NEW cereal varieties should lead to yields of eight to 10 tonnes a hectare in higher rainfall areas in a good season, according to CSIRO wheat breeder Dr Garry Rosewarne.
Dr Rosewarne was speaking at the launch of Preston wheat, which was released at the annual Mackillop Farm Management Field Days at Frances and Conmurra recently.
He said with an alliance with Plant and Food Research New Zealand, they were filling a niche market for high yielding milling wheat varieties.
CSIRO has been importing 600 lines a year from New Zealand as part of its high rainfall zone wheat breeding program, with one of these consistent high yielding varieties the new Preston wheat.
It was first trialed and evaluated in Australia in 2003, and has received a preliminary Australian premium wheat quality classification.
Dr Rosewarne said the variety which will be commercialised by AWB Seeds had a medium to late season maturity pattern and had shown excellent disease resistance to leaf and stripe rust.
Preston is a shortish, semi-dwarf wheat variety and has moderate resistance rating to yellow leaf spot and powdery mildew.
Dr Rosewarne said it sometimes showed physiological flecking on the leaves but this was not disease-related and did not adversely affect yield.
It had a number of physiological advantages including strong straw strength to prevent lodging, and a bluish waxy coating on the head which is likely to make it more drought tolerant.
"Part of the package is that it has a tight crown and its leaves are very vertical which enables better light capture," Dr Rosewarne said.
PlantTech also released its Oxford barley, the first release from Nickerson's breeding program in the United Kingdom, which aims to identify malting barleys and milling wheats.
PlantTech's technical development manager, Cameron Conboy said Oxford had consistently outyielded the widely-grown variety Gairdner by 10-20 per cent in trials in the southern growing zones, in some of the toughest years for long season barley varieties.
He said Oxford, being a nitrogen accumulator, had good potential to put nitrogen into increasing yield instead of pushing grain protein levels up, and it had a flowering date about seven days later than Gairdner.
"It is a very short variety so it puts a lot of its energy into grain and is a bit more resistant to lodging than Gairdner, so in those bigger yield potential crops it is not falling over and making it harder to harvest," he said.
Among its other advantages were disease resistance to leaf rust and moderate resistance ratings to spot form of net blotch and net form of net blotch and leaf scald which have affected many Gairdner barley crops this year.
Mr Conboy said Oxford was bred from Oxbridge, the leading malting variety in the UK, but malting trials were still being undertaken on Oxford in Australia.
In micro malt evaluations with Joe White and Malt Europe it has shown good potential, and bulk malt evaluations will be conducted after the 2009 harvest.
"It will be released as a feed variety, but a high yielding feed variety with a good disease package and potential for malting down the track," he said.
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