Wheat Varieties

Six classes bring order to the thousands of varieties of wheat. The classes are hard red winter, hard red spring, soft red winter, durum, hard white, and soft white. They all have origins in seeds that were hand-picked and carried to the United States by European farm immigrants.

For centuries, wheat plants were improved by carefully selecting the best grain from certain well-adapted plants during harvest. Selection was based on reliability of growth and harvest, productivity, disease-resistance, and suitability for their food use. This select grain was used for seed the next year. Because wheats are self-pollinating, they held their characteristics in succeeding generations.

At the turn of the century, plant scientists began to produce new varieties through hybridization and wheat breeding. Parent plants were selected for their desirable traits - greater disease and insect resistance, ease in harvesting, shorter growing seasons, better milling and baking qualities, and higher yields. Parent wheats possessing the desired traits were crossed by covering or exposing select plants during pollination.

Today, wheat breeders select within these new populations of wheat the characteristics they seek to improve. The ones chosen are grown in fields (field-tested) and evaluated for their strengths in production, milling and baking quality. Only the seed selections that pass all the tests are made available to farmers to grow.

Modern wheat breeders are geneticists who scientifically develop wheat varieties to meet the needs of farmers, millers and bakers. It is not an overnight process, it takes 10 to 12 years of lab and field tests at a cost of around $500,000 per new variety before a seed wheat can be released for production.

Advances in wheat breeding focus on certain genes in the chromosome arrangement of reproductive cells that control specific desirable characteristics of the plant.

The wheat breeder has a wheat gene bank offering selections from about 30 different wheat species. Included are the earliest wheat species and grasses that originally crossed to produce wheat.

By mapping the location of important traits or attributes on the wheat chromosomes, wheat researchers produce a genetic roadmap for wheat. Being able to better examine qualities in the lab before doing field testing saves valuable time and resources for the wheat breeder and wheat industry. Testing time may be reduced by as much as two years yet produce better results.