Early maturing samples of winter rapeseed bred at VNIIMK: search, estimation, selection of promising samples

Early maturing cultivars of winter rapeseed are of a great demand in the modern production as they allow lowering field intensity of harvesting works. Agrarians are interested in the cultivars which can be harvested simultaneously with winter barley and earlier than middle maturing wheat cultivars. Early maturing rapeseed cultivars are less depressed with summer droughts in the southern regions of the Russian Federation, they have shorter and more intensive periods of flowering and ripening. The purpose of our research was to select genotypes of winter rapeseed combining short vegetative period and complex of economically valuable traits in work breeding collection of V.S. Pustovoit All-Russian Research Institute of Oil Crops. We studied 330 breeding samples and selected 13 ones (3.9%) having significantly shortened (by 8-4 days) vegetative period compared to the early maturing standard cultivar Elvis. Also it was selected very early sample YS 5696 of Chinese origin, which ripened by 26 days earlier than Elvis, but having low winter resistance and susceptible to returned spring frosts. The best early maturing samples by yield appeared to be ES-15, МТ-1, МR-2, 787/09, they exceeded to a significant degree the standard cultivar Elvis - by 0.32-0.45 t per ha. Their flowering period started simultaneously with Elvis crops, but their periods of flowering and ripening were quite short. Also the selected samples had meaningfully high oil yield per a unit area (from 1.77 to 1.92 t per ha) compared to the cultivar Elvis (1.66 t per ha), low level of uncontrolled sulphur-containing substances - glucosinolates (from 12.2 to 14.5 µmol/g) and 1000 seeds weight within 3.4-4.1 g.