Hybrid breeding has been used for a long time to enhance yields in crops including self-pollinating ones such as cereals. Its grain yield advantage is known and has been started to be used in barley production. However, its advantages in malting barley, a specialty crop, with its own quality characteristics has not been well documented under field conditions. Therefore, the aim of the current study was to determine the agronomic and malt quality characteristics of hybrids produced from malting barley cultivars. Seeds of ten F1 hybrids were produced by hand-pollination of malting barley cultivars Zeynelağa, Aydanhanım, Efes-3, Tokak 157/37 and Harrington. Evaluations were made in two field trials i.e., fall-planted and rainfed field trials in Tokat, Türkiye in 2013-14 and 2014-15 growing seasons. Agronomic and malt quality traits were examined in hybrids as well as in parent cultivars. The hybrids had similar phenological and plant characteristics as the parent cultivars. As average, they had improvements of 7.5 and 4.5% for grain yield and 3.2 and 0.8% for malt extract percentage. The variation for seed size was greater compared to the parent cultivars, which could somewhat lower the heterosis advantages. Although the average grain yield and malt quality advantages of the hybrids produced from only five cultivars were not striking, remarkable improvements could be expected in individual hybrids produced between a multitude of genotypes as typical in commercial programs.
Karatas et al. (Fri,) studied this question.