Wheat Industry News
Recent news and highlights from around the wheat industry.
Speaking of Wheat: “There is a societal cost of not using new genome editing techniques or being slow in adoption. We have no time to lose in resolving our shared problems for food and nutrition security.” – Robin Fears, Director, European Academies Science Advisory Council, in a statement calling for reform of European regulation of plant breeding innovations.
Today We Have Bread. All of us at USW feel very fortunate to continue working virtually, and our farmer board of directors agreed with our staff to share some of that good fortune with others in need. So, USW is donating bread, produced at Uptown Bakery, owned by Master Baker and USW consultant Didier Rosada, to three area food banks. One of the recipients is the food pantry at Columbia Baptist Church in Arlington, Va. Rev. Gregory Loewer recently shared this in a letter thanking USW for the bread donation: “The recipients of your donations were so grateful to receive the bread. I happened to be serving on the team yesterday and when I told the folks waiting in line that ‘today we have bread’ they were delighted.”
“Killing Before Milling.” North Dakota State University (NDSU) researchers recently received a USDA Food Safety and Defense grant to explore the use of steam pasteurization to reduce pathogens in milled flour. Senay Simsek, NDSU’s Bert L. D’Appolonia Cereal Science and Technology of Wheat Endowed Professor, and Teresa Bergholz, associate professor of microbiological sciences, will work on a project titled “Killing Before Milling: Utilization of Vacuum Steam Pasteurization for Controlling Enteric Pathogens on Wheat.” The three-year USDA grant totals nearly $500,000. Read more about the project.
Award of Excellence for Dr. Simsek. NDSU’s Senay Simsek has been awarded the NC-213 U.S. Quality Grains Research Consortium 2020 Andersons Cereals and Oilseeds Award of Excellence. Simsek, who has been with NDSU since 2007, leads the HRS wheat end–quality project in the Department of Plant Sciences. Congratulations to Dr. Simsek, who is a frequent collaborator with USW. Read more about the award and Dr. Simsek’s work.
University of Maryland Professor Puts the UMD Small Grains Breeding and Genetics Program on the Map. Vijay Tiwari, assistant professor in Plant Science and Landscape Architecture at the University of Maryland, recently received the Leadership Award from the International Wheat Genome Sequencing Consortium (IWGSC). This award is given annually to scientists who make a crucial impact in wheat genomics. This year, Tiwari was the sole recipient for his leadership and expertise in Radiation Hybrid mapping or RH mapping, a technique that was used to validate the entire wheat genome assembly.
2020 National Wheat Yield Contest June 15th Early Bird Registration for Spring Wheat. The National Wheat Foundation officially opened the 2020 National Wheat Yield Contest in February 2020. The Foundation is currently accepting entries for Spring Wheat until Aug. 1 with an early registration deadline of June 15.
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