The Focus of Barley Research in Alberta

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The Field Crop Development Centre (FCDC) and Lacombe Research and Development Centre hosted Lacombe Field Day on July 27 to showcase some of the work happening in central Alberta. And, for Flavio Capettini, head of research at FCDC, some of this year’s excitement centres around a recently released barley variety.

“We just released TR13609 — it’s a new malting barley in our program that has a lot of good characteristics,” Capettini says in the interview below. “It has higher yield potential than the ones being grown now, it has a little bit better lodging resistance, but the important thing is it has all that package of malting quality needed.”

Capettini explains that one of the Centre’s main objectives is to improve yield, but that they also look at lodging resistance, good qualities for the different final uses of the crop and disease resistance.

In TR13609, that means offering a better than average reaction to fusarium head blight, providing consistently low DON levels.

“We work with all types of barley….feed, food, forage and malt,” says Capettini. “What keeps us in business is that the perfect variety has not been created yet. So our business is always to have something better.”

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