New Australian soybean variety Richmond outperforms traditional varieties, Asgrow A6785 and Soya 791 - Exp 1

The Australian Soybean Breeding Program develops varieties for diverse production environments across a 3000 km range from the Atherton Tablelands in far north Queensland (Latitude 17.2661°S, Longitude 145.4859°E) to the Riverina in southern New South Wales (Latitude 29.7503°S, Longitude 120.5530°E).The program focuses on strategies to broaden the range of adaptation of new cultivars (James & Lawn, 2011), and to complete the transition from traditional dark hilum types that supply lower-value crushing markets to clear hilum types with the grain qualities required for human consumption markets. Advances in yield, disease resistance and other agronomic traits are also targeted.Primarily, a single seed descent method is used to advance populations to the F4 level of inbreeding. Varieties from the Australian Soybean Breeding Program are not genetically modified (non-GMO). Regional evaluation and selection for environmental adaptation and specific regional traits is carried out across a wide range of environments in the target production regions. Typically, new soybean lines progress through stages of small-scale replicated evaluations for 6–8 seasons, with processors conducting small-scale grain evaluations. Advanced lines then complete evaluation in replicated on-farm experiments before commercial licensing and release.This paper summarises data from multi-season replicated evaluations and on-farm experiments of RichmondA, a new variety for production in northern New South Wales