitoba’s shorter growing seasons. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture and the International Wheat Yield Partnership are jointly funding a three-year grant for $975,000. The grant, titled “Developing the Tools and Germplasm for Hybrid Wheat” will involve Texas A&M’s Dr. Amir Ibrahim, a wheat breeder in College Station, and Dr. Jackie Rudd, a wheat breeder in Amarillo. Led by Dr. Stephen Baenziger, University of Nebraska-Lincoln small grains breeder the project will use an integrated approach involving in-house germplasm, chemical hybridizing agents, breeding, phenotyping, genomic selection and quantitative trait loci mapping. The researchers expect this project to help create scientific and germplasm foundations for successfully launching the hybrid wheat industry in the U.S. To feed a larger global population with increasing dietary needs, Ibrahim said wheat yields need to increase by 1.7 percent per year. Currently, yields are only increasing 0.9 percent annually. For wheat, past conventional breeding efforts increased hybrid vigor about 10 percent, but Ibrahim said they want to get that figure in the range of 15-20 percent to make it attractive to producers. “We believe hybrid wheat, which is more climate resilient than pure-line wheat, can contribute to achieving this goal,” he said. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations released its annual report on "The State of Food and Agriculture" focusing on impacts of climate change on agriculture and the implications for food security. According to the report, there is an urgent need to support smallholders in adapting to climate change. Farmers, pastoralists, fisherfolk and community foresters are dependent on tasks that involve climate and at the same time, these groups are also the most vulnerable to climate change. Thus, there is a greater need for access to technologies, markets, information and credit for investment to adjust their production systems and practices to climate change. The report is available at fao.org. We can tell when plants need water: their leaves droop and they start to look dry. But what’s happening on a molecular level? Scientists at the Salk Institute have made a leap forward in answering that question, which could be critical to helping agriculture adapt to drought and other climate-related stressors. The new research suggests that in the face of environmental hardship, plants employ a small group of proteins that act as conductors to manage their complex responses to stress. The results, which are detailed in the Nov. 3 issue of Science, may help in developing new technologies to optimize water use in plants. A team of U.S. Department of Agriculture scientists and their collaborators have established a strong link between honeybee health and the effects of diet on bacteria that live in the guts of these important insect pollinators. In a study published in the November issue of Molecular Ecology, the team fed caged honeybees one of four diets: fresh pollen, aged pollen, fresh supplements, and aged supplements. After seven days, the team euthanized and dissected the bees and used next-generation sequencing methods to identify the bacteria communities that had colonized the bees' digestive tract. A sister species of the Varroa destructor mite is developing the ability to parasitize European honeybees, threatening pollinators already hard pressed by nutritional deficiencies and disease, a Purdue University study says. Researchers found that some populations of Varroa jacobsoni mites are shifting from feeding and reproducing on Asian honeybees, their preferred host, to European honeybees, the primary species used for crop pollination and honey production worldwide. To bee researchers, it's a grimly familiar story: V. destructor made the same host leap at least 60 years ago, spreading rapidly to become the most important global health threat to European honeybees. Using computer model simulations, University of Illinois scientists have predicted that modern soybean crops produce more leaves than they need to the detriment of yield — a problem made worse by rising atmospheric carbon dioxide. They tested their prediction by removing about one third of the emerging leaves on soybeans and found an 8 percent increase in seed yield in replicated trials. They attribute this boost in yield to increased photosynthesis, decreased respiration, and diversion of resources that would have been invested in more leaves than seeds.