Wheat Demo Plots 2012

The two sites, one at Tregony and the other at Bude had very contrasting starts this last season.

Tregony followed Winter Oats and was drilled by the 10th October in relatively good conditions at a seed rate of 64kg/ac (158kg/Ha) and had a good start with the mild and albeit wet conditions through till Christmas. Bude on the other hand followed grain maize in part of an oilseed rape field, which came off mid October. However, the heavens then opened and the stova on the surface acted as a lovely mulch retaining all this moisture. The situation was worsened by the fact that a Simba cultipress had disced the stalks just after cutting with the result the land became like a sponge and nothing could move on it till we got a lucky break mid November when we managed to get a plough in and sowed the plots right behind using a light tractor with a 3m triple K type cultivator and air drill. Even so, there were wet areas where we had to lift the implement out of the ground almost in order to get through without getting stuck.

The above photo shows the thin looking Stigg (more brown than green) with JB Diego (New seed) on the left of the dividing strip and farm-saved JB Diego on the right. Ignore the very green headland which is Nickerson Original Invicta seed, look closely at the establishment of the JB Diego. The new seed has established far better with a denser plant number, is more vigorous in its growth at this early stage, something that would continue right through the plots lifespan.

Edgar, a new variety bred by Limagrain in Germany and a useful Group 1 milling variety was in the demo to see how well it might fair down in wet and wild Cornwall. It was the greenest all through winter, well established and very clean. It has a disease rating similar to Alchemy with similar yield. It is the very dark green plot, with Solstice on it's left and Exsept on it's right and Crusoe, a new group 1 in the foreground. The photo below shows the difference between Invicta and Alchemy coming through the winter, Invicta had much more biomass and leaf area, Alchemy much more prone and prostrate.

The three plots visible below are left to right Istabraq (low vigour seed and looking thin), Gravitas and Horatio to right of the central divide and Avatar below it. Gravitas had a low Thousand Grain Weight TGW, so looks very thick, Horatio looked well and green through out the winter. Avatar is just visible to the right of the Horatio.

The Bude plots by contrast looked quite rough given the way it was mauled in.

The late planting proves that sowing low vigour seed is not a good idea! It was a struggle to do plant counts in the Istabraq plot, Stigg also was not looking happy, so can safely say this is not a variety to drill late!

However, by the end of March they had started to pull together remarkably well. The Edgar still looking very green compared to all the rest as can be seen below.

By May, the Istabraq plot that had looked bare looked like this, a transformation, as it tillered like mad with some plants having 20 plus tillers. This was really surprising as this would have been ploughed in in normal circumstances to establish a spring crop.

By May, the Edgar was showing just what a huge plant relative to everything else it is, very noticeable with the thick wide chord leaves. This photo I took up at Bury St Edmunds shows this clearly.

I held two open days this year at both venues, the main ones being the 5th and 12th of July, first at Bude, then Tregony. The Bude day was well attended with 60 people attending during the course of the day to look at the Wheat and Oilseed Rape plots. Alastair Moore, Nickerson Sales Director was in attendance and gave everyone a frank and well appreciated appraisal of what was happening with the varieties, as well as in the wider grain areas to the north. It was really useful having a large scale cereal growers' perspective on the risk versus reward of varieties, how spray costs this year were making such a dent in farm budgets and what the wet weather was doing to potential yield estimates. 

Finally, on the last day of August, we managed to harvest/salvage the wheat plots at Bude, with the ones at Tregony done a week later. Here are the videos of both demo plots just prior to them being cut, this gives you a fairly accurate idea of how well these varieties stood up to this years conditions.

I am trying to get the results into a format I can post on here, so far it is not like excel or pdf files!