APG’s Jim Anderson has his name on more than two dozen cultivars of wheat—and counting!
When Twin Cities Public Television food show host Yia Vang chose to explore wheat for a July 2025 episode of his weekly series Relish, he reached out to the state’s foremost expert on the ancient crop: Department of Agronomy and Plant Genetics Professor Jim Anderson.
Anderson—who leads the University of Minnesota’s spring wheat breeding program and provides guidance for breeding programs developing intermediate wheatgrass (Kernza) and field pennycress—has developed 19 spring wheat varieties and is the co-developer of eight others in four different market classes of wheat. He is the sixth wheat breeder in the University of Minnesota’s program, which started in 1888.
As a child growing up on a small dairy farm near St. Peter, Minnesota, Anderson vividly remembers attending field days with his father at the University’s Southern Research and Outreach Center in Waseca. “Don Barnes was talking about alfalfa and Jim Orf was talking about soybean,” he says. Barnes, a USDA scientist, and Orf, an APG faculty member, lit a spark: “I wanted to be involved in agronomy or crop improvement in some way,” Anderson says. He enrolled at the University of Minnesota after high school and received his bachelor’s degree in agronomy in 1987.
Shortly after graduation, he attended the University of Kentucky to pursue a master’s degree while his soon-to-be-spouse, Janet Cenci (also an agronomy major at UMN), attended nursing school nearby. Two years later, they moved to Ithaca, New York, where Anderson worked on his doctorate at Cornell University.
His interest in wheat was secondary to his interest in the DNA work going on at Cornell, he says. “Cornell happened to be working on wheat and using DNA markers, and that was a technology that I wanted to learn because I could see that that was going to be a powerful technology in the future of plant breeding.”
After receiving his PhD in 1992, Anderson was a faculty member at North Dakota State University in Fargo for four years and then transferred to Pullman, Washington, where he worked as a winter wheat breeder for the USDA-ARS. He joined the faculty in APG in 1998 and began breeding hard red spring wheat. One of his first tasks and successes was to use DNA markers to help improve Fusarium head blight (FHB) resistance in spring wheat.
Anderson’s lab was the first to report on the discovery of what became known as Fhb1, a widely utilized gene in wheat that provides significant resistance to the devastating fungal disease. Most of the varieties that have come out during his tenure are moderately resistant to FHB.
15 million acres
The 19 wheat cultivars from Anderson’s lab have been grown on more than 15 million acres, and six of those have been grown on at least 1 million acres in their lifetime.
The six varieties include RB07 (named after Robert Busch, Anderson’s APG predecessor, and the year it came out, 2007); Rollag (named after the Minnesota town known for its annual Steam Threshers Reunion); Linkert (named after Gary Linkert, a lead technician on Anderson’s team who is now retired); Shelly (named after the Minnesota town by that name); Bolles (named after Lemuel Bolles, the founder of the first flour mill in the state), and MN-Torgy (named after a former CEO of the Minnesota Wheat Research and Promotion Council).
“We like to have a short name that people can pronounce and spell,” Anderson explains—and to honor those who have been literally in the fields. MN-Torgy was named in honor of Dave Torgerson, retired executive director of both the Minnesota Wheat Research and Promotion Council and the Minnesota Association of Wheat Growers. The research and promotion council is one of the major funders of the wheat program at the University.
Breeding wheat can be full of surprises, Anderson says. A variety that seems to hold a lot of promise but is introduced in a year not conducive to highlighting its strong points (or exposing its weaknesses) can cause farmers to move on. One variety that is a surprising success story is Linkert. Released in 2013, it had excellent protein content, its disease resistance was okay, and it had a strong straw, but it was low-yielding. It was planted on about 200,000 acres in 2015, the first year that certified seed was widely available—and a year with many wind and rainstorms that pummeled fields. That strong straw characteristic paid off. “The more popular varieties at the time lodged, and the growers immediately switched over to Linkert,” Anderson says. “The seed sold out.”
Linkert is still out there, 10 years later.
“We learned how much growers valued lodging resistance,” Anderson says, “so we try to have good lodging resistance in every new variety. Nothing that we have is quite as good as Linkert, but that’s the goal.”
The release of MN Rothsay in 2022 has been successful. “It has risen to be the top variety in the state for this year, and a lot of that is due to its combination of lodging resistance and yield,” he says. “It’s not quite as good as Linkert, but it’s pretty good.”
The next release could be in 2027. The seed will be sent to California to grow this winter and two Minnesota growers will further increase the seed next spring in anticipation of release.
Anderson says he encourages growers to try new varieties that may have better disease resistance, “but if it’s something that they like and it’s done well for them, it’s hard to switch.”
Forever Green
New breeding programs for Kernza began in APG in 2011 as part of the Forever Green Initiative (FGI), which is developing and improving winter-hardy annual and perennial crops that protect soil and water by having “continuous living cover” on the fields. Winter annual oilseed cover crops followed: pennycress in 2013 and camelina in 2015.
Anderson’s involvement “came about after many, many discussions with Don Wyse [FGI co-founder and co-director, who died in 2024]. He had been trying to convince the plant breeders in the department to join the Forever Green effort, and ”finally, I said yes,” Anderson says. “We’d put together our first grant to start the Kernza breeding program and I remember Don leaving my office one day as we were just ready to submit it. I said, ‘Don, what’s the chance that this gets funded?’ And he said, ‘Oh, less than 10 percent.’ I kind of breathed a sigh of relief. I said, ‘Okay, good, I don’t have to plan on it.’
“Well, we got the grant.”
Fourteen years later, one Kernza variety has been released, MN-Clearwater, and a lot of growers want to get their hands on it. There are still some characteristics that need to be improved, Anderson says, “but there’s a lot of good things going with that crop.” There’s also a lot happening with pennycress and camelina, and they are close to developing a new variety of each, he says.
Seeing the impact
Developing new wheat varieties is something Anderson finds satisfying “because you can see the impact of your varieties being grown.” And he’s been fortunate to have a good group of breeders and technicians working for him over the years, he says.
“Susan Reynolds has been with me about 20 years, so she knows the cycle better than me. She knows what needs to be done and when,” he says. “She’s orchestrating the whole thing, preparing all the data, and then I’m analyzing the data and making the decisions based on this data.”
The data comes from the work of Reynolds, Nate Stuart, Emily Conley, Professor Jochum Wiersma and his project in Crookston, and the undergraduate workers in the labs. Another area in which Anderson sees the great work in APG: the students. “As I reflect on the students who have been in my plant breeding class and former graduate students and postdocs who have gone on, you see their names and it’s like, wow, we’ve done something here,” he says. “We’ve produced this next generation of scientists and that’s a testament to the whole graduate program and the faculty. It’s satisfying to know that you’ve had some part in that.”
What’s next in plant breeding?
Anderson likes to say he got in on the ground floor of using DNA markers and identifying genes that affect traits, and then genomic prediction came next. “Everybody's doing predictive breeding today, but I think artificial intelligence will be that next phase of improvement.”
There's so much data over so many years, he says. “The genetic fingerprints of the stuff we test, their field data, their disease data . . . I think AI can do a better job of telling us who the real winners are in the data. So I think that'll be the biggest change in the near future, and it's already starting to happen. AI is going to be able to harness that data better than the current tools. That bodes well for the future of plant improvement.”
—Kristal Leebrick