Improvement and Development of Barley for Use in Feed, Malt, and Food

Wynse S. Brooks, Mark E. Vaughn, Nicholas Meier, Joshua Fitzgerald, and Carl A. Griffey
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University 

The Virginia Tech barley-breeding program is the largest and until recently was the only remaining public program in the eastern United States. The program is significantly diverse with breeding efforts primarily focused on development and improvement of superior, widely adapted, high yielding winter barley cultivars and a major focus on incorporation of value added traits geared towards development of new markets. 

As interest continues to grow in locally produced ingredients from the craft brewing industry in the mid-Atlantic and eastern U.S. finding malted barley is not easy for those located east of the Mississippi river. Therefore, the program’s main effort is breeding winter malting barley cultivars that have superior malt quality and are well adapted to the mid-Atlantic and southeastern United States. Development of Double Haploid (DH) malting barley lines in collaboration with Oregon State University has recently begun. Current results are encouraging since Double Haploids allows development of cultivars much faster than traditional methods. The DH lines are genetically pure, eliminating approximately 2-3 years of the total time required to develop a variety.  Besides development and testing of experimental lines, the program also collaborates with other breeding programs, allowing evaluation of cultivars developed by collaborators across the country as well as cultivars from around the world, especially Europe.

Meanwhile, an Eastern Mid-Atlantic Malt Barley Trial (EMBT) was initiated with neighboring states, (North Carolina, Kentucky and Virginia) to facilitate collaborations and enhance cultivar development. The EMBT currently includes over 40 elite malt barley lines and check varieties that are being evaluated at two to four locations in NC, KY and VA. A graduate student, Nick Meier, is developing molecular markers for malting quality traits to help with the selection of superior quality malting lines with more precision and elimination of costly testing expenses. There is anticipation that the production of malting barley will continue to grow in this region and that the release of cultivars will meet diverse market demands. The future allotment of resources will continue to provide more resources to the winter malting barley program as it continues to grow.