|
Dr. Jerry Franckowiak
Welcome, my name is Jerry Franckowiak, I work at NDSU
on the Two Row Barley Improvement Program. We have been
touring field days this year, giving our
recommendations on what farmers should grow on the two
row barleys.
The variety that we are recommending the most, is the
variety Conlon. It was released in 1996, as a replacement
for the old variety, Bowman. It was released in western
North Dakota, where hot dry conditions are the
determinant as to whether a variety is acceptable to
growers or not. Conlon is a couple of days earlier than
Bowman, it has larger and plumper grain, and slightly
larger straw and somewhat higher yields. Also, we see
that Conlon has a higher disease resistance. If we go
back and look at it a little bit, you can take a spike
here, and look at where the flag leaf is and
where the head is. This head has come well out of the
flag leaf. If we look at another variety, Harrington,
which is recommended for the western U.S., the
head is almost inside the flag leaf. The spike may be
longer, but what happens when we get hot and dry, is we
see that the kernels do not fill well when we look at Harrington, but get nice plump grain with low
protein levels with Conlon. Conlon was released
in 1996 as a non-malting barley. It was recommended by
the Malting Barley Association for use in malting in May
of 2000. The growers that grew Conlon in 2001 found
that it had lower levels of DON, Deoxynivalenol, which
is a toxin produced by the scab organism. This compared
to Robust which was commonly produced by farmers in
the Minot and Bottineau area. As a result, we have seen
more contracting of Conlon this year, and probably more
youth of Conlon. The acreage of Conlon was about 5.7
percent of
the total barley acreage in 2001. This year, we hope
that Conlon will be about 10 percent of the total barley
acreage, which makes it the second leading variety of
barley in North Dakota. |
