CHALLENGES AND RESEARCH OPPORTUNITIES FOR WHEAT PRODUCTION IN WARM DRYLAND REGIONS OF IRAN

Sustainable production of wheat is a major consideration in terms of meeting demands for food security in vast dryland regions in Iran affected by specific environmental conditions. Effects on production from adverse environmental conditions can be minimized using stable yield cultivars under optimum management practices to stabilize wheat production in subtropical dryland regions of over than 1.2 million hectares in Iran. During the last two decades, much research has been done by the Dryland Agricultural Research Institute (DARI), this has been effective in maintaining and improving wheat yield, but there are still large gaps between experimental and on farm conditions. Wheat is the dominant cereal crop and continuous wheat cultivation systems are becoming more common. Appropriate technologies such as alternative crops instead of fallow will help in sustainable agricultural production and restrict environmental damage. Conventional breeding with a special focus on adaptation to marginal environments provides a necessary baseline in terms of genetic background into which new traits and their genes can be introduced. However, specific research objectives to identify and accumulate new and more appropriate combinations of stress-adaptive traits must follow a systematic approach and there is still much to learn about how some potentially useful traits (and their genes) interact with each other, with different genetic backgrounds, and across a range of environments including warmer and drier environments (predicted by climate change) in which they must be deployed.