The spring bread wheat ‘Ekstra’

Abstract

The current study was carried out in order to create an early-ripening variety of spring bread wheat with productivity at the level of middle-early or higher, the most adapted to the specific conditions of the Middle Urals. The estimation of the breeding material was carried out in the fields, the soils of which are typical for the Sverdlovsk region and Permsky Krai. During the years of the study, the agroclimatic conditions differed along the growing season. There have been established the dry year of 2016 (90 mm of rain, GTC 0.6) and the moisture years of 2014, 2015, 2017–2019 (with precipitation amount of 247–448 mm, GTC 2.0–3.2). The crossings were carried out between the middle-ripening variety ‘Omskaya 35’ (mother) and the early- ripening variety ‘Iren’ (father). There has been developed the variety that combined high productivity and early maturity. The average productivity of the new variety ‘Ekstra’ in the Competitive Variety Testing in 2014–2019 was 4.07 t/ha, which is on 0.55 t/ha higher than the standard variety ‘Iren’, the maximum productivity was 5.0–6.1 t/ha (2019). The new variety has exceeded the values of the standard variety in such yield structure elements as “seed weight per head”, “1000 grain weight”, “grain content per head”; the accumulation of seeds per day of growing season was 14.2% and at 1 mm of precipitation the value improved till 15.2%. In the ecological testing the variety ‘Ekstra’ exceeded the varieties ‘Iren’, ‘Irgina’ from the State List of Breeding Achievements in the Volga-Vyatka region on 0.56–0.80 t/ha and the middle-early ripening varieties ‘Gornouralskaya’, ‘Bazhenka’, ‘Svecha’, ‘Zlata’ on 0.44–0, 55 t/ha. The variety ‘Ekstra’ is characterized by better energy efficiency parameters than ‘Irgina’, ‘Iren’, ‘Gornouralskaya’, ‘Zlata’. The excess was 9.2–21.9% in terms of total energy in the harvest per hectare, 16.0–40.6% in net energy income, and 4.7–13.1% in bioenergy ratio. The variety reduced energy consumption for the production of 1 ton of grain by 9.5–11.5%. There has been determined a significant advantage of the variety ‘Ekstra’ in terms of the general adaptability, stability, and breeding value of the genotype. In 2020 the variety was included into the State List of Breeding Achievements in the Volga-Vyatka region, Ural, West Siberian regions of the Russian Federation. The variety ‘Ekstra’ has the same parameters of productivity, yield structure elements, adaptability, the accumulation of seeds per day of growing season and per 1 mm of precipitation, energy efficiency of cultivation, as the middle-early ripening standard variety ‘Ekaterina’.