The relation of awns to the productivity of Ohio wheats
1937
Lamb, C.A.
Farmers in Ohio object to bearded wheats, and there are practical reasons why beardless wheats are more desirable. Unless awns have a real capacity to increase yields, bearded segregates could be dropped from nursery plats with advantage. Within any class of wheat, except white, there was a decrease in the proportion of bearded wheats grown in the United States from 1919 to 1929. Evidence concerning the value of awns presented by other investigators is contradictory and apparently the usefulness of beards is not the same in all locations. In Ohio a study of 3,695 bearded and 4,590 beardless heads from eight segregating populations in three seasons indicated a probable slight increase in yield resulting from the presence of the awn. For practical purposes, however, the advantage was negligible, and there seems no reason for carrying bearded selections in the breeding nursery. It is suggested on purely theoretical grounds that a function of the awn affecting yield may be its role in removing from the translocation system of the plant at filling time substances (possibly silicates, for example) which otherwise might interfere with the rapid movement of material into the grain.
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