January 15, 2018 marks 132 years since the birth of Pustovoit Vasily Stepanovich, the founder of our Institute, the world-famous breeder, twice Hero of Socialist Labor, winner of Lenin and state prizes, Honored scientist of the RSFSR, doctor of agricultural Sciences, full member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR and VASHNIL. Employees of the Institute honored the memory and laid flowers to the bust of V. S. Pustovoit.
V. S. Pustovoit is the founder of scientific agriculture in the Kuban. They started breeding winter and spring wheat and castor, created and introduced the first varieties of these crops. In addition, he is the author of varieties of winter rye and millet.
However, the world fame of V. S. Pustovoit was brought by the work on sunflower breeding to increase the oil content of seeds. He developed a fundamentally new method of breeding this crop, which allowed to increase the oil content in seeds from 28-33 % to 50-53 %. As a result, & nbsp; sunflower has become a globally recognized oilseed crop.
V. S. Pustovoit developed methods of sunflower breeding for resistance to a dangerous parasitic plant – Broomrape and a system of improving seed production of sunflower varieties.
Under his leadership, new directions of sunflower research have been launched, which currently determine the selection of this culture in the world: interspecific hybridization, obtaining interline hybrids.
The international recognition of the merits of V. S. Pustovoit is the establishment of the international Association for sunflower medal named after V. S. Pustovoit.
The achievements of V. S. Pustovoit in sunflower breeding became an incentive for the search for new methods of selection of other oilseeds by breeders who worked next to him in VNIIMK, and the method of improving seed production was adopted for all cross-pollinated crops.