BEIJING, Sep 2 (APP):The hybrid wheat is a target for the wheat seed industry as a way enhancing yield per acre, but hybrid wheat will only become a success if everyone benefits, including breeders, seed producers, and most importantly, farmers. And building trust is essential in this so that farmers can get their reward for their hard work, said researchers from five different countries in a zoom agriculture webinar titled “Wheat Seed Supply Chain Analysis”.
Dr. Abid Mehmood, Director General Agriculture research in Ayub Agricultural Research Institute, Faisalabad said that currently in Punjab, the yield of wheat was 3.2 tons per hectare.
And the experiments showed that if farmers use the certified seed, China Economic Net (CEN) reported on Wednesday.
It gives us an average of 4 tons per hectare by this way additional gain of 0.8 ton per hectare can be achieved by using the certified seed, and it worth about 28,000 Pakistani rupees and the land, which will be spared by using the certified seed, it will be 1.5 million hectors, which can be used for further yield.
“The total certified seed use in Pakistan is only 40% and the share by the government sector or Punjab seed corporation (PSC) is only 10% of total seed produced; while the share of the private sector in the certified seed is 90%,” Dr. Abid Mehmood added.
Dr. Huijun Guo, Wheat Mutation Breeder from the Institute of Crop Sciences at Chinese Academy of Sciences said that in China there had around 150 million hectares of farmland among them 71% are grain crops and 29% are other crops.
She further said that in some areas, they got two or three crops in a year while the majority areas can plant wheat.
“Last year, the wheat production is around 133 million tons per year which could meet the domestic demand. The farmer’s average yield maintains an overall upward trend and last year it was 5.6 ton per hectare” she mentioned.
The participants emphasized that companies, and also the farmers need to have trust in the certification system. You don’t end up in a problem where farmers don’t want to pay money for seed because they don’t trust about seeds. They further said whatever level of the system that develops trust is really at the heart of that.
Researchers from Pakistan shared their experience that the wheat rice cropping pattern is injurious to soil health in whole Indo-Gangetic plains in general and saline area of Punjab in particular containing the lowest average yield of wheat. They further said that the government was promoting oilseed crops as alternate high-value crop canola and sunflower in place of the wheat crop.
In his closing remarks, Dr. Asif Ali Khan, Vice-Chancellor, MNS- University of Agriculture, Multan said if you have to go find hybrids, you have to engage the private partners. He said that they were trying to engage private enterprises in the hybrids, which have developed in Pakistan and they were able to demonstrate success, and particularly with the private sector.
Asif mentioned that Chinese speaker work about mutation breeding is very important. The Atomic Energy Commission of Pakistan is working on it, and particularly with the new upcoming pools of hydropower systems that can be leveraged to create an impact.
This Webinar was designed to chart the future pathways for critical intervention in the wheat seed supply chain in Pakistan.
There were around 100 participants from five countries, logged in for two hours in the session chaired by Dr. Asif Ali Khan.
The Keynote speakers were Dr. Huijun Guo, Dr. Kulvinder Gill (WSU), and Dr. Abid Mahmood. They made an elaborate case on the seed system improvement and wheat variety replacements.
