The Best Of Both Worlds

WAI T SBURG - Jean Bruno Beaufume' s mission is simple: combine the best characteristics of French and British wheat seeds with those of the Pacific Northwest and come up with superior varieties that farmers in this region will buy.

The French-born breeder who will take up his new station in Waitsburg in late July said the mission here for the giant French cooperative Group Limagrain is much more challenging than it sounds.

But it's a challenge he is looking forward to.

"I'm very excited to have this opportunity," Beaufume said, indicating that the region has lots of growers who are interested in the research, particularly if it results in more disease-resistant higher yield varieties. Beaufume toured the Walla Walla and Waitsburg areas last week with a group of shareholders from Limagrain, including its chairman Pierre Pagesse and Frank Curtis, executive vice president and chief operating officer for Group Limagrain's U.S. subsidiary Limagrain Cereal Seeds based in Fort Collins, Colorado. This week, Beaufume is house hunting for his family in Walla Walla. He has a wife and two children aged 6 and 9 who will relocate here with him.

Two weeks ago, Limagrain announced it has opened its last in a network of five U.S. research labs at the Northwest Grain Growers building on Main Street in Waitsburg.

The biggest plant breeder and seed company in Europe signed a sevenyear lease with Walla Walla based NWGG for the 4,000-square-foot building and warehouse. It will employ three specialists, including Beaufume and two local professionals, and spend at least $1 million locally in the coming two years.

The other research stations are in Colorado, Indiana, Kansas, Minnesota and North Dakota.

Beaufume, who will be the only French expatriate at the Waitsburg station, intends to make his first local hire this summer and a second one later this year. He is on a renewable three-year contract with Limagrain.

His goal here is to explore new hybrids for hard red winter and soft white wheat varieties, building on research begun by expert wheat breeder Dr. Jim Peterson from Oregon State University in Corvallis a decade ago. Peterson recently signed on as a breeder with Limagrain.

Peterson discovered French wheat varieties can be cultivated in the Pacific Northwest, the only corner of the United States where they do quite well, presumably because it has a similarly temperate climate.

Beaufume points to NW 553, a French hard red variety that has been successful here, as a case in point. If crossbred with strains of Northwest wheat, NW 553 may just generate perfect offspring that produces higher yields and resistance to stripe rust and straw breaker, two diseases that can afflict wheat in the Pacific Northwest.

It takes years to breed a stable new wheat variety and screen endless variations for desirable characteristics that allow the new seeds to perform as well in the field as they do as ingredients for bread and noodles in the kitchen.

Beaufume said he will have his hands full supervising the work and analysis at the existing six test plots in Washington, Oregon and Idaho, let alone the additional two or three Limagrain may set up by the end of next year. The Washington sites are north of Walla Walla, near Connell, Fairfield and Reardan.

The plots consist of dozens, if not hundreds, of 5 x 12-foot sections prepared, monitored and harvested carefully by the researchers for analysis and selection. Beaufume and his team will perform some simple tests to check the seeds' suitability as end-use ingredients, but he won't set up a full-blown culinary facility as most of the "kitchen" testing will be coordinated by Limagrain Cereal Seeds in Fort Collins.

This is not the Frenchman's first overseas post. He studied agronomy and plant breeding genetics at the Ecole Nationale Superieur Agronomique in Bretagne, then worked for a year and a half at an international research center for developing countries in Ivory Coast, where he explored new varieties of robusta coffee.

In the mid to late 1990s, Beaufume worked for Secobra, a wheat breeder based 50 kilometers west of Paris before starting a new wheat breeding program at Limagrain.

"The area looks very nice and interesting," he said about Walla Walla County.