August 9, 2013

Saudi Arabia's researchers are hoping to learn from Australia as growing wheat and barley in the deserts of Saudi Arabia can be a challenge.

A deal has been done between the University of Adelaide and King Abdullah University in Saudi Arabia to look at breeding salt-tolerant crops.

Stuart Roy, from the Australian Centre for Plant Functional Genomics, says the deal should be good for Australian growers too.

"So they've got a range of field trials that are taking place out in desert regions, with and without irrigation, and so when those trials are assessing a large range of wheat and barley and quite a lot of those traits that they're looking at will be relevant to what we do in Australia, even though we're predominantly dry land agriculture."