The development of short-season wheats for a changing Australian climate

How will Australian wheat growers adapt to a changing climate? What targets should Australian wheat breeders be aiming for to develop adaptable, resilient varieties for the future? Can a shorter lifecycle result in a more profitable crop with reduced inputs?

The changing climate is reducing autumn rainfall across the southeastern Australian wheatbelt, often forcing growers to sow late or dry, and subsequently impacting grain yield. A solution to this challenge, and the others as questioned above, has been the development of shorter lifecycle wheat varieties for sowing mid-winter into more reliable soil conditions. In this seminar, I will present a summary of the development of a short-season wheat ideotype.

To define the short-season ideotype, I will discuss:

• Field scale, multi-year, multi-site experiments conducted using ~100 highly vigorous wheat genotypes
• Novel field warming and controlled environment experiments on near isogenic lines to decouple phenology driven temperature responses from daylength
• In-situ root-shoot responses to plant density and water availability

The results of these experiments provide the structure of the ideal wheat for winter-sowing, and to frame a discussion on its implications to the future of wheat in Australia. 

About the speaker

Prior to the work conducted above as part of his PhD, Tim studied his undergraduate degree in plant science and microbiology at CSU before completing his honours with the Solomon group at the ANU. Following several years with the cereal pathology team at the DPI in Wagga Wagga, Tim shifted into the cotton industry, leading the cotton pathology team at the DPI in Yanco and working with CottonInfo as Technical Lead for Disease, completing a postgraduate certificate with UNE in the process. Following a brief hiatus from formal research during the COVID pandemic to help manage the family merino sheep stud on the Monaro, Tim returned to CSU at Wagga Wagga to study his PhD. In the final year of his study, Tim moved to Canberra, based at CSIRO Black Mountain, before commencing with the ANU Agrifood Innovation Institute.