A project into salt tolerance, conducted jointly by the University of Adelaide and the Australian Centre for Plant Functional Genomics (ACPFG) has had some promising results.

“I’m excited by what is happening,” said project leader Mark Tester.

“The preliminary results are looking good - we are confident we will be able to reduce the amount of salt that gets into the plant, which then limits the yield.”

He said there was huge application within the Australian grains industry for salt tolerant lines, with research out of the University of Adelaide showing that 70 per cent of the nation’s grain belt was in some way affected by excess salinity.

“We estimate that salinity could be costing up to $200 million annually, working on yield limitations of 10pc across 70pc of the cropping area,” Professor Tester said.

“It is certainly pegging back crop yields across a large part of the wheat belt, and it’s not necessarily where salt is visible in the field – the major problem is with salt present in the subsoil.”

Work is being done on three cereal varieties – rice, barley and wheat.

Unfortunately, Prof Tester said the wheat, Australia’s most important crop, was the hardest species to build, due to its complex genetic make-up.

“We started with work on the trial species, a brassica that acts as the ‘lab rat’ of plant breeding, and we have then built the salt tolerant rice and barley varieties, with the wheat not far away.

*Extract. Full report in Stock & Land, July 16, 2009