Research on crop breeding for organic farming and heterogeneous populations

Institute of Agricultural Resources and Economics (AREI) is a fairly new institution in Latvia, established in 2016 by joining two crop breeding institutes, around one century old, and an institute dealing with economics of agriculture. Important breeder’s interest since the beginning of this century was research and breeding for organic farming, since the share of organic production was rising in Latvia continuously during the past two decades. The work started with testing of breeding material and growing methods in research fields certified for organic farming, international networking in COST Action 860 “Sustainable Low-Input Cereal Production: Required Varietal Characteristics and Crop Diversity” (2004–2008) and continued with the development of specific breeding methods for development of varieties adapted for organic growing conditions in the framework of the EU Social Fund co-financed project (2008–2012). The breeding programme for organic farming for several crops was financed by the Ministry of Agriculture of Latvia since 2012, and finally our first varieties for organic farming are entering the registration process. One of our research topics at AREI for the past decade was creation and investigation of heterogeneous populations of self-pollinating cereals, namely barley and wheat, which is a way to obtain large diversity within a field of one species. We focused on composite cross populations (CCPs) composed of bi-parental crosses between around ten different parental varieties/lines. Populations are subject to natural selection, able to evolve and adapt to particular growing environments during repeated cultivation, and therefore also have a valuable potential in the context of climate change. Latvia participated in EC temporary experiment on population marketing with our very first spring barley population ‘Mirga’ (Fig. 1), providing bases for EU regulations allowing production and marketing of organic heterogeneous material (OHM) seed starting from 2022. Our research on heterogeneous materials was performed within two national projects funded by the Latvian Council of Science (2013–2017 and 2018–2022) and also in the frame of EU HORIZON 2020 project LIVESEED (2018–2021) in cooperation with several European partners. Co-authors from the Latvian State Forest Research Institute “Silava” Genetic Resources Centre were involved in the genetic analysis. Our latest experiments involved testing the agronomic performance of local and foreign heterogeneous barley and wheat populations in organic and conventional research fields as well as in several organic farms; investigations on phenotypic and genotypic changes in populations due to cultivation under organic versus conventional farming fields as well as due to cultivation for a number of years under the same farming system; and experiments on population improvement techniques.