Breeding for more efficient water use — is it real or a mirage?
✍ Scribed by L.P. Reitz
- Publisher
- Elsevier Science
- Year
- 1974
- Weight
- 589 KB
- Volume
- 14
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0002-1571
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Reitz, L. P., 1974. Breeding for more efficient water use --is it real or a mirage? Agric. Meteorol., 14: 3--11.
Efficient use of water is the goal of all dryland systems. Plant forms differ markedly in adaptation to the rigors of dry climates and varieties must be closely attuned to the time when moisture is most likely to be available. The best plants seem to "get ready" or "wait", or "conserve" their effort until the moisture comes. This is all part of that elusive thing called adaptation. Unfortunately, we do not yet know what to measure or how, and sometimes we follow mirages while the search for truth goes on. The truth may be related to phenological, morphological, functional, or metabolical characteristics.
Water, air, and sunlight are our renewable resources, although sometimes scarce. Soils and the plant nutrients they hold are durable, yet, "ere long", like time, they are gone. Fossil fuel for power is irreplaceable, and the struggle is on for agriculture's major source of power --petroleum. In an environment that we influence only in piecemeal fashion and rather slightly, we are to discuss here what can be done to modify our plants to get the most out of them.
Luther Burbank, according to Hunt (1909, p.14), was a great dreamer, and he speculated about the impact of breeding a new cereal, tuber or fruit variety that "would produce one grain more to each head, or an extra kernel to each ear, another potato in each plant, or an apple, plum, orange or nut to each tree. What would be the result? In five staples only in the United States alone the inexhaustible forces of nature would produce annually without effort and without cost:
5,200,000 extra bushels of corn 15,000,000 extra bushels of wheat 20,000,000 extra bushels of oats 1,500,000 extra bushels of barley 21,000,000 extra bushels of potatoes.