Sargodha: Speakers of a 3-day national wheat conference pledged Thursday to introduce tissue culture techniques like ‘soma-clonal variation’ as a potential tool for creating better performing variants in wheat farming.
The conference was organized by the College of Agriculture, Sargodha University under the theme of ‘Innovative Trends in Wheat: Way Forward to Sustainable Wheat Production.’ The conference provided a platform for discussing and sharing innovative research experiences for higher wheat production by bringing together academia, researchers and genetic engineers.
The agricultural scientists agreed for organizing wheat travelling seminars to create provincial harmony by calling innovative minds on a single platform. They stressed on discouraging the wastage of resources and focused towards utilization of every inch of land and drop of water to ensure food security.
They provided different measures to prevent grain loss from weather, moisture, rodents, birds, insects, and microorganisms and to control post-harvest losses particularly stored grain pests.
The conference was organized around different themes, including conventional breeding, marker assisted breeding, biotic and abiotic stresses and post-harvest losses.
During the conference, around 30 agricultural scientists across the country shared their research studies and ideas on the subject. The research papers presented by leading wheat breeders were of vast canvas ranging from field to genomics and molecular level while short and long term measures were also discussed at length.
The conference explored innovative trends to solve the major problems for sustainable self-sufficiency in wheat crop and covered diverse areas of wheat production and protection measures.
Addressing the concluding session, Dr Ijaz Rasool Noorka, Principal College of Agriculture said that wheat is used as staple food crop and one of the five main crops in Pakistan. He stressed for boosting oil seed production so that the price of edible oil equalizes the price of petrol which could help farmer in cultivating crops.
At the end, Principal College of Agriculture distributed shields, souvenir and certificates among the participants.
