Mangere to mainstream – the story of a perennial ryegrass ecotype, a determined farmer, and a progressive seed company

Perennial ryegrass (Lolium perenne L.) remains the predominant grazed grass in New Zealand’s pastoral agriculture. Brought in from Europe in the early nineteenth century, locally adapted populations or ecotypes developed in a number of regions. Government plant breeders, employed to provide elite cultivars for farmer use as a public good, exploited an ecotype from the Hawke’s Bay region to produce ‘Grasslands Ruanui’. In the1950s Trevor Ellett, a dairy farmer in Mangere, Auckland noted that Grasslands Ruanui did not persist as well as ryegrass sown with seed harvested from 40 to 60 year old paddocks on his own farm. This ecotype, referred to as Mangere ryegrass, has since become the basis of many ryegrass cultivars bred by both government and commercial plant breeders over the past 50 years. This review documents how Mangere ryegrass became an important part of ryegrass cultivar development, the part it played in commercial plant breeders becoming involved in cultivar development, and coincidently in the discovery that the Epichloë fungal endophyte is crucial for perennial ryegrass persistence under drought, heat and insect pressure.