P-2
Expanding malt barley production in the semi-arid West
Presenter: Tom Blake, Montana State University, Bozeman, MT

The American West is a wide array of environments that vary dramatically in productivity from year to year. No other crop is as well-suited to this often harsh region than barley. Barley's immediate ancestor, Hordeum spontaneum, thrives in many of the world's driest, harshest environments. Wild barley has been collected from the heart of the Negev Desert to the Gobi Desert and persists as a weed throughout Central Asia, West Asia, and North Africa. Barley's durability and ability to cope with inconsistent environments make it the crop of choice for our rainfed crop-production areas. The malting and brewing industries demand consistently high quality barley. This has been achieved primarily through the use of irrigated and high-rainfall production areas. While some irrigated areas in Montana remain underutilized, the largest resources for expanded domestic malt barley production are the vast rainfed croplands in Montana, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon. In Montana alone, agronomic performance and quality data have been summarized for several hundred breeding lines and cultivars, spanning nearly 200 environments over 15 years. This analysis, coupled with an analysis of estimated environmental productivity for locations spanning Montana, provides a prediction of Montana's malt barley production potential, given appropriate malt barley genotypes. Those genotypes are now in trial.

Tom Blake received his B.Sc. in genetics from U.C. Davis and had the good fortune to study with R. A. Nilan for his doctorate. Dr. Blake has been the barley breeder at Montana State University since 1984, has published more than a hundred scientific articles dealing with barley improvement and genetics, and helped found the North American Barley Genome Mapping Project.