Rice Improvement III

The Crown in right of the State of NSW acting through the Department of Primary Industries

  • Project code: PRJ-002942

  • Project stage: Closed

  • Project start date: Thursday, September 25, 2008

  • Project completion date: Wednesday, June 29, 2011

  • National Priority: RIC-Optimised genetic improvement

Summary

This project aims to produce new rice varieties for NSW rice farmers. Rice farmers need access to varieties that combine adaptation to the NSW rice growing region, with high yield potential and quality characteristics appropriate to the international markets supplied by the industry.

While varieties developed in similar temperate environments may perform well under NSW conditions, the rice breeding program provides NSW rice farmers with two key advantages.

The first is the capacity to develop varieties with the necessary adaptation to Australian growing conditions and the second is the capacity to respond to market demands with a flow of varieties of specific quality types to capitalize on both domestic and export markets.

The breeding program can respond pro-actively to emerging trends in the rice growing environment, such as the reduced availability of irrigation water under a number of climate change scenarios. Varieties adapted to aerobic (non-flooded) conditions either during vegetative growth, or throughout the entire crop growth cycle, are needed to provide the industry with genetic options to reduce overall water use and/or provide the foundations for future increases in water productivity.

Program

Rice

Research Organisation

The Crown in right of the State of NSW acting through the Department of Primary Industries

Objective Summary

The overall objective of this project is to produce new mainstream rice varieties for the Australian rice industry with increased yield potential, yield stability and grain quality. Mainstream varieties are those which match the grain quality of the japonica type medium grain Amaroo or the soft-cooking long grain Langi. Varieties of these types will be available to all rice farmers through the issue of a non-exclusive licence to the commercialising partner.

Of equal importance is the objective of continuing improvement in water productivity (kg grain/ML) through tolerance to the main abiotic stress, which is low temperature during the reproductive stage. A related project is focused on capturing genetic improvement in cold tolerance through early generation selection, and the lines developed will flow through to this project for yield and quality testing.

Further objectives are to build adaptation to aerobic conditions during vegetative growth to allow the use of alternative irrigation strategies to reduce water use and/or improve water productivity.