A grain to weather climate change.

A grain to weather climate change

Over the past 30 years, the world's "breadbasket" nations have helped feed an ever-growing number of mouths by using crop genetics, fertilizers and modern agricultural techniques such as soil drainage and pesticides. But the dramatic crop increases stemming from these measures "seem to be reaching their limits," according to a new report by the National Research Council in Washington, D.C. The planet's expanding population is moving onto former croplands, while crop soils themselves are eroding, salting out and acidifying (SN: 8/20/83, p. 127; 10/6/84, p. 212; 11/10/84, p. 298; 9/24/88, p. 204). Moreover, signs of a greenhouse warming point to greater climate variability in the future.

"Because of the limits to intensive agriculture and the probable climate changes," the report says, "arable cropping will have to expand onto increasingly marginal lands." And the best cereal for meeting this challenge, says the council's board on science and technology for international development, is a wheat-rye hybrid called triticale (trit-i-KAY-lee).

Though plant breeders hybridized this grain more than 100 years ago, it went generally unrecognized--and unused--until about the 1960s. By that time, cereal scientists had conquered its seed sterility and much of its disease vulnerability. Subsequent wide-scale testing and commercial introduction identified new problems: a tendency for low yields, shriveled grain, poor adaptability to new geographic conditions, premature sprouting, late maturity (often after killing frosts) and poor baking quality (dough from triticale flour didn't rise well).

Further development though the '80s has improved the grain considerably, the new report says. Today, triticale appears "notably more resistant" than wheat to a number of major cereal scourges -- including leaf blotch, powdery mildew, smuts, bunts and other fungal infections. Though outer seed husks and bristles discourage bird predation. Yields match wheat's on good soil and can outperform the best wheats by 20 to 30 percent on marginal soils. Researchers have developed varieties that mature over a range of season and day lengths. But triticale's biggest advantage may lie in its ability to thrive where most cereals founder--on soils that contain otherwise toxic levels of boron or are saline, sandy, acidic, alkaline, cold, infertile, dry or mineral-deficient.

Although much of the triticale currently under cultivation goes for livestock feed or testing, this crop ultimately "could become a major staple" in kitchens throughout the world, the new report says. Researchers have already developed new lines that produce doughs that rise as well as those made from wheat flour.