Sunshine Barley: New Alaska strain shows promise.

AuthorEdmunds, Mary
PositionAGRICULTURE

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They call it "Sunshine." Its introduction in January 2009 did not elicit much fanfare. After all, it is neither an oil field nor a gold strike. It is a new strain of barley developed for small-scale commercial application in the Alaska climate. Work on it was begun in 1993 by Dr. Steven Doting and was continued by Robert Van Veldhuizen, research assistant at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Barley has actually been grown here for more than 100 years, mainly as feedstock. The Russian colonists brought barley seed with them from Siberia. C.C. Georgeson, a government agent working in Alaska around the beginning of the 1900s, reported that an experimental station in Rampart produced a barley crop in 1901. In the 1980s, there was the painful episode of the Delta Barley Project.

FAILED ATTEMPT

If you were here at that time, you might remember the Delta projects. The trans-Alaska oil pipeline had brought both revenue and optimism to the state. Then Gov. Jay Hammond thought Alaska should look for renewable resources that would be available when the oil ran out. So, the State developed the Delta Barley Project as a two-phase initiative to promote agriculture in the Delta Junction area.

In 1978, as the first phase, the State created 22 farms averaging around 2,700 acres each. The parcels were awarded by lottery. The State provided loans to the winners so they could purchase the land, clear it and begin production of barley, with Japan as a possible market. The second phase consisted of 15 additional farms at around 1,600 acres each.

So what went wrong? According to Clem Tillion, a State senator at the time, one problem was the process.

"They were going to be democratic about it," Tillion said. "Everybody had a chance for the land instead of farming it out to farmers who already knew how."

The land in the Delta region was difficult to clear. The farmers were given a three-year deadline, which was too short to get up to sufficient production levels to ship. And it turned out to be far too expensive to complete the railroad line meant to transport the grain from Delta to Valdez. When Hammond left office and William Sheffield became governor, Sheffield decided the project was a failure and ended it.

SUNSHINE BARLEY

This new barley is intended for human consumption. As a land-grant school, the university is tasked with doing research to benefit the community, and in spite of the apparent failure of the Delta project, barley is...

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