“2023 is a year that I hope I don’t see anything remotely like it for the rest of my career, for sure.”
That was Allan Fritz’s opinion of how Mother Nature has treated agriculture thus far in 2023. Fritz, a Kansas State University wheat breeder, spoke at the Sorghum U/Wheat U event held in Wichita, Kansas, earlier this year.
He discussed a number of varieties that are geared toward Kansas producers, but also started off with some valuable advice.
“If you haven’t purchased your wheat seed, please do it now,” he said. “Because our wheat seed suppliers are very limited, and you may have very limited choices as to what’s available to you.”
Variety selection
Fritz said there are some rules to follow when it comes to choosing the right variety and when thinking about those choices, first look at the data.
“Seek out some good sources of data that are unbiased, if at all possible,” he said. “Multi-year data is obviously best if we can see how things are going to do across a number of years and even locations.”
Next, make sure the key adaptive traits are covered.
“You know your operation, you know what the challenges are,” he said. “So, are you more worried about the particular diseases if you’re going in after corn? What’s the scab rating? What are your plans in terms of fungicide? Are you in anything that’s weak residue?”
Fritz said be aware of those details and traits that are needed to be successful on your farm. Take into consideration your management plan, watch maturity levels and genetics of the wheat.
“Probably the biggest change I’ve seen in my 23 years is we’ve gone for a really prizing very early wheats,” he said. “If you think back to Carl 92 was early. Jagger was early. We really pushed for those early things.”
But being early also had its drawbacks. There was a risk of late spring freeze injury, and Fritz is now concerned about how variable the climate is. But that’s not all.
“I think the bigger change is that we’re using fungicide much more readily and so we thought that we were getting earlier and earlier to avoid heat stress,” he said. “I think what we were really doing was getting earlier and earlier to beat leaf frost.”
Fritz said breeders are moving to more of a medium to medium-late maturity varieties—which seem to have a little bit of a yield advantage over the earlier maturity ones.
“They certainly carry a little bit less risk in terms of late spring freeze damage,” he said.
Knowing your history is really important. Especially if you’ve found a variety you like and it performs well.
“Your experience is really important in that process,” Fritz said.
Fritz doesn’t recommend “spinning the wheel of fortune wheel” to find a variety. Data from 2023 is important, and 2022 was a dry year. There were some abandoned acres because of drought and now in 2023, the weather pattern has shifted to hopefully a wetter winter because of El Nino.
“We’re likely to see very different conditions that we’ve really seen for the last three winters,” he said. “And so what’s done well over the last three years may or may not do as well this year.”
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Fritz said if you’re breeding wheat in Kansas and end up selecting for yield stability and other things that do well for the conditions wheat faces, there might be an added bonus.
“We’ve been selecting for yield potential but if you’re breeding for wheat in Kansas, you end up selecting for yield stability and things that do well across a broad range of conditions,” he said. “Because that’s just simply what we deal with from year to year.”
Digging into genotype by environment interaction is “critically important,” according to Fritz. That’s a big part of diversifying the genetics and maturity differences by year. Those things make it tough to predict what varieties will do.
“You need to spread that risk by choosing things that are different, then knowing what’s the best variety one year might not being the next year,” he said. “In some ways, it almost certainly won’t be.”
Fritz said the ramwheatdb.com website compiled by Scott Haley, a retired Colorado State University wheat breeder, has most of the variety performance testing data from Texas, Colorado, Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska as well as data from Lima Grain and Syngenta.
“It lets you really kind of do that head-to-head comparison,” he said. “A lot of times you might start looking at 70 varieties at your seed dealer’s field day but you’re never going to narrow that down.”
Fritz said it’s a nice tool that does some of the work for you.
When choosing that variety to fit the farm, Fritz suggested not relying on a single variety, but rather to hedge bets by diversification.
“We don’t have average or normal years in Kansas,” he said. “We normally have abnormal conditions and so we need to plan for the abnormality that we’re going to see. And the best way to deal with that is to diversify your genetics of your varieties.”
Blends could be an option, and there’s plenty of blending going on already. But there’s rules—maturities need to be matched within reason; choose complementary varieties; consider disease and weed management.
“Probably the biggest rule of blending is you cannot hide a dog in a blend,” he said. “That blend is probably going to be about a bushel per acre better than the average of the three varieties that you put into it. So you put one variety in there that doesn’t perform very well. Maybe it’s got really good scab resistance. It’s also going to pull down your yield with it.”
For more information about Sorghum U/Wheat U visit www.hpj.com.
Kylene Scott can be reached at 620-227-1804 or [email protected].
