December 6, 2022

Cultivar Selection

Ryan Buetow Extension Cropping Systems Specialist Dickinson Research Extension Center North Dakota State University 1041 State Avenue 701 456-1106 ryan.buetow@ndsu.edu

There are three main factors that influence our crop yield and profitability. Genetics, environment, and management and how they all interact with each other decides how productive our efforts are each year. Cultivar (cultivated variety) selection can impact disease and insect resistance, competitiveness, quality traits like protein, drought tolerance, salt tolerance, cold hardiness, and acid tolerance. We have become well aware of the benefits for improved weed control through glyphosate tolerance, glufosinate tolerance, imazamox tolerance, and more. We also continue to see overuse of some traits causing issues such as resistance over time. Considering things like days to maturity can be important for spreading risk from environmental issues and improve your time management during the growing season by spreading chemical application and harvest timelines. Cultivar/variety selection is one of our best tools to become more resilient to the many challenges that we can face throughout the growing season. In order to best make use of this tool, it is important that we continue to improve management, rotate our management to avoid pest chemical resistance, calibrate equipment, and make conscious decisions on which varieties are planted when and where. Variety selection and crop production guides can be found for all major crops grown in the state online at the NDSU AgHub. https://www.ndsu.edu/agriculture/ag-hub/ag-topics/crop-production/crops More information about wheat variety selection along with trial results can be found at: https://www.ndsu.edu/agriculture/extension/publications/north-dakota-hard-red-spring-wheat-variety-trial-results-2022-and-selection You can also try out our tool to better visualize and compare varieties across variety trial locations with the NDSU variety trial selection tool. https://vt.ag.ndsu.edu/list/spring-wheat

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