[Results and conclusions from our work on breeding awnless winter barley]

A breeding program was started in Gülzow to get awnless winter barley of high yield. Though only awnless spring barley was used as starting material satisfactory winter hardiness was obtained by backcrossing several times with awned varieties of high resistance to cold. To obtain sufficient straw stiffness and a good grain quality is much more difficult.The highest yield strains showed little straw stiffness and it is assumed that absent awns were compensated for a longer culm. The importance of parental forms for the formation of various yield properties could be shown.The results obtained show that suitable parental strains, able to compensate for the assimilation of awns by other plant parts, have to be found by means of physiological investigations.