On 12 April 2013, CIMMYT director general Thomas Lumpkin and José Ortega Cabello, chairman of the Campo de Tejada cooperative in Spain, signed a five-year extension of a collaborative agreement between Agrovegetal S.A. and CIMMYT dating back to 1998. The objective of the agreement is to develop improved durum wheat, bread wheat, and triticale varieties.
Agrovegetal is an association of several farmer cooperatives and other entities, whose objective is to offer quality seed to farmers in the AndalucĂa region of Spain. To that end, it channels resources and efforts towards strategic research and development priorities and activities aimed at developing improved varieties.
Ortega Cabello, Ignacio SolĂs Martel, Agrovegetal’s technical director, and Rafael Sánchez de Puerta DĂaz from the Andalucian Federation of Agricultural Cooperatives, met with Hans Braun, CIMMYT’s Global Wheat Program director, to define the specific durum wheat, bread wheat, and triticale research activities that will be conducted to develop high-yielding, highquality, drought-tolerant, and disease-resistant varieties.
Among the alliance’s successes to date is the development of materials with high yield stability and resistance to downy mildew and leaf rust, as well as durums with high pasta-making quality and bread wheats with good baking quality and yellow rust resistance. It has also produced triticales with high protein content, high specific grain weight, and resistance to foliar diseases (downy mildew, rusts, and septoria).
