Brave Englishman visits the CenGen herd

In the week ahead of the Rugby World Cup 2019 final in Japan, the whole of South Africa is swept up with Bok-fever for our clash with the English Roses on Saturday, 2 November. At CenGen we had the pleasure to host Mr Harry Bennett, service engineer from LGC, UK, to perform the first annual preventative maintenance service on our KASPTM SNPline XL instruments after they were placed in the laboratory in May 2018.

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Connecting over a cold one

This September saw Kelly Breeds and Daniël de Klerk (breeder at South African Barley Breeding Institute) travel to Perth, Western Australia, to attend the 19th Australian Barley Technical Symposium. It was Kelly’s first and Daniël’s third attendance at this symposium, which is held on a biennial basis.

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New Voices Symposium 2019

The Cereal Science and Technology-SA (CST-SA) association annually hosts a conference for young and upcoming scientists working on cereals. At this conference, postgraduate students are invited to present their research at a national level, thereby providing them with the opportunity to gain experience in delivering a scientific paper in front of an audience.

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Producers’ days and trial visits in 2019

September typically is an extremely busy month for the grain programmes at CenGen. During this month, rust season peaks in Greytown, Natal, where our wheat trials are planted at the Corteva AgriscienceTM trial site, and at the same time the producers’ days season kicks off in the Western Cape with the flowering of the grains.

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CenGen continues to grow

On August 1st 2019, Mignon de Jager joined the CenGen team as an intern to assist the barley- and commercial projects with data generation and administrative duties.

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Something for everyone to learn during Dr Lance Maphosa’s visit

Dr Lance Maphosa (Crop Physiologist with the New South Wales Department of Primary Industries, Australia) visited CenGen on the 15th of July 2019. Although Lance currently focusses his attention and research primarily on pulses such as chickpeas and lentils, he has been involved in several projects that focused on the performance of wheat under drought and high temperature conditions.

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