I come across growers all the time that are interested in this.
I go to field days that are nothing about chickpeas and just get talking and all of a sudden they go, I heard about that summer chickpea thing.
There's just a lot of curiosity.
Back in 2016, I started working for the Legumes for Sustainable Agriculture Project.
The idea being to do some breeding for chickpeas for hot and dry climates.
So the brief to me from GRDC was to breed for heat tolerance in a winter scenario.
So through the Grains Gene Bank, we imported some lines from India and other hot and dry places around the world, in the Middle East, etc.
And after looking them in the field for a couple of years, I just started to wonder why do we only grow these very short season chickpeas in Australia in winter?
Because in India and in other places around the world they don't necessarily have a summer or a winter growing season like we do in this part of Australia.
Why aren't we looking at climate in a different way and how we can try and connect the genotypes that we have to the environment that they're going to be grown in?
So we put in some lines at the end of 2019, I hand sowed them, just made an educated guess what we might need in a summer chickpea genotype.
And it was a resounding success.
As you know, 2019 was a terrible drought and they had very little water, but they still grew very, very well.
So then we thought, we've got to do this again.
So in 2020, I made another educated guess and expanded the number of lines and total opposite season.
It was dry at the start and then it was very wet from March, but again, they did very, very well.
Not all of them did very well, but the trial overall showed that there is a lot of potential of the good lines to produce high yields in this kind of summer planted autumn growing season environment.
What about this one?
It's a bit short for harvest, but it's got so many pods on it, it's looking really great.
It's covered in pods and it's finishing up on its own too.
So the trial this year has about 20 genotypes in it.
We picked the best breeding lines from last time and combined it with some of the current cultivars and we're testing them now in five different growing environments.
The idea being we can really see well what does this season hold for us?
Can we use summer chickpeas that far north or that far south?
Because we know it worked in Narrabri.
But we really want to see where's it going to work.
And then we can go from there looking at the agronomics of the system.
So this plot right here is PBA Seamer.
It's doing very well, as you can see.
Super happy.
Full of pods.
Seven pods already.
And this was only planted at the end of January.
But it also illustrates some of the reasons why PBA Seamer is probably not going to work as a cultivar for this particular season.
Obviously, in winter, it does fantastically.
But you can see here how happy it is and it's still producing flowers.
By June, it's too cold and it's not going to be any good for these flowers to be turning into pods because it's not going to be marketable yield.
There are three things that have to be in a summer chickpea that aren't necessarily important in a chickpea growing in winter.
The first one is it has to be very quick.
So we've got a shorter window for them to finish.
Again, it will depend a little bit on the environment and that's what we're testing.
But in general, we want it to start in January and be done by at the latest, the first week of June.
That's a shorter growing season.
The second trait is that they have to finish up on their own somehow.
Whether that's true genetic determinacy or whether they just have a smaller root system and they just run out of water, whatever the mechanism is, they need to crisp up on their own a little bit and stop producing flowers.
This is really important, otherwise, the seed quality is very, very poor and also it's too hard to harvest them.
The third trait is that they need to be insensitive to shortening day lengths.
So we call that photo period insensitivity.
If they're growing in winter, when they're flowering, the day lengths are getting longer and longer and longer as it's coming into summer.
This time of year, it's the opposite.
The days are getting shorter and shorter and some chickpeas get confused by a shortening day length.
This example of a breeding line has those three key characteristics that we're looking for.
So it's early enough.
It's finishing up on its own.
You can see there's not too many more flowers on the tops of these ones here.
And it's also clearly insensitive to a photoperiod.
But it also has some key characteristics that a grower will need in the field, and that is that the bottom pod isn't so low that the header can't get under it.
So hopefully all of this yield will make it into the header.
The yield potential question is the one all the growers need to know.
Is it going to be economically viable to try this?
When we did it in 2019 and 2020, I got about four tonnes a hectare off the very best lines, but they were hand harvested so we're yet to see if we could get them through a header and be able to to screen out all the little chickpeas as well that come from this weird time of year system.
Whether they really going to match up.
But my instinct says they will.
This is an example of a chickpea that was harvested at just the right time, but in 2019.
So this was harvested at 92 days after planting.
So it's a three month chickpea.
Obviously, 2019 was a very quick season because of the drought.
But the main thing I wanted to point out is how even these seeds all are.
This genotype, also harvested in 2019, is an example of what happens when the plants don't finish up on their own.
This has been screened in the tiniest ones were screened out.
But even now, you can still see the immature seeds that were harvested when this when this plant came in off the field.
It's also you can see some heat damage in here.
And basically this genotype, because of the variability in the seed maturity, is going to have a knock back in its marketing.
I'm very optimistic about this as a system, and the curiosity and the feedback from farmers says to me that I think it's on the right track.
But I'm just one little prebreeding researcher.
It really needs a team of researchers to pull this together because there's a lot of agronomic and plant breeding considerations that need to be combined because it really is a new season for a crop that needs new genotypes.
So with a good team of researchers working together with more expertise than just just myself, I'm really optimistic we'll be able to find a way to make this work for growers.