[Title Slide – Conventional Soybean Varieties; Dr. Pengyin Chen Professor of Soybean Breeding and Genetics; Number 17, October 13, 2009 Your Soybean Podcast, University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture, Arkansas Soybean Promotion Board]

[Pengyin Chen standing in a field] My name is Pengyin Chen. I am the soybean breeder with University of Arkansas. My research program focuses on development of new varieties with high yield and pest resistance and stress tolerance to be released to the farmers for them to grow with profitable production. Our program really has two major components, one is GMO research, the other one is conventional. Of course the conventional is a big part of our research program. We have released three conventional varieties so far, [Slide – Recommend Conventional Varieties U A 4805 – 4.8; Ozark – 5.3; Osage – 5.6; picture of soybeans] one is UA 4805 which is a group 4.8 and we released it in 2005 and has been doing real well. The other one is called Ozark which is about 5.3 in maturity and in 2007 we have released a new variety called Osage which is about a 5.6 in maturity and very high yield and very competitive with GMO varieties. [Pengyin Chen] And we have another new variety in pipeline, the experiment number is 1194. We have not found a proper name yet we’re in the process of releasing this variety, hopefully it will be in the market in a year or so.

Now our conventional varieties have been doing well in farmer’s field and also the interest in conventional has been increasing in the last several years. I think the main reason are the following, [Slide –Conventional Soybean Variety Advantages ; Seeds can be saved to plant; Seeds much cheaper than GMO seed; Alternative weed management potential; picture of soybeans] one because obviously the farmers can save the seed for planting if they choose to keep the same variety on their farm. And secondly the price of the seeds per bag is about one-third the cost as compared to the GMO varieties and then the other reason is that these conventional varieties offers alternatives for weed management. As we all experienced the challenge of herbicide resistant weeds on our farms. The conventional soybeans will give you the option to shift your chemical chemistry so you can get the weeds [Pengyin Chen] cleaned out from your farm. So we have been trying very hard to come up with conventional varieties with high-yield and now a new direction we are moving to is to incorporate some other value added traits such as low trans-fat oil and high-protein and drought tolerance, flood tolerance, of course disease resistance is always a priority for us to work on.

So hopefully with the support from the promotion board we’ll continue to develop and release high-yielding varieties with local adaptation to our farms and the environments and also in the future we hope to release varieties with low trans-fat and also high-oil, high protein and some other food-grade attributes.