Field Day - Visita in campo - 20 Maggio 2019

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Scopri la nostra nuova varietà di frumento duro!

Triticum durum L. cv. SAMARCANDA

Costituita dalla Ditta F.lli Menzo s.a.s., Samarcanda è il risultato dell’incrocio tra le varietà Capeiti x Rusticano.

Ha una qualità eccellente grazie ad un ottimo indice di giallo!

Anno di iscrizione: 2018

Field Day - Visita in campo - 18 Maggio 2018

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The company F.lli Menzo s.a.s. consists of seven units working full time and with the collaboration of technicians and professionals for commercial activities and research. It serves in the seed sector proposing appropriate strategies to promote their products, certified under the control of CREA-SCS (ex ENSE), manifest excellence at national level and beyond.

Since the early 2000s, the company collaborates with the research consortium "Gian Pietro Ballatore" to the project Quality and traceability of durum wheat in Sicily, engaging in the development of the sector and the implementation of a control system of the quality of durum wheat.

The aim is to contribute to the professional growth of cereal branch, ensuring a certificate and quality seeds and providing advice to stakeholders who persevere with tenacity in their business.

A key aim is to identify the means and strategies most suitable for the realization of excellent yields of cereals and fodder.

The storage center F.lli Menzo provides a consistent service to farmers assisting them in the selection of seeds and other products for agriculture. Farms is facing a clear concept: the use of a certificate seed is a guarantee to enhance the yield.

The company makes a contribution in this regard both with own research, which has provided some varieties of durum wheat and vetch, and experimenting with new products and new techniques of cultivation.

There are many varieties commercialized, both cereal and fodder. Durum wheat, barley, oats, vetch, clover, broad bean, both in conventional and organic.

F.lli Menzo's Services

• Products spreading
• Research and Development
• Breeding via marker-assisted selection (MAS – Marker Assisted Selection)
• Partnership

With regard to research, the company F.lli Menzo s.a.s. has been involved for many years in experimentation, producing annually experimental fields in order to get new plant varieties in particular wheat and legumes.

As part of the genetic improvement, research work is carried out through a series of precise schedules of crossing and selection that aim to focus a series of favourable agronomic traits (quality and yield, resistance to biotic and abiotic stress) in a limited number of plants that will create new varieties.

The company employs a laboratory to test the plant material in selection for quality of grain, bran and gluten through specific instruments. To these, for some years, they were added bio-molecular tools in order to integrate in the traditional selection, the application of molecular markers. Therefore, in this way, it’s possible to get the advantage of determining the presence of the desired genetic trait directly at the DNA level, speeding up and simplifying the timing to get new varieties and ensuring greater efficiency than the conventional method.

The results showed the different performances of the genetic material in comparison to each others and have highlighted the availability of cultivars with quality features that meet the needs of processing industry and with high yield stability and adaptability to the soil and climate of Italy South Central. The plant material in selection is tested for the organoleptic traits also by public and private laboratories. For the quality related to the pasta making, the company it caters to the laboratory NAMAD in Rome.

To date the company F.lli Menzo has joined to the National Register of Variety, the variety of common vetch Ereica (year of registration 2004) and durum wheat varieties K26 (year of registration 2006), Isola and Orizzonte (year of registration 2011), Opera (year of registration 2013).

The placing on the market of high-protein varieties will give the chance to the company F.lli Menzo to organize in the near future a chain, for the production of high quality grain mill, which will involve the seed companies, as well as centers storage, farmers and naturally processing industries.

Marker Assisted Selection (MAS) allows the use of DNA fragments associated with target genes (known as molecular markers) to select efficiently plants with specific agronomic traits (disease resistance or stress tolerance, grain quality, yield).

Marker assisted breeding is able to determine the presence of the desired genetic trait directly at the DNA level (i.e. the "genotype"), as opposed to the conventional breeding based on the evaluation of the trait through the analysis of the "phenotype" that is at the level of the whole plant or its parts. MAS can be more efficient, effective and reliable than phenotypic selection. Furthermore, MAS can shorten the development time of varieties significantly.

It’s important to note that a plant obtained with these techniques is not a GMO plant (genetically modified organism). In the case of the MAS we cross only genomes mutually compatible as is done in conventional breeding, or works only within a same type of seeds or plants, with the only difference that shorten greatly the achievement of results; in the case of GMOs other hand, the genomes that are crossed can come from different species, as in nature could never take place and with results that are much more difficult to predict.

The modern genetic breeding must therefore be based on biodiversity and must be able to exploit the molecular selection in combination with the traditional selection. In this way, the availability of biodiversity on the one hand and efficient means of selection on the other are the two fundamental aspects to ensure a future in the field of variety renewal, in the face of climate change and in the respect of the environment, continuing to pursue those basic requirements (high protein content, high gluten quality and high yellow index) in order to achieve variety able to produce grain of quality.