High oleic soybeans come full circle

For Bryan Stobaugh, it’s pretty exciting to see high oleic soybeans start to come full circle.

Missouri Soy recently announced the first license to the University of Georgia to execute a commercial license to advance UGA’s high oleic soybeans called Soyleic. Missouri Soybean has been working on a trait-licensing plan with universities to move seed ready for commercialization that meets both quality assurance and quality control standards.

Stobaugh, Missouri Soybean director of licensing, said this first of its kind partnership is one that he—growing up on a row crop farm in Arkansas, and going to graduate school and working on a Soybean Checkoff funded project—is happy to see come to fruition.

“Actually seeing it come full circle, seeing beans in the field that are able to be touched,” he said. “A lot of times they see traits and things (that are) inside the bean. It’s not a visible piece.”

Stobaugh said soybean growers and developers could talk about disease, drought or flood tolerance—all things that can’t be seen in the bean.

“This is something that can be seen and it’s something we can use in our kitchens. Something we can feed our livestock, we can feed our poultry,” he said. “The meal is still valuable because it is a sustainably produced product with competitive protein content.”

At work

Missouri Soybean Executive Director Gary Wheeler sees how important it is to have these traits available to growers in the maturity groups.

“This is a big win for checkoff innovation, and simply, innovation in the agricultural industry,” Wheeler said. “We are seeing our research reach producers’ fields today. This is our checkoff at play, ready and available for use by producers across the country.”

He hopes they’re able to supply Soyleic in the next two years.

“With strong data, we will be announcing further expansion of the Soyleic portfolio,” he said. “With partnerships, like the one with the University of Georgia, we plan to achieve our goal of providing the Soyleic trait option to all producers in the U.S.”

The breeding of high oleic varieties hasn’t stopped, and is continuing today to make the lines more advanced and more competitive in the marketplace.

“The major focus for Soyleic has been non-GM because that is where our breeders excel,” Stobaugh said. “It allows us to get more on various acres, and always working with various companies and ways of how we increase the other pieces of the puzzle which are protein, which are our tolerances, which are insects, diseases, pressures and things of that nature.”

Nothing is out of sight he said, and now all the options are on the table since it’s a non-GM.

“That’s what really makes Soyleic what I would call a cool piece of the puzzle,” he said. “For high oleic—is that we have that ability since we aren’t regulated as a trait since it was naturally discovered,” he said.

What is Soyleic?

Many years ago, the ability to change high oleic content was discovered by Missouri and U.S. Department of Agriculture-Agricultural Research Service personnel at the Fisher Delta Research Center in southeast Missouri.

“Through molecular identification, and through continuous breeding through the traditional means, they discovered that they could increase the high oleic content naturally,” Stobaugh said.

In 2008, the Food and Drug Administration changed the way food oils were labeled, impacting demand for soybean oils. The discovery helped these oils eventually gain their lost foothold back, and helped ensure soybeans’ place in the food market.

“What it resulted in was high oleic now needing to be in the forefront for soybean oil to get back and get that standard of being a healthy alternative used in cooking oils and other products for human consumption,” Stobaugh said.

Breeders had a vision to get the increased high oleic content into as many maturity groups as they could. Current maturity groups start with zeros and ones in Minnesota and Canada. Numbers increase the farther south you go, with seven in Georgia.

“So they started by putting this in all the breeding programs through allele transfer of it in the normal means,” he said. “And they put it into the hands of these breeders at the public institutions.”

The main ones working on this project were Minnesota, Arkansas, Missouri, Tennessee, Georgia and later Illinois and Michigan. Partnerships with these universities allowed all the maturity groups to be covered from north to south.

“This is a true meaning of what the checkoff’s major goal is, and that is to put quality high yielding products that give the farmer the opportunity to increase revenue through a potential premium,” Stobaugh said. “And that’s what this high oleic trait does.”

Zenglu Li, professor in soybean breeding and genetics at UGA, developed elite genetics combined with Soyleic to establish new growing areas for high oleic production. Researchers hope these soybeans are leaders in functionality, but can still produce zero trans fats. Missouri Soybean believes these soybean traits give growers the most opportunity, providing a value-added market for both oil and meal.

“With the discovery of high oleic genes by the University of Missouri and USDA, we were able to incorporate these genes into the University of Georgia soybean genetics using molecular breeding tools to develop high yielding Soyleic soybean cultivars with a good defensive package in maturity groups six and seven,” Li said.

Commercializing these cultivars will benefit soybean growers, processors and consumers, according to Li.

This partnership gives universities like Georgia the ability to license germplasm and get their varieties into the competitive market, which enhances seed genetics for soybean growers nationwide.

Significance

Stobaugh believes this partnership with UGA works because of Li’s background—coming from the private sector—he knew how to make breeding advances fast, and he led the group of public breeders to make the advancements that ultimately ended with the licensing. Work in nurseries in Puerto Rico allowed them to shave time off the plant breeding process, as well as ensure they get the genes they want into the beans.

“They were crossing it back against each other,” he said. “A lot of times people were forward and backcrossing—that devil in the details. But basically they were crossing these back against one another to ensure that they were getting the high oleic in there.”

Li’s work is a “big deal” to Stobaugh because they were the first to sign on with them to do this.

“The University of Missouri is the patent owner, so they are already releasing in licensing through those,” he said. “But this is just proof for the producers to see that the checkoff is a viable piece of the of the initiation of new innovations they can get to the farm.”

This is one of those innovations that came through with checkoff dollars and qualified state soybean boards and the United Soybean Board, along with partners at the USDA-ARS to put this into as many places as possible.

“It was just a matter of who had the gene that settled the best, meaning incorporated faster, and that’s what leads to commercialization,” Stobaugh said. “It’s a matter of making the right selections. You can make 50,000 crosses a year but, in the end, you’re going to only maybe see 10% of those go forward, right?”

Every time the process reaches the end, there are only two to four varieties released out of these programs, so to have something like this come out is a big win for Stobaugh.

“It’s many years in the making, for checkoff to have value and this is a piece of that value where we’re putting it right back on the farm,” he said.

By working with all the universities that have been in this program, Stobaugh said they’re at a stage where they’re now selecting to bring in a new maturity group one, maturity group two, and possibly multiple group threes.

“Plus we have our licensees that have breeding options as well,” he said. “And those groups are also working to release new ones.”

Stobaugh said this work is showing high oleic can be put on any maturity group soil in the United States.

“Therefore giving us that demand we need for what we export, that our importers are desiring,” he said. “Which are a healthy, sustainable, innovative crop that allows them to have a healthy population not only for their human consumption, but also for their animal consumption.”

Kylene Scott can be reached at 620-227-1804 or [email protected].