Wheat is the world’s most important grain. But it has high environmental costs due to the need to fertilize with nitrogen.
Wheat is the world’s most important grain. But it has high environmental costs due to the need to fertilize with nitrogen. Researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and France's National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment (INRAE) have now determined that new wheat varieties produce better crops with the same quantities of fertilizer.
It is not always easy to find the right amount of fertilizer for wheat crops. If too little is applied, it is completely used up, but the harvest falls short of its full potential. And if too much is used, the harvest is good but the growing grain does not consume all of the fertilizer. The surplus nitrogen finds its way into the environment and damages ecosystems and the climate. But wheat is essential for satisfying the growing hunger in the world.
To overcome these challenges, Senthold Asseng, a professor of Digital Agriculture at TUM, Pierre Martre (INRAE) and other researchers have investigated new wheat cultivars still in the experimental stages. Their results have been published in Nature Plants. The team used data from five experimental fields representing global wheat producing regions with particularly high yields. The fields were included into a simulation model with other fields and analyzed under three climate scenarios: the climate conditions of today and global warming of 1 degree Celsius and 4.8 degrees Celsius. The results show the yields that can be expected from the tested varieties when different quantities of nitrogen fertilizer are applied.
Read more at Technical University of Munich (TUM)
Photo Credit: KaiPilger via Pixabay
