Improvement of faba beans in China and Australia through germplasm evaluation, exchange and utilisation

• Zhejiang Academy of Agricultural Sciences, China

Faba bean (Vicia faba) is an important crop helping maintain soil fertility as well as contributing to human nutrition and intensive livestock production.

China is the world's largest producer, utilising the grain legume in intensive crop rotations, however, the area planted fell from 3 million ha in the 1950s to 2 million ha in the 1980s. Prevalence for farming systems based on two rice crops during the summer means that current faba bean varieties are too late maturing for incorporation in these systems. Other factors include relatively low and variable yields and disease susceptibility.

In Australia, the Grains Council has targeted faba bean production at 500,000 tonnes a year by 2000 compared with 130,000 tonnes now. The Grains Research and Development Corporation is supporting a national research and development program.

In Australia, disease resistance, time of maturity and other attributes are also constraining the expansion of faba bean plantings.

This project aims to develop improved varieties of faba bean for planting in China and Australia. Identification of research priorities concluded that a project involving five Chinese provinces Zhejiang, Gansu, Jiangsu, Sichuan and Yunnan and Australia, with links to the International Centre for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas (ICARDA), should be developed.

One element of the project will be a collecting mission to southern China to increase the range of germplasm. Seed gathered from farmers' fields and marketplaces will augment the World Faba Bean Collection maintained by ICARDA in Syria, which currently holds 4490 open-pollinated accessions and 5238 pure-line accessions.

Further work in China will include:

introduction and propagation of germplasm from ICARDA for distribution to breeding programs, with measurements made of phenology, disease reaction, plant height and branching, and seed yield and quality;
breeding to develop a range of populations for screening, selection and evaluation;
screening for grain quality, resistance to the diseases chocolate spot, ascochyta and rust, tolerance to cold and frost, and tolerance of waterlogging; and
crop management research covering nutrition, integrated disease and weed management, and the rotation benefits of faba bean to subsequent non-legume crops.

The Australian section of the project will include the screening of large numbers of genotypes at ICARDA. This will focus on characteristics that will assist the expansion of faba bean production in Australia notably adaptation to Mediterranean environments, resistance to ascochyta, chocolate spot and rust, and early maturity. Following the introduction of selected germplasm, work on evaluation and improvement will be performed at the Tamworth Centre for Crop Improvement, the Australian Cotton Research Institute, Narrabri, and field sites in the region.