Techniques to improve technological and sanitary quality

Agronomical ways for better quality and safety Choice of cultivar is an efficient way to obtain higher grain quality. Intercropping legumes (grain or forage) improves weed competition and N availability for wheat crop or succeeding crop. Green manure can be an effective alternative to farmyard manure. Fertilization with readily available nitrogen improves yield and quality when water is available. Reduced tillage affects soil fertility and wheat yield but has little effects on grain quality. Technological ways for better quality and safety Milling process strongly influences flour characteristics. Stone milling improves nutritive value; characteristics remain very stable independent of the milling yield. Flour characteristics from roller milling appear very susceptible to the milling yield. Increasing the milling yield in the aim of enriching nutritional quality has a detrimental effect either on safety (DON) or on bread-making quality (bread volume)

Agronomical techniques to improve technological and sanitary quality

In spite of variable grain protein contents, baking quality of organic wheat was found to be acceptable to good. Mycotoxin (DON) infestation was generally low on tested grain samples. Choice of wheat cultivar was the most efficient way to obtain higher grain quality. Fertilization with readily available nitrogen and, to a lower extent, association with legumes and green manures with mixtures containing fodder legumes also improved grain quality. Reduced tillage affected soil quality and wheat yield but had little effects on grain quality

Technological quality of organic wheat in Europe

The demand for high quality organic bread wheat is increasing. The quality level of organic wheat harvested in EU is mainly dependant on variety, environmental conditions and agronomic practices. In some countries, protein content and composition, influencing technological value, are equivalent to those produced under conventional practices. Beside agronomical techniques, technological processes can help to maintain a good quality. Pre-treatments before milling such as debranning were found to be efficient in reducing DON contamination. The project highlighted the necessity to redefine the methods to assess the quality of organic wheat

Pea–wheat intercrops in low-input conditions combine high economic performances and low environmental impacts

Intensive agriculture ensures high yields but can cause serious environmental damages. The optimal use of soil and atmospheric sources of nitrogen in cereal–legume mixtures may allow farmers to maintain high production levels and good quality with low external N inputs, and could potentially decrease environmental impacts, particularly through a more efficient energy use. These potential advantages are presented in an overall assessment of cereal–legume systems, accounting for the agronomic, environmental, energetic, and economic performances. Based on a low-input experimental field network including 16 site-years, we found that yields of pea–wheat intercrops (about 4.5 Mg ha−1 whatever the amount of applied fertiliser) were higher than sole pea and close to conventionally managed wheat yields (5.4 Mg ha−1 on average), the intercrop requiring less than half of the nitrogen fertiliser per ton of grain compared to the sole wheat. The land equivalent ratio and a statistical analysis based on the Price\u27s equation showed that the crop mixture was more efficient than sole crops particularly under unfertilised situations. The estimated amount of energy consumed per ton of harvested grains was two to three times higher with conventionally managed wheat than with pea–wheat mixtures (fertilised or not). The intercrops allowed (i) maintaining wheat grain protein concentration and gross margin compared to wheat sole crop and (ii) increased the contribution of N2 fixation to total N accumulation of pea crop in the mixture compared to pea sole crop. They also led to a reduction of (i) pesticide use compared to sole crops and (ii) soil mineral nitrogen after harvest compared to pea sole crop. Our results demonstrate that pea–wheat intercropping is a promising way to produce cereal grains in an efficient, economically sustainable and environmentally friendly way

Breeding for intercropping: join applied genetics and agronomy for improved annual legume production

Archaeology offers evidence that growing plants together, with annual legumes as usually inevitable component, could be the most ancient cropping system in all primeval agricultural centres. With a ten millennia long tradition, intercropping annual legumes, usually with cereals and for diverse uses, has remained important all over the world until today. There is a phenomenon that brings together legume breeders and agronomists: both are aware that there are differences in the agronomic performance of the mixtures of annual legumes and other field crops if diverse annual legume cultivars are used. Wishing to understand this phenomenon properly and define its economic significance, we are establishing a firm interaction between breeders and agronomists, in order to design such annual legume ideotypes that would have the best agronomic performance when intercropped with diverse plants for either forage or grain or biomass or any other use. Our major hypotheses are that the ideotypes for intercropping are the genotypes being the most competitive in the same environment compartments or taking profit of the complementary compartments