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.