Barley breeding: believing in what is best

Over 10,000 years ago, barley was domesticated in the fertile crescent of the Near East. Today the area is still home to a tremendous variety of crop plant types and their wild relatives. Farmers, with assistance from scientists, are continuing to tap into this diversity in order to grow crops and improve their yields, even under the harshest of conditions.

Credit: ICARDA

Farmers in dry areas lead a precarious existence with few resources and the risk of drought discourages investment in inputs, particularly fertilizer. Rainfall is invariably low and often erratic and low yields are common. Salvatore Ceccarelli, a plant breeder at ICARDA (International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas) is full of admiration for the farmers he works with, which is why he takes their needs so seriously. He strongly believes that traditional breeding programmes have failed marginal farmers and that there is a real need to involve farmers in the very earliest stages of selection.

In conventional plant breeding programmes, cultivars are selected by scientists on research stations to be genetically uniform and generally suitable for a large geographical area. This is fine if the crop is to be grown under adequate conditions and preferably with inputs applied. However for resource poor farmers in less moderate climates, these centrally selected cultivars are just not appropriate and, in the process of scientists' selections, vital diversity is lost.

It is this diversity that Dr Ceccarelli and his team at ICARDA aim to maintain with the 300 farmers that they work with in Ecuador, Egypt, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Jordan, Morocco, Syria, Tunisia and Yemen. In these countries, barley is an essential food and feed crop, and landraces, well suited to the harsh, dry conditions of these regions, continue to be favoured over commercial cultivars despite the best efforts of national breeding programmes. The problem lies in the location of research stations, which are situated in areas where climatic conditions are more favourable. At the research farm in Syria, for instance, the average rainfall is about 335mm - more than enough to produce a reasonable crop of barley. And yet only a few kilometres away, farmers' fields receive 200mm or less.

A selective process

At ICARDA's barley nursery situated at the Tel Hadya research station in Syria, 25,000 different varieties are sown in late spring-early summer each year. The main objective of this nursery is to evaluate seeds from plants that have been crossed in an effort to combine specific beneficial traits such as varieties that require low temperatures to switch from a regenerative to a reproductive stage. If the temperature is not sufficiently cool at a critical time in the growing season, then certain cultivars of barley will not produce any seed. Later in the season, temperatures at Tel Hadya can reach 45°C, so varieties are also selected for heat tolerance. At the end of the season, Dr Ceccarelli and his team select the varieties to be harvested and then sent to the laboratory for determining those that have produced the bigger seed - as this indicates the potential for grain filling even under extreme conditions.

From the 25,000 varieties grown at Tel Hadya, only 100-150 varieties will be selected and sent to countries where the crop can be grown with limited rainfall and high temperatures. It is at this stage that farmers are given the first chance to indicate their preferences. Their decisions then influence the scientists' selection of the material for the next round of breeding and this two way communication becomes a continuous process in which the main decision making is decentralised to the farmers in each of the target environments. And naturally, the decisions made are different for each group of farmers in each of the regions.

Success of the project has been demonstrated in a number of different ways, not least by the increasing number of farmers wishing to become involved in the project. To respond to farmers' concerns over seed multiplication, ICARDA has set up small seed units in four of the eight participating villages in Syria. Each unit consists of a seed cleaner and a machine to treat seed with fungicides against seed-borne diseases. This can also be used for seeds other than barley. It is hoped that similar activities will begin in Yemen and Jordan. In Syria a small but successful participatory project has been set up along the same lines with cumin, and there are plans to expand this to Jordan next year with cumin and also wheat.

Women's involvement in the project, particularly in Yemen and Jordan, has also increased. As with other crops, there are clear gender differences in the lines selected. This is understandable in staple crops where cooking qualities are important. What is not yet clear is why this should be the case in regions where barley is fed to animals. It is hoped that analysis of the data will provide an answer. But, most importantly, whatever the answer, Dr Ceccarelli knows, after his many years of working alongside these farmers, that he can trust their knowledge and that, whatever they have decided, they have done so for the reasons that suit them best and not because of what science believes is best.

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