����Ӱ��

Photo by Laura Weingartner.
Fields of wheat grow at the Agricultural and Forestry Experiment Station

By Laura Weingartner

����Ӱ��'s growing season has been reliably lengthening for the past 30 years. One researcher hopes it brings economic opportunity to the state. Jakir Hasan, research assistant professor of plant genetics at the University of ����Ӱ�� Fairbanks’ Institute of Agriculture, Natural Resources and Extension, is searching for new crops that could be commercially successful in ����Ӱ��, and a changing growing season may mean farmers' options are expanding.

����Ӱ�� isn’t known as the epicenter of agriculture. Hasan says that fellow researchers in the Lower 48 have joked, asking him, “Do you have anything other than snow, ice or rock?” However, ����Ӱ��'s agriculture industry is growing, according to the United States Department of Agriculture, and Hasan is committed to contributing to it.

“����Ӱ�� has a difficult climate for crop production, but it can be done,” he says.

Hasan works to develop improved varieties of crops with a history of cultivation in the state, mainly barley, oats and spring wheat. He also collaborates with scientists in the U.S. and abroad to find new crop types like winter barley, which is planted in the fall, matures in the spring, and is harvested in the summer, and perennial wheat, which regrows from the crown of the plant and produces grain for multiple years without replanting. Winter and perennial grains must be very cold-hardy to survive an ����Ӱ�� winter — one of the traits Hasan is looking for in a successful variety.

To test hardiness and find the right variety of each type of crop he’s researching, Hasan has collected varieties from around the world and planted rows of each on the ����Ӱ�� Experiment Farms in Fairbanks and Palmer and on research fields in Delta Junction.

His plots are impressive, with almost 300 varieties of green and gold wheat, barley, oats and canola at the Fairbanks farm. He monitors these plots throughout the seasons and records the timing of important events like germination and maturity; whether the stems lodge (bend at ground level) or neck (snap just under the spike of grain); the number, height and uniformity of stems per individual, called tillers; and important post-harvest characteristics like grain size, protein content and starch percentage.

He wants a plant that reliably matures in a short season, produces high yields of grain and satisfies the end user's requirements, whether for malting, flour or animal feed.

Hasan has farmers on his mind at every step of the process, one reason he plants in various locations. He wants crops that do well during years with less-than-ideal weather and in multiple environments because farmers can’t risk planting crops that won’t produce in poor conditions.

“There are varieties that are doing consistently good in all three locations. That's the variety we need,” he says.

Hasan isn’t just trialing varieties from all over the world. He’s also breeding them to develop something new. He keeps a nursery of 3,000 varieties of barley and 35 varieties of wheat at the Fairbanks farm. These rows and rows of grain almost glow under the summer sun and provide the seed Hasan needs for his breeding program.

This program involves taking varieties that did well — maybe one matures quickly in colder temperatures but suffers from lodging, while another stands upright at harvest but only matures successfully during a warm August. Hasan can take pollen from one individual and fertilize the other, creating the first generation of offspring called F1 hybrids. Out of the many F1 hybrids, there is potential that one of them has the traits he’s looking for.

Seeds from hybrids won’t breed true, meaning their offspring won’t necessarily look like the parent. Once a successful hybrid is found, five or six generations of inbreeding are required to create a plant that breeds true to type. Because of this, breeding a new variety can often take 10 or more years, but Hasan hopes to do it in five. He uses a greenhouse on ����Ӱ��’s Troth Yeddha’ Campus in the winter to grow multiple generations in a year instead of just one or two.

Developing a new variety in half the time benefits both farmers who sell their grain and ����Ӱ��'s food system as a whole, as much of the state's food is imported.

"I have seen farmers get so excited to hear about new, more productive barley and wheat varieties in Hasan's research program," Jodie Anderson, director of IANRE said. "One farmer insisted he would plant what Hasan has developed already, even though he is still a few years away from a formal release."

Hasan didn’t start out wanting to be a plant breeder. His father encouraged him to go to medical school or pursue engineering, but despite always being a good student, he wasn’t interested in those fields. After grade school, he knew he wanted to leave Dhaka, Bangladesh, where he grew up. He visited the Bangladesh Agricultural University in Mymensingh with “wonderful green spaces,” a contrast to city life — Dhaka is one of the most populous cities in the world.

He moved to Mymensingh and studied biotechnology for his bachelor’s and master's degrees. Afterward, he stayed for a couple more years working as a lecturer. During his teaching tenure, students would come to him with interesting questions.

"Many of the answers you would find in a book,” Hasan says, “but some questions nobody knew the answer to yet.”

That mystery was the motivation he needed, and he applied for graduate school at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. But before Hasan could attend university in Canada, he had to pass an English proficiency test. Hasan reminisces with a laugh about his time studying English with two close friends who pledged only to speak English together and the challenge the first time he tried.

“I could not finish the first sentence; I felt like my brain was going to explode,” he says.

Slowly, they improved and they still laugh about that first attempt. Living with Canadian students in Edmonton helped his English, as did meeting his wife, who is from Pakistan, with whom he had to speak in English. 

In Edmonton, he received another master’s degree in plant science and a doctorate, for which he focused on the genomics of club root resistance. This disease infects Brassicas, a group of plants that includes cabbage, cauliflower and canola. It can cause a 30-100% crop loss in canola which is a big cash crop in Canada. Canadian canola cultivars didn’t have resistance to this pathogen, so Hasan worked to find a Brassica with resistance he could cross with canola. As a result of his doctoral studies, he introduced a new club-root-resistant variety of canola to the Canadian market.

This work led to seven years in the private industry. He worked as a plant breeder with Cargill in Great Falls, Montana, developing another commercial canola variety that produces omega-3 fat, which can be used as an alternative to fish oil. He later worked briefly as a senior plant breeder for Bayer Science in Winnipeg, Manitoba, but he missed the mystery of research.

“Anything that has some mystery behind it, I find very interesting,” he said, so he started looking for an academic position.

Despite coming from a warm climate, he continued to chase the cold, so when he was offered the plant breeder position at the University of ����Ӱ�� Fairbanks, he accepted immediately. Never having visited, he moved his wife and two children up in August 2022.

“I think the challenge, or this extreme climate, attracts me,” he says.

Fortunately, he likes Fairbanks and enjoys being part of an academic community. Hasan takes his job seriously and is dedicated to finding answers for people who need them and improving things for the future.

“We know that it can be grown,” Hasan says, “but we need to know how to do it and what variety will make farmers more profitable.”

Laura Weingartner is the science communicator for the Institute of Agriculture, Natural Resources and Extension.