Location: Dale Bumpers National Rice Research Center
Project Number: 6028-21000-012-014-S
Project Type: Non-Assistance Cooperative Agreement
Start Date: Jul 1, 2023
End Date: Jun 30, 2026
Objective:
1. To conduct on-farm trials investigating irrigation automation technologies for water and energy conservation.
2. To develop and extend breeding efforts to develop rice cultivars with improved performance under high night temperature stress conditions.
3.To investigate the epidemiology of P. ananatis and other Pantoea spp. in rice, in Arkansas, as an emerging disease.
Approach:
These studies will predominantly be conducted at field scales in cooperation with local producers. A portion may be conducted on the rice research stations located in Stuttgart and/or Greenfield, Arkansas. The studies will compare the irrigation water use efficiencies (i.e., grain yield per amount of irrigation applied) of different automation systems to standard rice irrigation practices (farmer control). The economics of the different systems will also be compared.
Our USDA/UADA-RREC NACA project is an effort to unite the expertise of scientists in both organizations in extending and improving the high night temperature project’s primary purpose of improving tolerance of Arkansas long-grain rice cultivars developed by the UADA-RREC rice breeding effort.
A. Provide a controlled climate screening procedure with objective criteria to deliver usable information for evaluating long-grain rice lines prior to cultivar release.
B. To provide robust high night temperature evaluations of field test data, incorporating genomic and environmental interactions to assist breeding decisions.
C. Disseminate relevant information and publish results in appropriate venues.
Pantoea spp. is an emergent pathogen in rice and we plan to collect crop samples throughout Arkansas. This project will require travelling and researching disease symptoms in rice fields (commercial and experimental fields). This project will involve the development of more accurate and reliable methods for evaluating the susceptibility of rice varieties to Pantoea. We will determine the environmental conditions necessary for the development of the disease. We will further study the ability of Pantoea to infect and cause disease in a range of plant species to determine whether it is a host-specific pathogen or capable of infecting a broad range of hosts, and possible hosts for survival.
