Utilization of natural variation in Cephalaria joppensis to diversify wheat forage crop rotation in Israel

Abstract

The recently domesticated species, Cephalaria joppensis (CJ), emerges as a new alternative forage crop in Israel. It has high biomass potential and nutritional values that are comparable to forage wheat. Still, much of the agronomic information regarding CJ is based mainly on a single variety, cv. Rishon, and the genetic variability of this species has not been evaluated. In the last 3 years, CJ seeds have been collected from more than 200 natural populations in Israel. In this work, we characterized 42 of these populations in a replicated field trial, using cv. Rishon as a control. In addition, near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) was calibrated to predict nutritional attributes. NIRS was found to be instrumental in producing excellent predictions of ash, crude protein, neutral detergent fiber, in-vitro digestibility and rumen degradability, but it did not predict lignin or nitrate. Large variation was found among the accessions with respect to growth rate, flowering time and yield, with several accessions scoring significantly higher than cv. Rishon. Almost no variation was found in nutritional quality-related traits. Early flowering populations were somewhat less fibers and higher digestibility than late flowering populations. The natural variation in agronomic traits will facilitate the development of new breeding germplasm for CJ in the near future.