Prime Hard varieties for the northern grains region will remain the focus of Queensland Department of Primary Industries (QDPI) wheat breeders under the newly launched National Wheat Breeding Program.

The program, officially announced earlier this month, links the intellectual property, plant breeding technologies and germplasm of Queensland, New South Wales and Western Australia in partnership with the The Grains Research & Development Corporation (GRDC).

The director of QDPI’s Farming Systems Institute, David Hamilton, says the department is looking forward to collaborating with the equally long-established NSW and WA wheat breeding programs under the new arrangements.

"Each of the partners brings particular skills to the new program," said Hamilton.

"In Queensland, for instance, we have outstanding sources of disease resistance which we are incorporating in new varieties – resistances to stem, leaf and stripe rust, including alternative resistances to leaf rust resistances Lr24, which is coming under some pressure in southern Australia.

"We are screening for resistances to yellow spot, crown rot and root lesion nematode – although our sources of resistance to crown rot are not as good as we would like – and we have a much better understanding of the genetics of black point.

"Every time you screen for another characteristic you double the work required, but we are still confident we can continue to deliver progressive yield increases while incorporating the required disease resistances."

Dr Hamilton said QDPI breeders would continue to target PH varieties because, even though the category was a small proportion of the wheat crop, growers preferred varieties which were PH capable.

In the same way, even though they would now test new wheat lines nationally, the main focus would continue to be the northern grains region – northern NSW and Queensland – with wide scale on-farm testing.

The ability to test northern developed varieties nationally, through NSW Agriculture and AgWest , promised to make them more durable; testing for resistance to more remote diseases, septoria for instance, might be carried out in Wagga Wagga or Perth.