Marla remembers dear old Dad! Wheat harvest in south central Kansas usually starts around Father's Day. This is very appropriate as most everyone's dad (in Kansas, anyway) is involved in wheat harvest. It seems fitting to be with your dad harvesting wheat on "his" day. Thinking about my own dad and wheat harvest is [...]

Marla is "a mite concerned" about the health of some wheat plots! Y'all remember my last blog about inoculating wheat plants with wheat streak mosaic virus (WSMV)? Well, we recently took the ratings from this screening test. Rating diseases is done visually by assessing the symptoms and damage caused by the pathogen. In the [...]

Borlaug Summit in Ciudad Obregon, Mexico March 25, 2014 would have been Norman Borlaug’s 100th birthday. For those of you who don’t know exactly who Dr. Borlaug is, this blog is for you. As I write this, I’m waiting for my flight to Mexico to attend a celebration hosted by CIMMYT, the International Center [...]

Or "How to make Wheat Streak Mosaic Virus soup!" A few days ago, the LCS Hard Red Winter Wheat breeding program went viral, both physically and literately! John Fellers, USDA ARS Molecular Biologist, came down from Manhattan to show us how to make wheat sick with wheat streak mosaic virus (WSMV). He was even [...]

Caio from Rome! My recent travels for work took me to Italy for the annual ACL meeting with the Limagrain Group. The ACL meeting, or Association de Chercheurs Limagrain, is an annual event hosted in a different city each biannual, with the main goal of reinforcing l’esprit de corps within Limagrain. Okay, so I [...]

January finds me in Indiana at the greenhouse making crosses. This is my absolute favorite part of my job as a breeder. Generating the new crosses that will eventually be in the hands of farmers is exciting! But if truth be told, I just really like sitting in a warm greenhouse, quietly removing anthers [...]