UC Davis and UC Cooperative Extension will host the UC Small Grains and Alfalfa Field Day on Thursday, May 7, 2026 from 7:30am to 1:30pm. The field day will begin at the UC Davis Field Facility; wagons to the field plots will leave promptly at 8:00am. Continuing education credits and lunch are available, so please register to help with planning. (Registration is free!) Thanks for your interest, and we hope to see you at the field day!

Agenda:

7:30 Registration

7:50 Welcome and introductions

8:00 Travel to stop 1

Small Grains Breeding and Variety Development

8:20 Overview of the UC Davis small grains crop breeding program - Xiaofei Zhang, UC Davis

8:30 Barley and oat variety development - Isabel Alicia del Blanco, UC Davis

8:40 Wheat and triticale variety development and evaluation - Joshua Hegarty, UC Davis

8:50 Using ancient wheat to improve modern varieties - Li Francis Meinhold, UC Davis

8:55 Using drone imaging to evaluate drought and nitrogen use efficiency - Elmer Flores, UC Davis

9:00 Developing wheat with reduced gluten immunogenicity - Maria Rottersman and Jorge Dubcovsky, UC Davis

9:10 Wheat, triticale, barley, and oat plot tours - Joshua Hegarty and Isabel Alicia del Blanco, UC Davis

Agronomy of winter cereals, alfalfa, and other forage crops

9:30 Update on disease observations during the 2025-26 season - Michelle Leinfelder-Miles, UCCE

9:35 Weed management in small grains and alfalfa - Mandeep Singh, UCCE

9:45 Water use from winter cereal crops and fallow land in the San Joaquin Valley - Caity Peterson, PPIC

9:55 How does water availability impact baking quality in common wheat? - Morgan Wlaschin and Maya Shydlowski, UC Davis

10:05 The Nitrogen Nutrition Index (NNI): an integrative measurement - Mark Lundy, UC Davis

10:15 Travel to stop 2

10:35 An online nitrogen fertilizer calculator for annual crops - Daniel Geisseler, UC Davis

10:45 New cover crop species selector and database for California - Sarah Light, UCCE

10:50 Impacts of limited irrigation on forage sorghum yield and nutritional quality - Jackie Atim, UCCE

11:00 Producing jet fuel from crops: possibilities and research on biofuel production from sorghum - Corinne Scown and Jutta Dalton, JBI

11:10 Alfalfa hay yield mapping through imagery of windrow volume and bale distance - Ahmed Kayad, UCCE

11:20 Overview of insecticide resistance in alfalfa - Ian Grettenberger, UC Davis

11:30 Saving money on fertilizers: crediting rotation nitrogen benefits from alfalfa-grains or alfalfa-tomato cropping systems - Dan Putnam, UC Davis

Alfalfa Breeding and Variety Development

11:40 Breeding alfalfa for a water-challenged future - Charlie Brummer, UC Davis

11:50 Creeping rooted alfalfa - Cree King, UC Davis

12:00 Alfalfa germplasm improvement - Michele Nalle, UC Davis

12:10 Travel to lunch

12:15 Lunch sponsored by the California Crop Improvement Association 

12:30 Acknowledgments and remarks