The University of Saskatchewan’s Crop Development Centre will receive $2.7 million dollars for targeted barley research.
The money is coming from the Canadian Barley Research Coalition over five years for the development of new barley varieties.
The Canadian Barley Research Coalition is a collaboration among the Saskatchewan Barley Development Commission, Alberta Barley and Manitoba Crop Alliance.
Brent Johnson, Vice Chair of SaskBarley says the CDC has an excellent breeding program.
"Our best advantage is in quality in Western Canada and CDC has been very good about bringing high quality malts out and we
want to see that continue to keep us at the cutting edge. There's also other parameters such as yield and disease and those things are
always in the mix when were talking about barley breeding. We always want to see improvement on that and our registration system definitely helps with that.
We want to see CDC continue to get varieties able to be registered, so we can have them as producers."
He notes the CDC continues to work on new varieties that show some great potential.
"There's CDC Bow and CDC Fraser which is brand new and starting to look really good. On the feed side they have CDC Austenson the
most grown feed in Western Canada. Some of our forage varieties like CDC Maverick and CDC Cowboy are all out of that program
and we're very lucky to have had that program in the past, and we want to see that continue in the future."
CDC Copeland also came out of the CDC's Barley Breeding Program and is one of the most popular malting varieties grown in Western Canada.
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