Solving sorghum lodging: how Australian scientists are strengthening crops against drought

Farm Online

Australian scientists are tackling sorghum lodging by developing drought-resistant genotypes with stronger stems, aiming to boost crop yields and stability for farmers.

Transcript

00:00My name is Professor David Jordan. I'm a sorghum breeder geneticist working for the Queensland

00:17Alliance for Agriculture and Food Innovation. So lodging is one of the major problems that

00:22affects sorghum in Australia. It's a major problem for farmers because the plants and

00:28lodging means that the plants fall over and makes it very difficult for the farmer to

00:33harvest the crop, can lead to large crop losses, reduction in the quality of the product. So

00:40when a sorghum plant is subjected to drought, it uses its internal resources to fill the

00:48grain and in doing that weakens the stem and that weakening the stem causes it to break.

00:55And what we're trying to do is to select plants that will be able to deal with this problem.

01:02Now the challenge for us is that higher yielding plants are more prone to lodging. And so if

01:08we just select for plants that don't lodge, we'll select for low yield. If we select for

01:14high yielding plants, then we'll have more lodging. So this is the challenge that University

01:20of Queensland, in collaboration with the Department of Agriculture and Fisheries and

01:26Advanta Seeds are trying to solve for Australian farmers.

01:30My name is Professor Andrew Borrell and I'm a crop physiologist with QAFI at the University

01:36of Queensland. So the panicle here, which contains a lot of grains, has a certain demand

01:44for carbon and nitrogen. And normally when the leaves are green, through current photosynthesis,

01:51they're able to fill the grains. However, if you have a drought after flowering and

01:56the leaves begin to die, then photosynthesis is not able to provide the carbon for the

02:02grain. In that situation, the plant takes carbon out of the stem and up to the grain

02:10to fill it. But in so doing, it produces a hollow stem, which is then much more prone

02:17to breaking and that's how the lodging occurs.

02:21I'm Dr. Gipika. I am a postdoctoral research fellow at Queensland Alliance for Agriculture

02:26and Food Innovation. And currently I am working on sorghum lodging. Looking at these differences

02:35in stem strength amongst the genotypes and knowing that they are performing better than

02:41each other, we would be able to select for these better performing genotypes and eventually

02:48be able to breed for this stronger stem, which would result in having a genotype with a high

02:58yielding trait and stronger or increased stem strength.

03:06Here is the stem breaker. We load our stem onto the stem breaker, which breaks the stem.

03:13In doing so, we get a fixed value or the force that was needed to break that stem for that

03:19particular genotype. When you look at the data here on the screen, we get all of these

03:24different values of stem strength for different genotypes. And then when we look at this data,

03:32I'm able to compare different genotypes with one another and then be able to say that this

03:39particular stem or this particular genotype was actually stronger and performed better

03:45than the other.

03:47Some of the results that we are already getting is that firstly, we know that there is a wide

03:53variation in stem strength amongst the genotypes. And secondly, we think that these differences

04:01in stem strength are actually coming from other components such as variations in stem

04:07structure, which could be linked to differences in stem diameter or differences in stem shape.

04:13One other result that we are getting is that we have found that the stagnant genotypes

04:18are performing better and they tend to have stronger stem compared to non-stagnant genotypes.

04:27So I know that my research is solving a question which has been a problem for a number of years

04:33for the Australian grains industry and sorghum farmers. And it feels good to know that this

04:38research is going to be making a difference for them as well as increasing grain yields

04:44for the grains industry.

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