These are not your typical greenhouses.
Weeds and insect colonies grow in one greenhouse; off-colored and funny-shaped pinto beans grow in another. Scientists at the University of Idaho’s Research and Extension Center north of Kimberly, Idaho, work year-round in the greenhouses to make growers’ lives easier.
The university’s research has led growers to adopt such practices as strip tillage and no-till direct seeding to save irrigation water in the spring. Its bean breeding program is crucial to the dry bean industry, not only in Idaho but in other bean-growing regions.
“We develop new ways to help farmers,” sats UI weed scientist Don Morishita as he leads a tour of greenhouses filled with unlikely inhabitants.
Weeds are a menace to agriculture, so Morishita, superintendent of the facility, grows weeds in his greenhouse to educate the public. Many people are familiar with common weeds, like kochia, redroot pigweed and cheat grass, he said. But few know what the weeds look like as seedlings—when they are easy to control.
Growers and gardeners alike should “be able to identify weed seedlings to help them make knowledgeable decisions for controlling them if they are using herbicides,” Morishita says, “and it’s always good to know what’s growing in your field, yard or garden.”
Morishita shares his work with UI’s master gardeners as part of the university’s outreach program.
Much of the work done at the center focuses on preventing diseases that cause crop loss. Zebra chip disease, for example, creates ugly dark stripes inside Idaho’s famous crop that not only make a potato chip look undesirable, but also affect the taste.
Entomologist Erik Wenninger raises colonies of potato psyllid—a carrier of zebra chip disease—in netted cages filled with tomato and pepper plants. He tests various insecticides on the psyllid, then tracks their survival.
Wenninger also grows weeds to determine which ones might alternative hosts that attract the potato psyllid.
The university’s dry bean breeding program, run by bean breeder Shree Singh, is perhaps the most intensive work done at the center. Singh develops breeding lines of pinto and white beans resistant to fungi, viruses and bacteria. White mold is one significant problem in bean crops. Developing a mold-resistant pinto bean would save growers thousands of dollars in fungicides, and could even save entire bean crops when nature provides too much humidity in the field.
Bean common mosaic virus is another important disease that originated in the highlands in Mexico, Singh says. To develop a resistant variety, Singh crosses hundreds of bean plants, then plants the resulting bean seed in his greenhouse. The offspring are then exposed to various diseases, and if any of the plants show signs of the disease, they are aborted. Only the desired, resistant bean plants are left to grow and reproduce.
But developing disease resistance in beans is only half the work. The new varieties need to look appealing to consumers.
Singh’s new plants most often produce off-colored and misshapen bean seeds. So the breeding process continues until he has achieved a disease-resistant plant with attractive seeds. Growing the beans in greenhouses allows several generations to be produced in one year, compared with one generation each summer in the field. It’s a 15-year process to develop a new cultivar from start to finish.
“But once we ‘cure’ the genes,” Singh says, “they’re good for eternity.”
Source: MagicValley.com