Investment

The National Lentil Breeding program will deliver a transformational change in lentil breeding to develop improved, high yielding varieties faster, thereby enabling Australian growers to improve profitability. The program deploys innovative breeding technologies such as genomic selection and high throughput phenotyping to improve selection intensity and accuracy while dramatically reducing the breeding cycle. By utilising Agriculture Victoria's high-end computational knowledge and capabilities, the program is deploying "big data" to gain an unprecedented understanding of genotype by environment by management practices to drive selection and genetic gain.

A major focus of the program is in diversifying the germplasm beyond the bottleneck caused through previous successes that established the industry in the core production zones in south eastern Australia. The breeding program now has a National focus with a major expansion of trial sites and entries into Western Australia and New South Wales. This will undoubtably raise challenges in exposure of germplasm to new soil constraints and diseases. Furthermore, the expansion regions will likely require changes in flowering and maturity to best optimise production to local temperature, water availability and photoperiod. The breeding program will work closely with other GRDC investments in phenology and crop modelling while building onto its genomic capabilities to rapidly incorporate novel genetics into its high yielding backgrounds to drive this local adaptation. The novel genetics will also see improvements in traits impacting on farming systems through the ongoing improvements in disease resistance and herbicide tolerances.

Core breeding will be able to take advantage of new controlled environment and irrigation facilities that will come online over the coming years through additional GRDC and Agriculture Victoria infrastructure investments in Horsham. These will be used to dramatically expand the hybridisation and generation advancement program with the incorporation of "speed breeding" capabilities and seed multiplication through the deployment of summer nurseries. Furthermore, a range of controlled environment phenotypic screens against diseases and soil constraints will further feed the genomics capabilities that will provide genotypic estimates of traits in early generation material to enhance parental selection in the hybridisation program and line selection for field testing. These will result in dramatically improved efficiencies within the breeding program and ensure the delivery of better varieties to growers in a shorter time frame.