Current Breeding Programs to Develop Winter Cereal Cultivars for Animal Feeds Production in Korea.

Jong Woong Ahn, Ok Kyu Han, JaHwan Ku, Sun Jong Kweon, Byung Ju Kim, Central Area Crop Breeding Division, Department of Central Area Crops, National Institute of Crop Science(NICS). Rural Development Administration, the Republic of Korea

Poster Presentation

Abstract:

In this paper we reviewed the winter cereal crops breeding program and their utilization after a variety release in Korea. Current trend on food consumption in Korea has showed that consumption of meat, “Hanwoo” which has a high preference would be increasing, whereas that rice consumption as a staple food be continuously decreasing.

Therefore, one of major national agricultural policies should be focused on maintaining adequate level of national rice consumption per capita in a year as well as providing stable supply system of good quality forage feedstocks needed for high quality meat production.

Recently we introduce the concept of local feed and food miles in producing and transporting forage to end-users for animal feed at a national level, which means self-supply system in feeding and meat production. In addition, other measures would be in progress in order to substitute vast amount of imported forage like hay and raw grain stocks making for formulated animal feed stuffs from abroad with a variety of winter cereal crops for forage use developed by RDA’s winter cereal breeding team at the National institute of Crop Science(NICS), RDA.

To attain these goals and direct forward, by using diverse crop germplasm, especially winter cereals like barley, wheat, rye, triticale, and oat, we have developed a number of cultivars for forage use and animal feed to raise a Korean cattle, ‘Hanwoo“.

Also, I preview the desirable directions of winter cereal breeding programs for forage use in Korea which would be slightly different by the crops. So targeted traits to be improved by the crops would be as follows; early-maturing, winter hardiness, yellow rust resistance, and early seed-set after anthesis in triticale; early-elongating and maturing after overwintering, high-yielding at a dry base, lodging-tolerance and aphid resistance in spring type oat; early-emergence after sowing, good growth habit under low temperature, high-yielding at a dry base, and lodging-tolerance in summer type oat; early-maturing, high-yielding, early seed-set after anthesis, low fiber and low lignin in rye; and winter hardiness, stay green, a hood spike type, Scab(Fusarium graminearum) disease resistance, and multi-tillering in whole crop winter type forage barley.

Key words: Winter cereal, Forage, Hanwoo, Breeding, Korea