By KEVIN WALKER
Michigan Correspondent

EAST LANSING, Mich. — A Michigan State University researcher is part of a multidisciplinary team that’s been awarded $4 million to advance research into the common bean.

James Kelly, a crop and soil scientist at MSU, has been involved in plant breeding and genetics for the past 30 years. He’s part of a team of 26 researchers from 16 different institutions, including Oregon State University, Colorado State University and the USDA. Phillip McClean, a researcher at North Dakota State University, is the project leader.

CAP stands for Cooperative Agriculture Project, a program administered by the National Institute of Food and Agriculture at the USDA. An additional $1 million has been awarded to a team led by researchers at Purdue University and NDSU to map the common bean genome. The common bean is often referred to as the dry bean.

There are other CAP projects. In 2008, researchers at MSU were awarded $5.4 million to improve the quality and desirable traits of potatoes and tomatoes. Likewise, in 2009 researchers at MSU were awarded $14.4 million to do the same thing for apples, peaches, cherries and strawberries.

Kelly said over the years researchers like him have been developing dry beans that are more similar to soybeans in “plant architecture.” In particular, the dry bean has been a challenge for farmers because of a lack of “standability.”

The dry bean includes black, pinto, navy and similar edible beans. It also includes snap greens, or green beans. There are several traits Kelly has been working on. These include drought tolerance, nutritional makeup, disease resistance and standability.

Standability affects whether or not a crop can be direct-harvested. The dry bean’s traditional lack of standability has meant that, unlike soybeans, dry bean farmers cannot remove the bean directly from the plant. Instead, they have to cut the plant first, then pile rows of cut plants together before threshing.

Kelly said such operations create more risk for farmers because bad weather has more time to intervene.

“If I want the plant to stand upright, I have to find a variety with that trait and use them as parents,” he said. “We first started working on that upright bean 30 years ago. The nature of plant breeding is that it’s long-term.

“Identifying the actual gene or genes responsible for the trait is the real gold standard. That’s part of the BeanCAP process.”

Kelly said the mapping of the dry bean genome will help to make his research go faster. He compared the problem to a person lost somewhere, in his car, but all he has is a world map when what’s needed is a street-level map.

“It’s a lot more complex than what was anticipated,” Kelly said. “It’s important that we involve ourselves in this commodity.”

Over the years they have made progress: Kelly said all the recent seeds in the Midwest can be direct-harvested. Approximately 220,000 acres of dry beans are planted in Michigan each year, with a $125 million farm-gate value.

“It’s an important crop for this state,” he explained. “We’ve been growing them for over 150 years now. They fit in with the fabric of our agriculture. Our farmers like dry beans, too, because the early harvest frees up the land for planting of winter wheat.”

Another goal of BeanCAP is to try to recruit young students into the field of plant breeding.

“The seed industry needs many plant breeders to develop the varieties needed for producers and consumers,” McClean said. “Currently the education pipeline is lacking the number of students needed by the industry.”

According to a background paper by McClean and other researchers justifying the dry bean genome sequencing project, the dry bean is a “societally important” food globally that needs to keep evolving in order to keep up with large crops. Many people around the world depend on the dry bean as an inexpensive source of protein and micronutrients.