HE SELECTION OF PERENNIAL GRASSES – PROBLEMS AND OPPORTUNITIES

Abstract

Over the past decades, a third of the world’s arable land has been lost to soil erosion, and the rate of this degradation is increasing and will continue to increase with increasing production capacity boundaries. The persistent problem of soil erosion around the world has revived interest in perennial crops. All of our current crops are annuals, so developing a number of new perennial crops, legumes, and others will take a long-term effort. An analysis of the literary sources of domestic and foreign scientists has established that some cereals, such as rye, rice and sorghum, can be hybridized with the closest perennial relatives to enrich the gene pool. Others, such as wheat, oats, corn, soybeans and sunflowers, must be hybridized with more distant perennial species and genera. And some perennial species with a relative

Keywords

• cereals
• perennial grasses
• organic farming systems
• interspecific hybridization