Slow maturing wheat variety revs up

It has been named after the Valiant Charger, an iconic Australia muscle car that is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year.

Two of the popular cars were on show at the launch, garnering as much attention as the new variety.

InterGrain senior wheat breeder Daniel Mullan said the new variety formed part of InterGrain's strategy to provide diversified options to growers and help reduce the risk of some of the decisions they make.

The new, slow maturing variety is geared to early sowing and adaptable to seasonal variability, has strong disease resistance to stripe and stem rusts and yellow leaf spot, in addition to good grain size, test weight and a moderate plant height.

Valiant CL Plus also features tolerance to imidazoline pre-emergent herbicide.

When designing Valiant in 2012, Mr Mullan said the goal had been to create a product that had a longer maturity than was currently available to growers.

"So that's a maturity that would be able to be sown in the middle of April, so farmers could capitalise on those early rains - previously they have not had a perfect variety to be able to do that," Mr Mullan said.

"We all know the sooner you get wheat in the ground and up and away the better options you have later in the season for high yield - so that was a key motivation."

To help reduce the longer season wheat risk, InterGrain added in the traits of herbicide tolerance and a longer coleoptile (a sheath protecting a young shoot tip in a grass or cereal).

"If you sew earlier in the season following a crop that has had that chemical on it, you can have some effects from that previous crop, so by having a herbicide tolerance in Valiant, we are able to de-risk that sowing option and if we have weeds come up later in the season we are also able to get onto those weeds so we don't have ongoing weed resistance issues in the years to come," Mr Mullan said.

"It's a nice security for growers going earlier in the season."

Mr Mullan said the advantage in having a longer coleoptile was that moisture could go deeper into the soil profile for better establishment.

"For mid-April sowing, that's always a high risk for growers where they'll go in and not quite get the germination they were expecting, so this helps them to achieve that so they may not have to go back over that paddock again and re-sow."

In order for Valiant to get its AH classification Mr Mullan said a national body looked at three years worth of quality data from InterGrain.

"Through a large investment within the company, well over a million dollars, we've set up our own classification quality lab here at InterGrain, so we bring samples in from the field and over three years it goes through all sorts of tests - from how well it mills to how well the baker can handle the dough," he said.

"We end up making noodles and bread loaves to make sure that all of those functional qualities are fit for our end markets.

"That rigour that we put into making sure things are fit for our customers really distinguishes the Australian grain crop from other countries."

Agriculture and Food Minister Alannah MacTiernan said the release of the new variety formed part of the State government's strategy to provide more flexibility to growers as they adapted to climate change.

"This new variety is going to be slow growing and therefore comes to flower a bit later, making it a bit more frost resistant - and we know frost is one of the emerging problems from our changing climate," Ms MacTiernan said.

"It's a good medium to high protein variety that will go well particularly in noodles and in bakery products, so we're really targeting the South East Asian market with this product."

Rather than choosing between adapting to or mitigating climate change, Ms MacTiernan said the agricultural industry's focus needed to be on doing both.

"The breeding is very much about providing different options for farmers so we need to continue to make sure we've got proper funding coming in from the State government, that we have robust partnerships with the GRDC to continue on that work, but at the same time we need to be having regard for these other possibilities that involve carbon sequestration in our soils and the development of soil biology," she said.

In order to strengthen WA's research and development capabilities, Ms MacTiernan said the department was keen to co-locate InterGrain with DPIRD within the next few years.

"We need to really build that ecosphere that will make our research even stronger," she said.

"We recently received authorisation from the government to expand InterGrain's remit so it's beyond wheat and barley now and will be ready to go forward into the oats space and we would like to see it go even further."

InterGrain is co-owned by the Western Australian government and the Grains Research and Development Corporation.