Grain Maize at Bude, Cornwall.

Bude is one of the few places in Cornwall and Devon that grain maize can be grown without the excessive cost of using plastic to force the crop. It is not a favourable area in the NIAB/MGA sense at all though, so site choice is crucial as wind is a major factor in any site being considered for growing grain maize.

Below photo's of Lorado 2 weeks off combining, or when combining should have been done! Photo taken 7th October.

Two growers tried it in 2009, one had much better results than the other, one was being grown as a concentrate source in preference to Spring Wheat, the other as a cash crop. The concentrate crop was to be crimped and clamped, whilst the other was to be dried and sold at 15%MC.

One of the risks of combining maize is being able to harvest the crop early enough before the onset of the wet weather in November. Both growers crops were ready to combine in October, however for various reasons this didn't happen. Sure enough on Saturday the 7th of November the first winter storm blew in, deluging 3 inches of rain with 45mph winds in 4 hours between 6 and 10pm that night, with the results seen below.

Photo's below taken 9th November.

Even after this setback with the weather, the concentrate crop still averaged over 4.5t/ac, even though 4 ac were lost and not cut. It was telling that the crop was actually too dry when it was being crimped as water had to be added to aid the crimping process. However, the result worked in the farmers favour with 330 tonnes being crimped at a cost of £70/ton in the clamp, still a lot cheaper than bought in wheat and a far better feed. The actual advantage has turned the enterprise around with grian maize now being grown instead of forage maize as the one thing it does provide is a very stable diet platform for the cows.

Maize Trial Pt 2

Fresh weight yields for the varieties was as follows;

Acclaim 14.8t/ac
LG 3181 17.8t/ac
Lorado 18.4t/ac
LG3193 18.9t/ac
Beethoven 22.3t/ac
Nescio 22.7t/ac
Award 19. 2t/ac

Starch yields were a bit more interesting as can be seen from some of the cob photo's below and didn't follow the pattern of yield above in some instances.




Acclaim (4 rows in middle above) being the earliest to maturity had the highest dry matter (36%), but lowest ratio of starch to fresh weight, even though the plants were much shorter than the rest by a good 12 to 30 inches. Award had the lowest dry matter and was only at 22% DM when harvested.

Acclaim on left, LG3181 middle.


Whole cob weight (sheaves removed) averages as follows:
Acclaim 210 grams
LG 3181 270 grams
Lorado 270 grams
LG3193 236 grams
Beethoven 258 grams
Nescio 268 grams
Award 220 grams

What is interesting to note is that Beethoven and Nescio both combined very high yields in tonnage terms with a good average cob weight and when analysed gave readings of 32 %DM/34% Starch and 29%DM and 33% Starch respectively.


Beethoven left, Lorado right of knife.

LG3181 and Lorado both surprised with quick dry down, large cobs and high starch contents, facts which have been born out by similar merchant trials at Tregony where LG3181 had the highest starch return/ac of all varieties on trial and Lorado the highest return at a big trial at Launceston. This is also consistent with national trials for grain maize where both these varieties have come top for grain yield vs DM, both yielding over 8.4 ton/ha at 15 % moisture content.

Lorado and LG3181 were also both grown in a trial a mile down the road with Kingdom and both outyielded it by some margin, with Lorado doing the best of the three. This variety wiill be covered more in the section on grain maize where it performed well, even though the weather did wreak havoc.

Maize Trial at Bude. Part 1

There has been a fair amount of data and results published in the press with regards to maize varieties, some funded by merchants, others by seed houses, some done by farmers and those done by NIAB. The new NIAB descriptive list has been published and it is good to see the LG varieties are performing well across a broad spectrum of sites, although hopefully this year we are going to see a proper Less Favourable Site being added to the South West, rather than the data from Bicton, which should be classified more as a favourable site.

This year I conducted a small scale trial near Bude with the idea to get some relevant data for this area, given that the climatic factors and soils are very different here than those at Bicton.

The following varieties were planted at 45,000 seeds/ac on the 5th of May, 12 days after the grain maize planted in the same area. Nescio, Award, Beethoven, Lorado, LG 3193, LG 3181 and

Acclaim to give a spread of maturity classes from 4 to 10. The site was westerly facing, about 150 ft above sealevel, fairly exposed to wind, on ground that had been contiuous cereals before going into maize, this being year 5 into maize, so not an ideal situation, but typical of a lot of maize ground in the area. The site was dunged with FYM @ 10 ton/ac, also had 100 units of Nitrogen supposedly applied in the form of biogas digestate, as well as 50kgs DAP down the spout at planting. The plots were the full eight rows of the planter, each line being just over 300 meters long to give some idea of variations in line and soil type as there were a few clay patches in the field and also to try and get a representative yield analysis.

Initial germination was good, plants grew away well before slowing down with the cooler drier conditions in late May. The initial herbicide application pre-emergent worked well, although the was a post emergent flush of volunteer oats and oil seed rape that required spraying. This checked the growth rate and at first this was assumed to be the main cause of slow growth.

By the 26th of June, the difference in growth rates between 3 different sites all within a couple of miles of each other was starting to generate some cause for concern. A line was developing half way through the trial site below which plants were paler and shorter, whilst above this line plants were much greener and healthier looking. This was the cut off line where chicken manure had been spread previously at 2 ton/ac.

Come 14th of July, yellow patches were readily apparent in the area where no chicken manure had been previously applied, plants were just not growing as vigourously as they should have been, so after an inspection involving the suppliers of the biogas, a soil nitrogen test revealed a huge difference in available nitrogen between the two halves of the field. As a result the field, and those others that had biogass applied to them were topdressed with 75kg/ac of AN, with an immediate improvement in growth and colour, with very minimal scorching of leaf area.

The above photo shows Acclaim tassling, it was about a week ahead of the medium varieties, as would be expected with it being a class 10, with LG 3181, Lorado, Beethoven and LG3193 following shortly behind with Nescio and Award last.

Nescio Monster Crop Update.

According to the contractor, the field yielded 23.5 ton/ac, the analysis has come back with the following figures: Starch 30%, Dry matter 28% (fresh sample) and 32% Starch, 30% Dry matter taken from halfway down the clamp 14 days after ensiling. Not a bad result really, with a pH of 4 the cows are tucking in to it and milking well!

Monster crop of Nescio forage maize!

Nescio is a class 5 variety that has been on the list for a long time, since 2001 and is such a stable variety that it is used as a control variety.One of it's characteristics is to produce large cobs with big grain, making it a good grain variety if situations allow it to go that far.This crop was harvested on the 29th October near Sticker, St Austell. Contractor was surprised too, really made his machine grunt! Estimated yield was well over 20 ton/ac, every line and a third of the way back was a full trailer load!

Knife is 4.5 inches, unfortunately the cob is pointing towards me when I took it, never-the-less, it was a good 9 inches in length.

Maize at Cann Orchard 2

This is Beethoven, the highest yielding variety in it's class on the NIAB list. This sequence is the harvesting of the crop whose pictures appear in an earlier blog of mine charting the crops growth stages.

Some farmers will be shocked, or surprised at how green the crop appears, saying it was harvested way too early, being cut on the 5th of October.

Now, there would appear to be a fair amount of incorrect information being dispensed by certain people not familiar with the stay-green concept of most LG varieties, you only have to look at photo's of harvesters in Holland, or Denmark cutting maize which is as green as this, they don't seem to have any problems with it.....The issue is cob maturity, as well as soil type related.

This is fairly dry, free draining soil, so the amount of water in the stems is that much less than that on heavier clay soils. Looking closely at the sheaves of the cobs, it can be noticed that they are all brown and drying off, when the cobs were snapped in half, the kernels were hard cheese almost down to the bottom where there was a little bit of milk/soft cheese, importantly the grains on the cob were shiny, but not flint hard. This is important, as I have seen quite a lot of maize that has been left in the field till the grains were flint hard, especially maize under plastic. The problem with letting this get to this stage is that there is a high risk of the cows' gut not being able to digest these very hard grains even if they have been through the cracker on the forager. Seems pointless to go for a high drymatter, if the cow isn't going to get the full benefit of all the feed.

The issue of maturity of the crop is important, because where crops have been planted later (15th May onwards), I have noticed that they were still not mature in the cobs by the end of October, even though the leaves were dying back (due to frost and the very cool nights). Given maize needs to photosynthesize right the way up to cob maturity before dry down commences, it is important to get the cobs mature on the plant, before this happens. Immature cobs, no matter how dry the plant is from a dry mature point of view, is always going to produce very acid, poor quality silage. Unfortunately, it is the way in which NIAB works out the dry matter values at harvest that causes some varieties to be placed in catergories that don't accurately reflect their harvest dates. In trials this year, where a range of maturity classes from 5 to 10 have been grown all in the same field, the diffrences in maturity to harvest was 10 days between the earliest to the latest, with some group 5 varieties being ready to harvest at the same time as some 9's. Harvest dates on the list should be measured as a race to 32% DM, this would then allow better differentiation of varieties on the recommended list.

Happy grower! Silage in the clamp has come back at 30% DM and 32.5% Starch, the yield was conservatively worked out at 22ton/ac as with only 4 trailers running the driver on the forager was filling the trailers to brimming to enable them to keep up.

Nice consistant crop height, even cob height,even maturity, dwarfed forager.....that's what we should be aiming at when growing maize!

Nickerson Wheat variety trials 2009

Something that is so important to growers, yet is often overlooked in chosing a variety to grow on your farm is disease profile. So often I come across farmers who are chosing varieties purely on outright yield off the NIAB list and not looking at what it is going to cost in spraying and agronomy inputs to produce this yield. Look on this chart produced by Masstock who co-run this trials site in Devon with Nickersons and the interesting feature to note is that most varieties in the green zone (ie being more resistant to Septoria tritici ) are Nickerson varieties! This is so important when it comes to timing of sprays, especially in the west where disease pressures are higher anyway and the rain can delay critical spray applications by a week ,or more early in the spring, leading to a loss in yield, or worse, lower specific weights at harvest. It was illuminating talking to a contractor near Crediton who is growing, Sahara, Except, Istabraq, Gatsby and Einstein who after testing reckoned his average specific weights were all over 80!

Nickersons' breeding team are and have for a number of years have been breeding clean ripening varieties with disease resistance. What has been interesting to see this year is that some of the 'older' Nickerson varieties which have been down graded by some experts as 'past it', this year outperformed the so-called all-dancing-all-singing newer varieties of some other seed houses. Claire (10 years on the list) this year performed extremely well in large parts of the country, and Istabraq is still a fantastic late sown variety, particularly after maize. The photo's below show the stay-green-and-clean aspects of some of Nickersons' varieties compared to others.

A variety to watch out for is Invicta, shows really good yield potential along with strong disease profiles.