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Imprint
Development of maize varieties for organic agriculture
Project
Project code: 2810OE074
Contract period: 14.04.2011
- 31.12.2015
Budget: 246,883 Euro
Purpose of research: Applied research
Maize is not very common in organic agriculture, though it would be interesting both for feeding animals and as market fruit. One reason for this are the high requirements for a cultivar adapted to organic farming that partly differ from the requirements in conventional farming. The most specific characteristic of maize growing under organic conditions is the high competition by weeds. This problem was investigated with agronomic and plant breeding approaches.
The agronomic studies were conducted in three years at two locations in the South of Lower Saxony (Reinshof and Wiebrechtshausen) under organic management. Several maize cultivars were grown with eight different variants of cover crops. All of them were able to reduce the amount of weeds in between the maize rows. Very efficient cover crops were perennial rye grass (61 % less weed biomass compared with the control without cover crop), subterranean clover (57 % reduction) and chicory (53 % reduction), whereas rye was not efficient. The cover crops had hardly any negative influence on the maize.
In the plant breeding studies at the same locations weed pressure was simulated by sowing a mixture of species in between the maize rows. In a two year experiment 180 testcrosses were grown with and without artificial weed and the highest yielding genotypes were selected in each of the two systems. In the third year hybrids were produced from the selected lines and tested in both systems. The selection environment had no significant influence, therefore it is hardly promising to select maize hybrids with specific genetic adaptation to weed pressure. In a further part of the project the breeding of population cultivars was investigated. It was shown that spontaneous self pollination is no hindrance to develop population cultivars in maize.
Section overview
Subjects
- Plant Breeding
- Organic Farming
Framework programme
Federal Organic Farming Scheme and other forms of sustainable agriculture (BÖLN)
