Varieties of forage crops bred in the North-Western Scientific Research Institute of Dairy and Grassland Farming

To expand the assortment of pea varieties, the staff of the North-Western Scientific Research Institute of Dairy and Grassland Farming has been breeding this crop for 30 years. The basis for the creation of new varieties is hybridization and selection. In most crosses, a high-yielding variety adapted to a given soil and climatic zone is used as one parent, and a sample more valuable in terms of totality and individual characteristics is selected as the second parent. The result of the selection work of the 1980s was the breeding of two varieties of peas SZM-85 and Fen, with an average yield of green mass and seeds of 25 and 2 t/ha, and about 30 and 3 t/ha, respectively. In Russia and abroad, varieties of peas of the mustachioed morphotype began to occupy most of the crops. In the early 2000s, Vologodskiy Usaty pea variety were bred. It had a high seed multiplication coefficient, allowing to reduce seed costs, more resistant to lodging and diseases with the highest yield of green mass of 37.8 t/ha, grain – of 3.3 t/ha in the experiments of the North-Western Scientific Research Institute of Dairy and Grassland Farming. Varieties of peas SZM-85 and Vologodskiy Usaty are currently preserved in the State Register of Breeding Achievements.