Grass breeding is a long and complex business. It takes up to seven to 10 years to complete stage one and after that there are a series of tests that must be completed for five years before it heads to the final stage for commercialisation of varieties. Pat Conaghan is the man responsible with leading forage breeding for Teagasc. He is based at Oak Park and this is where the Teagasc research and development on grass varieties takes place.

Teagasc Oak Park focuses solely on stage one – the grass variety development. It has a huge amount of resources tied up to complete this process. Each year, there are over 3,000 sward plots sown in between crops of cereals at Oak Park to prevent grass pollen moving from one variety to the next.

Also at Oak Park there are 26 polytunnels where clover crops are pollinated.

On top of all this, there is a huge amount of labour required to measure and monitor the various grass plants as they move through different stages. The extent of the resources required are hard to believe until you actually walk into Oak Park and see the various plots and understand the investment required.

Stage two of this variety improvement process is the independent variety testing carried out by the Department of Agriculture at various sites around the country. This process takes five years on top of the seven to 10 years that it has already taken at Oak Park to develop the variety. After that, once a variety passes through the independent testing, it must be sown for commercial seed production – ie sown and harvested to generate seed so that Goldcrop, the commercial partners in the Teagasc programme, can sell the seed. This process takes a further two years.

In total, it means that it takes up to 15 years from when work first starts on a variety to when it is ready for a farmer to buy the grass seed.

You might ask why Teagasc Oak Park is involved in grass breeding but there is a long history to breeding at Oak Park. Pat Conaghan, forage breeder at Oak Park, says: “In the mid-80s, a plan was developed giving the breeding programme a strong commercial focus. In 1992, Teagasc signed its first commercial agreement with DLF Trifolium, which gave DLF exclusive rights to produce, distribute and market Teagasc varieties. In 2013, a new commercial arrangement was agreed with Goldcrop, giving it exclusive rights to the Teagasc-bred varieties.”

So getting back to the question of why Teagasc Oak Park – well it comes back to the mission and target of Teagasc Oak Park and that is to support animal production from grassland in Ireland by breeding improved grasses for Irish farming systems.

Other countries manage and use grass differently and hence have different objectives when it comes to breeding grasses. In Holland and Denmark, the feeding system is completely different because animals do very little grazing outdoors and yield of quality silage is much more important than spring growth for grazing in February or ground score cover in spring. The focus in these countries is to select varieties that have big silage cuts and produce large volumes of seed. The target of the Oak Park work is to produce sufficient yield of quality forage to meet the animal feed demand curve over the entire season plus provision of adequate winter feed as silage.

When you ask Pat Conaghan what plant breeding is, he will say it’s a mix of science (genetics, botany, etc), business (people, money and time) and art (the breeder’s eye). It is this mix that is driving the evolution of grass varieties into the product that farmers want. Ideally, Irish farmers need lots more good quality grass in spring and more in the main growing season for winter feed and it all needs to react well when stock walk on the plants.

Pat and his team are trying to identify the plants that are in the top quartile for autumn yield, spring yield, ground cover, digestibility, etc. If Pat can cross plants to combine more favourable genes, he effectively creates new plants or genetic combinations and then he needs to evaluate these in a large number of plots. That cycle of crossing, evaluation and selection takes two to six years to complete and each year the yield of grass seed increases. The process moves through phases where they are sown as individual plants and then into plots.

Perennial ryegrass is wind-pollinated so the grass plots are sown in between a crop of oats to prevent grass pollen moving from one plot to the next. Clover is more difficult and is pollinated by bees, so for cross-pollinating a hive of bees is purchased and introduced into a plastic tunnel with the clover plants and in a controlled environment the bees cross-pollinate the clover plants.

One of the changes Pat and his team are hoping to make this year is that they are going to introduce cattle into the evaluation process to see how the different varieties react to grazing pressure. Up to now, they have generally depended almost exclusively on cutting and weighing varieties but some grasses react differently to cutting as opposed to grazing. Pat and his team have been using sheep for some clover testing, but using cattle will now deepen the grazing impact even more and make it that bit more reflective of Irish grazing conditions.

So what has Oak Park delivered?

In the last 10 years, 16 perennial ryegrass varieties have been bred and six white clover varieties have been commercialised. The 16 grass varieties are Genesis, January, Soloman, Glenkeen, Carraig, Giant, Elysium, Oakpark, Kerry, Majestic, Glenveagh, Glenroyal, Tyrconell, Smile, Kintyre and Solas. The six clover varieties are Dublin, Buddy, Iona, Coofin, Galway and Pirouette.

Is there much room for further improvement in grass varieties? Pat believes there is enormous potential. He said: “If we look at the long-term selection in maize, we have seen the oil percentage rise in plants in Illinois as the number of cycles generated. Overall, they have seen a fourfold increase in oil percentage after 100 cycles. In grass breeding, only about 20 cycles have been completed. This tells me that grass breeding is only in its infancy and there is no evidence to suggest we are anywhere close to reaching our limits. I’d also suggest genomic selection will double the genetic gain in perennial ryegrass.”

  • Over 3,000 grass plots are evaluated each year in Oak Park.
  • Varieties bred in Oak Park are tested by the Department and then commercialised by Goldcrop and DLF.
  • Plans to introduce cattle grazing to plant evaluation this year.
  • Grass breeding is nowhere near reaching its limits.
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