Team effort behind new ryegrass cultivar to future-proof pastoral farming
It takes a team approach to produce a new cultivar of ryegrass, match-fit to meet the future challenges of pastoral farming.
The process involves treating ryegrass seeds with varying degrees or recipes of UV light which sends 'messages' to the seed to react in certain ways. The outcome, according to the company's founder and chief science officer Dr Jason Wargent, is increased yields, increased metabolised energy (ME) and increased lipids to suppress methane.
Wargent, originally from England and who did his PhD in plant photobiology, has always specialised in the effects of UV light on plants. He says his reason for doing this back in the early 2000s was concern about the thinning ozone layer and what effect increased natural UV would have on plants. In the end he says that threat largely went away, but he and a small group of researchers looked further into the effects of UV on plants.
Fast forward to 2010, Wargent took up an academic position in the College of Agriculture and the Environment at Massey University where he continued his work in his specialist field.
"One of the things that struck me was that over millions of years, seeding plants had naturally adapted to UV light," he told Rural News.
"Long before humans arrived, their seeds simply dropped on the ground and life continued apparently unaffected by UV light. It was things like drought that killed plants - not UV light," he says.
Given the plants were getting 'messages' from natural UV light, the thought was that we could artificially mimic what nature was doing and send 'new messages' to plants by utilising UV light treatments.
He says they initially did this successfully on plants in the nursery by sweeping across them various UV light treatment. This was not just about yield, but about consistency of a crop to suit customers. But there was more to come with the focus turning to seeds - the breakthrough moment for Biolumic. Nobody else in the world had attempted to use UV light on seeds to improve the performance and characteristics of a crop.
How It's Done
In a relatively small and inconspicuous laboratory near Palmerston North, Dr Jason Wargent and his team of scientists are doing what some have said, and are still saying - is impossible. Yet they are being proved wrong, because it is already working in the USA with corn and soy. Now the focus is ryegrass and it's based on what nature already does.
"We know that all crop plant species have certain detection equipment, such as certain proteins and so on, that can detect UV light and that's been going on for millions of years, and what we have been able to do is piggyback off that evolutionary adaptation," he says.
To that end, ryegrass seeds are being run through a machine and given different types of light treatments to produce different traits. Wargent calls them light recipes. It's not just about the time the seeds are exposed to UV light, it's about the density and other factors of the UV light treatment. In the initial stage of the research, the exposure time could be up to 24 hours, which was “uncommercial”. But now the process has been refined, and it is down to minutes or seconds.
Seeds that have been treated in this way are now being grown as plants in Biolumic’s laboratory and the results are excellent. And for the record, no further applications of UV are involved in this process.
The initial focus on the seed treatments so far, as stated earlier, is on yield, ME and methane suppression by increasing lipid content. They are also looking at the opportunity of heritability of the traits in the ‘parent’ seeds and plants and already the results from the laboratory suggest this is feasible.
The real test will come with the field trials which Wargent says will start next year. This will also be an opportunity to look at such things as drought resistance and overall persistence. He says these trials will take place in 2026 and 2027 and, by then, they hope to have product for commercial release. All being well at that point, Biolumic will come to a licensing arrangement with seed companies to produce the modified seeds in commercial quantities, at an affordable price for farmers that reflects the benefits of these new seeds.
“Our goal is to deliver seed trait packages to farmers that will potentially allow them to put less nutrients into the ground, produce more efficient plants and roots and provide an opportunity to reduce nitrous oxide and methane emissions, while at the same time increasing crop yield and ME that will in turn could increase milk solids, so everyone is a winner,” he says.
