Monsanto’s wheat breeding arm, WestBred, has announced the release of 10 new wheat varieties in 2017, but only one of them, WB4269, is a hard red winter wheat.

WB4269 is a medium-early-maturing hard red winter wheat with very good adaptability in the Central and Southern Plains. It has improved fusarium head blight (scab) resistance for this region and can serve as a solid companion variety to WB4515 and WB4458.

Also released for this year for other parts of the country are these varieties:

WB9350 is an awned hard red spring wheat variety with high grain yield potential for California and the Pacific Northwest. It has excellent lodging resistance and a very good overall disease package.

WB9479 is a medium-maturing hard red spring variety with high yield and protein potential for the Dakotas and Minnesota. Excellent test weight and standability and a good disease resistance package are all combined in this medium-short variety.

WB9578, a hard red spring variety, displays excellent yield potential for irrigated crop systems in Montana, Idaho and Washington. This medium-short, medium-maturing variety has excellent standability and test weight, along with stripe rust and leaf rust resistance.

WB9590 is a broadly adaptive hard red spring variety with outstanding yield potential and protein content for Minnesota, Montana and North Dakota. A short plant height contributes to the variety's superb standability. This variety's disease resistance package includes very good leaf rust and stripe rust resistance.

WB9616CLP, a hard red spring variety with Clearfield Plus technology, combines excellent yield potential with the flexibility of the Clearfield Production System for tough-to-control grassy weeds in Montana. Best suited for dryland conditions, WB9616CLP is a medium-short variety with very good standability and Hessian fly and stripe rust resistance. 

WB9662 is a hard red spring variety with outstanding protein potential and milling and baking quality. With a medium-late maturity, WB9662 provides growers with very good yield potential and excellent resistance to stripe rust and leaf rust. This variety has excellent dual-season potential for winter planting in the Northwest and southern Texas.

WB9719 is a broadly adaptive, medium-late-maturing hard red spring variety with outstanding yield potential. Suitable for irrigated to dryland environments across the Pacific Northwest and Montana, this medium-short variety has excellent standability and test weight and a strong disease resistance package.

WB1783 is an improved soft white winter wheat for the Pacific Northwest that can serve as a companion to WB1529 and as a replacement for the very popular varieties of WB 456, WB 523 and WB-528. It is a solid-stem variety with excellent stripe rust resistance.

WB4575 is an excellent dryland variety for the Montana market. Its agronomic package makes it a choice growers will like, while its quality and protein profile make it an excellent choice for baking and milling. Excellent wheat stem sawfly resistance has been observed, though this is not a solid-stem variety.