Common buckwheat (Fagopyrum esculentum Moench) is well suited as a secondary or cover crop due to its very short vegetation period, making it ideal for diversifying arable crop rotations. In cultivation, buckwheat is undemanding — it requires neither pesticides nor fertilizers and performs relatively well even on poor soils. The low yields often observed in practice are primarily due to poor lodging resistance and, above all, seed loss during harvest.

The overarching goal of the project is to establish a foundation for building sustainable, preferably regional, value chains for buckwheat through extensive phenotyping, the development of innovative breeding methods, and practical breeding efforts. By providing the first high-yielding and easily processable domestic varieties, the aim is to increase the attractiveness of buckwheat cultivation, expand agrobiodiversity, and create incentives for both processors and consumers.

Our role in the joint project is primarily the technical implementation and execution of a breeding program for buckwheat. For this purpose, we plan to use the residual seed method based on selected half-sibling families. In multi-location and multi-year field trials, the best half-sibling families will be selected, and the top-performing ones will be made available to interested breeders as populations for conservation breeding and variety registration, in accordance with the University of Hohenheim's seed distribution guidelines.