Cereals breeding
in the Leine Valley

When the company started up again in Einbeck, wheat and barley breeding was also resumed. To enable that, KWS leased the 200-hectare farm in Wetze in 1951.

Cereal breeding was continually strengthened: KWS took over the company Saatzucht Heine in 1964 and merged it with Peragis to form the new subsidiary Heine-Peragis. In 1968, KWS took over Lochow-Petkus GmbH, Germany’s largest cereal breeding company. Shortly afterwards, Lochow-Petkus GmbH bought Heine-Peragis in order to combine breeding activities under one roof and kept Wetze as the central location for barley and wheat breeding.

One reason for that was the better soils there than in the area around Lochow-Petkus’ headquarters in the Lüneburg Heath, the main location for breeding rye as well as oats, which was still a very important crop at the time.

Wheat and barley are still bred in Wetze, in the direct vicinity of KWS’ log house and KWS Landwirtschaft GmbH. The breeders Klaus Brunckhorst and Jörg Großer, who have since retired, left their stamp on the location’s profile and made a key contribution to the success of cereal breeding there. The names of barley such as Lomerit, KWS Meridian and KWS Kosmos and wheat varieties like Bussard, Dekan and Cubus are testimony to that.

The team

Wetze is and will remain KWS Cereals’ main site for breeding wheat and barley in Germany – also after Erhard Ebmeyer from the Wohlde location has taken charge of it from Klaus Brunckhorst. Nina Pfeiffer, who supervises the German winter wheat program, Reiner Bothe with his summer wheat program and Anja Maasberg in barley breeding and their teams are now writing a further chapter in this success story. A new breeding program was added in 2016: hybrid winter barley under the leadership of Volker Marwede. Its objective is to develop hybrid varieties for feed barley and malting barley markets in Europe.

New and converted buildings optimize work processes

The station has undergone significant changes over the past years. One milestone was implementation of Master Plan I, under which a greenhouse, storage space, a workshop, workrooms, labs and staff rooms were newly built or converted. Yet the objective of that was not only to expand capacities. The station’s management led by Thorsten Bielfeldt and Martin Schneider optimized work processes and channels and minimized distances, as reflected in the new building structure with its work and processing rooms.

Wetze also has a complete pool of machinery for all the work to be done: seed drills, threshing technology, fertilizer spreaders, pesticide sprayers, smaller equipment for tilling the soil and, of course, tractors.

2.51 hectares of station space and 192 hectares of breeding nurseries

The station currently has an area of 2.51 hectares (KWS leases it from the Klosterkammer Hannover) and includes a 700 m² greenhouse, as well as storage areas for seed and equipment, a drying plant, office and staff rooms, labs, work rooms and a workshop. 37 employees, five of them breeders, currently work at the location. In addition, agricultural technical assistants and plant technologists are trained there and currently number nine. Seasonal employees help the station at harvest time.

The areas cultivated by the station in the Leine Valley are wholly leased from farmers in the surrounding region and from KWS Landwirtschaft GmbH. They have fertile soils with an average quality rating of 80 points. Like many other places, the location unfortunately suffered low precipitation in 2018 and 2019: around 580 millimeters, almost 100 millimeters below the long-term average. The nursery area for the crops winter and summer wheat and winter barley was 192 hectares in 2020. That figure seven years ago was 140 hectares – testimony to the dynamic development of the Wetze location.

Objectives of barley and wheat breeding

The winter barley program aims to breed high-yielding varieties. Their stability is ensured by a balanced mix of traits such as winter hardiness, standing power, resistance to fungal pathogens and viral diseases, and good grain quality.

KWS’ winter wheat program is geared to developing varieties with an emphasis on high yield with rounded agronomic traits and balanced resistance profiles across all grades. Just this March, the German Federal Office of Plant Varieties gave approval to four new KWS varieties in grades A, B and C, three of which are the highest-yielding newly approved line varieties. Performance tests and observation in the field are therefore focal areas of the station’s work.

Newly bred barley varieties and around 80 percent of the young wheat material are likewise located in Wetze. A large part of the team’s activities involves the first stages of seed multiplication and preservation breeding, including the not inconsiderable work involved in cleaning areas. A further focus is on variety demonstrations.

Processing and treatment on site

Seed is likewise processed and treated further in Wetze. The efficient drying plant can hold 60 crates at one time and dry the material from a moisture content of around 17 percent to below 14 percent in 12 hours. It uses a 65-kilowatt fan that delivers an air flow via a underfloor duct.

The seed processing machine Petkus-Gigant cleans about two tons of seed an hour and seed can also be treated in the direct vicinity with roughly the same throughput.

The team examines the seed’s quality in the labs and work rooms. That includes screening it, ascertaining its thousand grain weight, measuring the protein content and quality, sample size calculation and other examinations on dough properties.

The moth problem solved

A big problem at the Wetze location until recently was storage pests, in particular moths. An efficient and eco-friendly solution was found in the shape of resealable plastic containers for the seed samples stored there. Moths are no longer able to reproduce. External cold stores are also used for the long-term storage of seed. Master Plan I is not the end of the station’s development. The next plans to expand its capacities are already in the drawer. |