Wheat Hybrids

In the world we have a problem when it comes to food. There is growing population in the world, who are taking up more land, leaving less land for the farmers to grow our food. The only way farmers can keep up with the demand of food in the world, is with wheat hybrids. Hybrid wheats are a combination of two different types of wheat. The question is, can we grow enough wheat for the demand our population growth in the world?

Wheat is grown around the world more than any other crop, and the production of wheat is second to corn. Even though the wheat technology has not been up to other crops’ research and development, wheat has still been a main contender of world production of grain(Spiegel, 2013). In the 1930 the US started a hybrid wheat program that made no progress in 30 years. But in 1962, the program started to make some progress by creating the first cytoplasmic male sterility. Cytoplasmic male sterility is the failure of plants to produce functional anthers, pollen, or male gametes. Then in 1973 the first Chemical Hybridization Agent was produced by Rohm and Haas, and American chemical firm. This agent creates a sterilized male plant, and the pollination from another plant makes it a hybrid. In 1981 hybrid wheat was first marketed in the United States and in Australia. In 1982 Monsanto launched a wheat program off of the Agent GENISIS. GENESIS is important because its the first effective wheat hybrid on the market. In 1993 the first commercial hybrids were introduced to the US and France. They were known as CROISOR and GENESIS which came out again in the commercial market. Even though the wheat hybrids were commercialized, they were not popular among the farmers of this age.

There are multiple advantages to...

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...of DuPont says, “If we are going to feed 9 billion people by 2050, we are going to need to improve productivity for farmers everywhere”.

Syngenta expects to bring the first commercial hybrid wheat to farm fields across the U.S. by 2020. Rollie Sears, a long time researcher, says, "It will offer a significant yield bump to growers and it will have good end use qualities. It will perform well across a wide variety of soil and weather conditions".

Wheat, as a plant, has a long history of being a crop for food, but the technology for it has been behind soybeans and corn. Wheat, in the future, will be at the top of its production by 2020 with new hybrids coming from many of the major companies. With the growing population of the world, the wheat hybrids need to be more productive to keep up with the rapid growth rate of the world and the decreasing farmland acreage.