IT HAS a very minor share of the national research budget, but a vision of perennial wheat and other perennial food crops like rice is gaining increasing attention around the globe.
The US Department of Agriculture recently allocated $US1 million to Michigan State University to research perennial wheat, a subject already pursued for decades by the perennial-focused Land Institute in Kansas.
The International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), and researchers in China and Egypt, are chasing the prize of perennial rice, particularly for upland areas.
Perennial wheat, if it can be realised in an economically viable form, offers a range of advantages that makes a certain amount of yield loss compared to annual wheats acceptable.
Dr Phil Larkin, group leader of CSIRO's High Rainfall Zone Cropping program, said perennial wheat plants should be much deeper-rooted than their annual relatives, preventing water and nutrient leakage into water tables;.
It wouldn't need to be resown, so could deliver savings on fuel, fertiliser and labour and it would form a permanent ground cover, reducing erosion.
But thinking about it is the easy part. Dr Larkin is part of a small team involving the Future Farming Industries CRC, NSW Department of Industry and Investment and Charles Sturt University that is doing some proof-of-concept research.
Dr Larkin has put together some bread and durum wheat strains collected in the United States, China "and a couple of lines from some old Russian research", along with some perennial wheat-grasses likely to hybridise with conventional wheat.
The ultimate objective is a plant like triticale, which is two-thirds wheat and one-third rye, yet stable and very high yielding.
The first sowing of wheat-wheat grass hybrids went in at Cowra last year. Most failed, Dr Larkin said, but somewhat to the researchers' surprise a few survived, with grain yields ranging from "reasonable to appallingly low".
Survival and grain yield are only part of the equation: in the Australian farming environment, it is vital that a perennial wheat plant goes completely dormant during summer so that it doesn't use moisture.
Summer dormancy isn't a big issue for overseas research, and the wheat grass strains that have been selected for their perenniality are all exotic and don't have dormancy built in.
The research team is instead identifying Australian species built to withstand our ferocious summers, and reshoot from the butt in autumn.
On the plus side, wild wheat grass, developed over eons of natural selection, are "unbelievably resistant" to the fungi and viruses that afflict the nation's wheat crop, lowering fears that a perennial wheat might form a so-called "green bridge" that allows a disease developed in one season to affect the following crop.
Dr Larkin stressed that the research is in its infancy, and with very little interest from industry may not even be sustained.
"There was a lot of scepticism about this, not least from us, but we think it's an attractive enough idea to pursue," he said.
A group of researchers associated with the FFI CRC recently published a GRDC-funded desktop analysis on the economics of perennial wheat.
"If an equivalent grain price was received, a perennial cereal for grain production purposes only would need to yield between 60 and 75 per cent of annual wheat to be more profitable on soil types where annual wheat profitability is low," the report's lead author, Lindsay Bell, wrote.
Perennial wheat becomes more attractive if it offers grain-and-graze flexibility - a focus of the Cowra research.
"A perennial cereal that could provide 800kg DM of additional green feed between harvest and early winter would be selected in a farm plan that maximises profitability even when it receives $30 less per tonne and yields only 40pc of annual wheat," the study found.
* See also a good video on US perennial wheat research on YouTube.
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