Because of the long time required for soybean variety development, it is very helpful to have a winter nursery to advance the early (F1 – F5) generations of breeding lines. Without the access to winter nursery, we can advance just one generation per year. So, use of USDA-ARS winter nursery in Puerto Rico can reduce the breeding line development timeline by 2-3 years. Past support from NCSPA has been extremely helpful to keep the USDA public soybean breeding program in Raleigh highly competitive with other public and private soybean breeding programs in southeastern USA. Puerto Rico is frost-free and therefore an excellent off-season environment for the North Carolina USDA soybean breeding program. The importance of the winter nursery is highlighted by the fact that all of the varieties we have released in NC were developed using the Puerto Rico winter nursery. The objective of this research is to grow NC soybean breeding nursery materials in the Puerto Rico winter nursery, during the off-season. Using the winter nursery speeds the development of soybeans with high yield, drought tolerance, nematode resistance, higher protein & improved oil quality. Because of the long time required for varietal development (8-10 years), it is essential to have a winter nursery that can reduce that delivery time. Otherwise, it would not be possible to maintain the high productivity and competitive performance of our breeding program. The winter nursery allows us to rapidly take advantage of genetic advances as they occur and get them into applied breeding. This request is for a 3-year project, in one-year increment.

The objective of this research is to advance the early generations of USDA soybean breeding materials in the USDA-ARS Puerto Rico nursery, during the NC off-season. Use of the winter nursery will reduce the time to develop soybean lines adapted to NC and other Southeastern states with high yield, drought tolerance, nematode resistance, higher protein, improved oil quality and other traits of interest to the growers and help stay competitive with other public and private soybean breeding programs in the Southeast.

Expected End Products:
The winter nursery is vital in all our breeding activities, because it reduces the time required for development of a variety or new germplasm by 2 to 3 years. This permits the timely release of new variety products while they are still competitive in the market place. All of the soybean varieties (>50) jointly released by USDA & NCSU in the last 40 years were developed with the aid of the USDA off-season winter nursery in Puerto Rico. We have released five improved germplasm with high meal protein, high oleic, genetic diversity over last three years. At least six more lines will be released over next three years from our Unit. We have a robust pipeline of breeding lines in early (F1-F4) generations which are produced by making more than 100 cross combinations each year. Such lines will be rapidly advanced with the help of winter nursery. Two or more miproved lines adapted to NC will be released yearly from our Unit during the foreseeable future.