By
BISA Team
Every year in March CIMMYT-BISA organizes Wheat Field Day as an annual event to celebrate and honor the hard work that goes into producing quality seed at BISA farms. It is the annual celebration of research, productiveness, and perseverance. It’s an effort to accelerate the global breeding process and serve humanity with the best in Wheat. This event allows wheat breeders to evaluate/select new, improved advanced breeding lines for possible use. It’s an amalgamation of farmers, researchers, and young students from the agricultural field, as it opens a platform for co-creation, knowledge exchange and experience sharing.
It is organized on a large scale to showcase the breeding process, new breeding tools, mainstreaming of enhanced grain quality traits and integrating the traits needed for future wheat. This year also, BISA research farms in Jabalpur (Madhya Pradesh), Samastipur (Bihar) and Ludhiana (Punjab) invited scientists from different parts of the country to have a firsthand look at the ongoing variety of trials. It’s been a premier event where researchers interact and learn about CIMMYT’s newest advanced wheat lines: heat, drought and disease resistant.
This year in Ludhiana, more than 75 scientists from the national system (public & private sector) joined the wheat field day.
Wheat nurseries at BISA farm, Ludhiana during the 2023-24 cycle.
A total of 20105 entries and 22531 plots were planted at the BISA research farm, Ludhiana during the 2023-24 season. This includes ~6500 standard yield trial plots and ~16,000 small plots with two rows for stripe rust screening and germplasm maintenance.
Advanced wheat breeding lines from CIMMYT and international nurseries are available for selection by public and private sector national partners, some of which are described below:
- Stage-1 Trial: Total Entries: 4971 entries
- Elite Parcela Chica (EPC): 1458 entries
- South Asia Bread Wheat Genomic Prediction Yield Trial (SABWGPYT): 540 entries
- High Zinc Wheat Yield Trial (HZWYT):100 entries
- Elite Spring Wheat Yield Trial (ESWYT): 50 entries
- Semi-Arid Wheat Yield Trial (SAWYT):50 entries
- Heat Tolerant Wheat Yield Trial (HTWYT): 50 entries
- Wheat Yield Collaboration Yield Trial (WYCYT): 45 entries
- Stress Adapted Trait Yield Nurseries (SATYN): 45 entries
- High Zinc Advanced Nursery (HZAN): 23 entries
- Elite Late Heat Tolerance Trial (7thELHT): 60 entries
- 15th HLBSN: 50 entries
- Station Trial: 15 entries
Almost the same pattern was followed at the other two farms of BISA where a similar pattern was used to display the trials.
BISA, in the last decade, has focused on mechanization to improve efficiency, and yield production with the lowest cost of production. Thus, having a significant positive impact on Indian agriculture. On Wheat Field Day, BISA also displayed innovative farm machinery, digital tools and equipment used in farming with the latest technology.