New UGA Soybean Varieties

The demand is up for soybeans as a feedstock for the production of biodiesel so new highly productive UGA soybean varieties are available to meet this growing demand. Two additional years of field testing identified Roundup Ready® versions of Benning, Haskell, Boggs, and Prichard. These four newly developed Roundup Ready® varieties were equal to their non-Roundup Ready® parent in seed yield, seed composition, and disease resistance. Two additional varieties have been created by forward crossing a high yield soybean to these backcross-derived Roundup Ready® varieties. In 2008 they released a new highly productive conventional (non-transgenic) soybean variety. The UGA Research Foundation in collaboration with the Georgia Seed Development Commission licensed the marketing rights of these Roundup Ready® varieties to AgSouth Genetics (AGS 758RR, AGS Prichard RR, and AGS Boggs RR), UniSouth Genetics (USG 7732nRR), the Monsanto Company (Dekalb H7242RR) and Pioneer (97M50). In the past year these varieties were grown on more than 400,000 acres and were planted in more than 80 percent of Georgia's soybean fields. There is a high level of interest in the new Roundup Ready® AGS 758RR and 97M50 varieties along with the conventional variety, G00-3209.