June 2023 - New West Genetics

NWG Named Top Independent Seed Company

By admin|2023-07-13T08:43:57-06:00June 28th, 2023|Categories: news|

New West Genetics named a Top Independent Seed Company by AgriBusiness Review. The agriculture industry is facing many challenges due to climate change and a growing population. Hemp is a crop that offers superior sustainability advantages over traditional commercial crops, while possessing competitive protein, fiber, and oil profiles to serve the same markets. New West Genetics leverages a blend of expertise in traditional breeding techniques and modern genomics to create hybrids and varieties that offer uniformity, superior yields and ongoing adaptation to new regions. Our groundbreaking hybrid trait AMPLIFY™ provides yields competitive with soy, thus enabling competitive price points to serve the fiber, feed, fuel, and foods markets. Another key advantage of this trait is that it can be crossed with varieties across the globe, essentially doubling yields and improving vigor. AMPLIFY, with a commercial release next season, is just one example of our non-GMO cutting-edge traits to be released over the next few years. Breeding must be market-driven and customer responsive. In collaboration with clients, we create improved products based on data-driven processes. We are proud that these customer-centric and innovative methods have paved the way for a sound hemp industry, and a competitive rotational option for the agriculture industry. Full Article on AgriBusiness Review Top Seed Companies Seed Edition NWG Profile

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Dual-Purpose Hemp Crop Production

By admin|2023-06-14T13:12:56-06:00June 14th, 2023|Categories: blog|

NWG believes that this early in the hemp industry, you can not have a fiber industry without a grain industry, and vice versa. This is why we first created dual-purpose varieties. Depending on processor prices, these varieties can be grown for single purpose production, however when grown for both grain and fiber yields, the dual-crop approach allows hemp acres to compete economically with other large commodity crops. As farmers adopt hemp into their rotation, they find the highest profits are earned through dual-crop production. Utilizing good grain production varieties also lowers the cost of fiber seed production. Dual-crop hemp production is common in European production where they have successfully developed markets using well adapted dual-purpose genetics. Dual-cropping relies on genetics that raise crops tall enough to offer significant stalk yield while producing good grain yields. A great dual-purpose genetic is the NWG ABOUND family of genetics – bred and adapted in the US. Even a year ago , valorizing both stalk and grain was minimally feasible due to the lack of functioning, regional fiber processing infrastructure, but slowly and steadily regional constellations of fiber and grain processors are coming online across the US working with both grain and fiber. Numerous fiber specific processors have come online in the last year, mitigating the logistics costs associated with trucking massive hemp bales. A successful dual-purpose crop starts with good genetic selection and agronomic management. Existing on farm equipment for row cropping and alfalfa production can handle both of these processes. Fertility [...]

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HudsonAlpha and New West Genetics collaborate on USDA-NIFA grant

By admin|2023-06-14T13:19:37-06:00June 7th, 2023|Categories: news, press release|

Faculty Investigator Alex Harkess’ laboratory at HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology, and their collaborators New West Genetics, were recently awarded a three-year, $650,000 United States Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture (USDA-NIFA) grant that aims to unlock the full potential of industrial hemp, a versatile plant used for centuries as a source of industrial fiber, seed oil, food, and medicine. In our changing climate, there is a growing need for more adapted and sustainable crops. Industrial hemp is a promising candidate for sustainable fiber, protein, and oil because it has a deep, massive root structure that sequesters more carbon than typical row crops, requires lower inputs, and has greater drought and pest resistance. Hemp plants are also interesting from a biological standpoint because they have separate male and female sexes. Among the two, female hemp plants possess greater commercial value due to their higher biomass production and exclusive ability to yield seeds that are rich in beneficial lipids and proteins. As a result, hemp breeders strive to achieve a substantial proportion of female plants thriving in their cultivated areas. This emphasis on maximizing female hemp plants aligns with the broader objective of harnessing the crop's sustainable qualities to thrive in our changing climate. HudsonAlpha Faculty Investigator Alex Harkess, PhD, and his lab are experts at studying the genetic basis of sex in plants. Through this USDA-NIFA grant, Harkess and his lab will build several high-quality hemp genomes and use them to identify and analyze the hemp sex chromosome [...]

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