Bloomington, Illinois, USA
April 1, 2026
By Dr. Jessica Rutkoski, Associate Professor, University of Illinois
Advancements in technology and crop genetics continue to push the boundaries of what farmers can achieve within a single growing season. This is especially true for wheat-soybean double cropping. Successfully producing two crops in the same growing season requires each crop to be more efficient to maintain yield with fewer days of sunlight and less-than-ideal growing conditions.
On the wheat side of the doublecrop equation, varieties must be high-yielding and early-maturing while also demonstrating strong scab resistance, standability and test weight. The University of Illinois wheat breeding program makes hundreds of new genetic combinations and evaluates thousands of candidate varieties each year to identify those that meet these criteria.
With funding from the Illinois Soybean Checkoff program, we have been leveraging our skills and testing capabilities to help farmers make more informed wheat cultivar selection decisions. Each year, we test about 100 commercial wheat varieties for yield performance across six locations in Illinois as part of the University of Illinois Variety Testing program. At two of these locations, we evaluate when each variety begins jointing and when it matures.
The timing of jointing in early spring matters because earlier jointing puts wheat at greater risk for freeze damage. The timing of maturity is critical because it determines when the double crop soybeans can be planted. For each day of later wheat maturity, farmers lose about one-half bushel of double-crop soybean yield because of delayed soybean planting. Ideally, we want to see normal or late jointing and early to medium-early maturity combined with excellent grain yield, scab resistance and test weight.
All the data we collect on commercial wheat varieties is summarized and provided online at https://varietytesting.web.illinois.edu/wheat/ to support decision-making. Summaries of variety performance by region for all the important traits are available. With the growing amount of data and traits to consider, wheat variety summary tables can be challenging to digest. Therefore, we developed a wheat variety testing browser that allows growers to filter and sort the data in different ways to more quickly identify varieties of interest. The browser is currently accessible online at: https://jrut.shinyapps.io/ILWheatExplorer/. We welcome feedback or suggestions for improvement, as we are still actively making updates.
We are excited to see companies bringing more ultra-early wheat varieties to market. One of the earliest wheat varieties introduced in central Illinois was planted this fall at the Illinois Soybean Association Agronomy Farm in Heyworth alongside a second variety with average maturity. This will demonstrate to growers the range in wheat maturity timing that currently exists and how it can affect overall success of the wheat-double crop soybean system.
Our wheat breeding program at the University of Illinois specializes in developing ultra-early varieties, some of which have been commercially successful. We continue to push the boundaries of wheat genetics to improve yield while maintaining early maturity. One of our research projects in that area is examining patterns of senescence, or how the wheat plant dies. We have made some interesting findings that suggest varieties that start senescence earlier and lose greenness gradually tend to yield more than those that start to senesce later and then lose greenness rapidly. If we confirm these findings next season, we can use this knowledge to make faster progress in the breeding program and share this information with other breeding programs to help improve wheat more broadly.
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