Comparison of conventional and new methods in barley and wheat breeder seed management

Seed is one of the most important inputs in wheat and barley crops production systems. Due to the importance of bred seeds in crop production with higher quality and quantity, demands have been increased for seed of newly released wheat and barley varieties in recent years. But the agricultural research stations would not be able to produce enough initial seed nucleus to cover the demands because of limited land resources and funds. Furthermore, the lack of initial nucleus seed is due to inefficiency of conventional seed production method (hill-pot method); because it needs more land, time, fund, and too much manual operation. The newly developed method, presented in this paper, designed based on plot cultivation and has been successfully implemented during 2006-09 at the Sararood Agricultural Research Station. In comparison with the conventional method, the new method could produce clean nucleus seed with less cost. By implementation of new method, the production of initial nucleus seed of Sararood-1 (barley variety) has been raised significantly from 300 to 3900 kg/ha, which is 13-fold increase. It can be concluded that, shifting from conventional methods to the new method would improve the quantity, quality and purity of nucleus seed production with lower cost in breeder seed production centers.