Our areas of activity
SECOBRA Recherches develops small grain cereal breeding programmes adapted to changes in Agriculture, farmers, sectors and markets, and the climate.
Focusing on winter and spring barley, soft winter and spring wheat and triticale, our teams develop new varieties every year at our various breeding sites.
Variety creation is the mainstay of our company. For over 100 years, SECOBRA Recherches has supported farmers and the industry in their search for varieties that meet several criteria : yield, agronomic stability and quality. These requirements are evolving and breeders must adapt to these demands, directing their selection with the aim of meeting the agricultural challenges of today and tomorrow:
Produce more, while respecting the environment
Incorporate resistance in a sustainable way
Adapting varieties to climatic changes (earliness, diseases, parasites) with greater yield stability
Meet the expectations of the industry (quality, stability, lower costs and sustainable savings)
By studying the genome, we can gain a better understanding of how plants function and help breeders to choose the most interesting varieties.
Thanks to molecular marking, certain so-called simple agronomic traits can be pre-selected in breeding material. This is particularly the case for certain resistances to pathogens such as dwarf yellows in barley, rhynchosporiosis and helminthosporiosis in barley, and mosaic and eye-spot in wheat. Thanks to modelling techniques based on genome analysis, it is now possible to work on other so-called complex agronomic traits, such as grain yield, grain quality, brewing quality and bread-making quality.
Pre-breeding
Screening
Breeding is also a race against time : we use acceleration methods.
Variety creation is not only technically demanding, it is also time-consuming. Numerous technologies have been developed to reduce the time between the first crosses and the registration of the variety. These acceleration methods are used internally at SECOBRA Recherches : diploid-haplo, SSD (Single Seed Descent) and off-season cropping.
Tomorrow’s scientific and agronomic projects
We stay aware of the pulse of our sector and, in our quest for performance, we are involved in numerous public/private collaborative research projects such as BreedWheat, SARDI, SHAPE and ECOBREED. This involvement is the result of the willingness of the SECOBRA Recherches teams to exchange and share skills.
A benchmark laboratory
Created 100 years ago, our french laboratory is the only one to be approved by the Syndicat de Paris du Commerce et de l’Industrie des Grains as part of the BIPEA-organised circuits for varietal identification analyses on malting barley.
It has a collection of several hundred varieties of barley grown in France and abroad.
This laboratory is also accredited by SEMAE, the national seed trade association, to certify cereal seeds. The laboratory team carries out commercial analyses as part of transactions between operators in the barley-malt-beer sector, seed analyses for certification purposes on all small grain cereals, and internal control analyses for SECOBRA Recherches’ breeding and production departments.
