ABSTRACT
Successful winter and spring cultivars marked by excellent malting quality, earliness, more flexible straw, and resistance to cold and diseases have been released. The latter aims are pursued by developing new populations, by introducing gehetic resistance to biotic and abiotic stress, and by selecting for adaptation to soil and climatic and anthropic demands. In contrast, Smail et al. reported that the introduction of earliness factors in the American cultivar Betzes has determined, as a result of the shortened crop cycle, reduced plant height and yield in non-restrictive environments, whereas in restrictive environments early lines registered the same yields as the original cultivar. Ramage proposed the male-sterile facilitated recurrent selection system for long-term programs designed both to develop new germplasm with useful agronomic characteristics and resistance to fungi diseases and insect pests, and to extract superior genotypes for new programs and for hybrid breeding.
