| Summary: | <div class="page" title="Page 1"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><p><span style="font-size: 9.000000pt; font-family: 'NimbusSanL';">In Belgium and The Netherlands, bread wheat (</span><span style="font-size: 9.000000pt; font-family: 'NimbusSanL'; font-style: italic;">Triticum aestivum </span><span style="font-size: 9.000000pt; font-family: 'NimbusSanL';">L.) is getting attention within a </span><span style="font-size: 10.000000pt; font-family: 'NimbusSanL';">growing movement looking for more sustainability of wheat cropping and breadmaking. The few varieties available are pure lines that do not match the wide range of environments and organic farming practices, </span><span style="font-size: 9.000000pt; font-family: 'NimbusSanL';">so that yields and milling quality are often disappointing. Composite Cross Populations (CCP) have been </span><span style="font-size: 10.000000pt; font-family: 'NimbusSanL';">created with the idea of evolutionary plant breeding through on-farm mass selection and seed saving. In 2015–2016, one such CCP of winter wheat was cropped side by side with a pure line variety in four organic farms with different wheat cropping practices, as a first step to answer some of the concerns arising from farmers’ networks we work with. Seeding rates ranged from the standard high to the very </span><span style="font-size: 9.000000pt; font-family: 'NimbusSanL';">low ones practiced under the System of Wheat Intensification (SWI). Multivariate data analysis confirmed </span><span style="font-size: 10.000000pt; font-family: 'NimbusSanL';">greater differentiation of the CCP both compared with pure line varieties and within populations on farms where inter-plant competition was less intense. Low seeding rates thus seem to enhance the phenotypic </span><span style="font-size: 9.000000pt; font-family: 'NimbusSanL';">expression potential of a CCP, yet this is a neglected fact among participatory plant breeders. Since both </span><span style="font-size: 10.000000pt; font-family: 'NimbusSanL';">CCP and SWI have great potential for ecological intensification within organic farming, we argue that </span><span style="font-size: 9.000000pt; font-family: 'NimbusSanL';">more work is needed on finding new ways of combining innovation in farming practices and on-farm plant breeding, which also implies new ways of organising research. </span></p></div></div></div>
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